Wonder Woman

One evening I needed something new to chomp on, so I decided to see the latest Wonder Woman movie, characterized by some reviewers as a feminist vision to counteract the current male resurgence.  I had planned to see it at the Cinemark 22 in Lancaster, but my altered ego D.L. called to see if I'd like to go with him to the Edwards Stadium 6 in Calabasas, a white enclave in the rolling hills northwest of the melting pot of the San Fernando Valley.  I was ready for human society and a break from the psychic importunings of my animal friends, so last night I drove 67 miles from Pearblossom to The Calabasas Commons, an upscale open-air mall that is pleasant, though it looks like an Italian village re-dreamed by Disney and has speakers hidden in bushes that broadcast Rat Pack songs.

The parking lot was not crowded because it was Wednesday night and local high schools had a few days left before the weekend start of summer break.  Nevertheless there was a long line next to the theater, where people were waiting for free ice cream at a newly opened Jeni's, and it was there I spotted D.L., waiting in line though he had often opined that "Waiting in line is never worth it."

"I decided to see if it's true that 'Good things come to those who wait,'" he explained.  

I waited with him and in fact a good thing came, in the form of creamy, sweet ice cream, albeit on a tiny plastic spoon.

"Remind me why we're seeing Wonder Woman," D.L. said.

"Because it's a distraction."

D.L. nodded resignedly.

We bought tickets and entered , finding plush, reclining seats in the half-filled faux-palace.  I held down a button on my armrest and the seat moved horizontally until I was nearly supine.  It was not the most comfortable position for watching the screen, but I felt only the far setting would give me my money's worth.

Wonder Woman comprises a series of action scenes punctuated by lingering shots of actress Gal Gadot’s pretty face.  I was struck by the smart casting of this soft and hard looking woman to kick the crap out of many men (to be fair, she kicks the crap out of one woman, the weird Dr. Poison).  Gadot's Israeli identity has given the film a political dimension, and some are scouring for Zionist meaning.  I looked for something, but unless women are Hebrews and men are Canaanites, or vice versa, I saw nothing. 

Gadot was credible in the role and a strong choice, giving some depth to an otherwise ridiculous and lazy film.  It opens with a fantastical CGI city, carved into the mountains of a hidden island, where an all-female society known as the Amazons lives.  There are few biological details, but we get the impression that the women do not reproduce and are immortal.  The exception, and the only child on the island, is eight-year-old Diana (young Wonder Woman), who was fathered by the king of the ancient Greek gods, Zeus.

A note on Zeus: Even though he was a notorious male chauvinist and serial rapist, Zeus is apparently in the Amazons' court, defending them from the evil and ultra-male God of War, Aries, by making the Amazons' island invisible and by fathering the super-warrior Diana. For these signs of support, Zeus' rap sheet is forgiven.

Viewers expecting moral clarity in the movie for depicting women as a force for peace and nurture, and men as a force for brutality and war, may be puzzled by the Amazon culture, in which women continually train for battle against a hypothetical male army that will arise when Aries wakes up from an assumed dormancy (Diana learns when she arrives, fully grown, on the French front in World War I, that Aries has been anything but dormant).

Back to the idyllic island: Beautiful women smile and gaze at one another as they perfect man-killing arrows and magic cords that force men to tell the truth.  Everyone is in harmony with nature except, as noted, little Diana, who drives her elders crazy by wanting to practice warfare all the time instead of doing little girl things.  Derivative and tedious dialogue reveals that Diana's mother wants to protect her from her warrior fate by not telling her the truth, that Zeus created Diana to be a "god killer" whose destiny is to kill Aries, so that there will be no more war and the Amazons can go back to designing man-killing weapons and perhaps quilting.

Symbolism: The only way Diana can kill Aries is with a magic sword designed by Zeus, giving us a story in which a woman must use a phallic symbol to kill a man. I'm not complaining about the symbolism; I'm just asking: What does it mean?  You'd think a true feminist story would entail a heroine killing a man with a symbolic vagina- maybe whacking Aries over the head with one of Judy Chicago's ceramic vulvas.

[Update, 7/27/18: I just watched the much superior Justice League, in which Wonder Woman (again Gadot) and a group of male superheroes join forces.  There is little of the gender bullshit of Wonder Woman.   The enemies in Justice League are not generic men, but a particular male, about ten feet tall with a goat's head and an itch to burn up the entire universe.  He is the opposite of nurturing.  Wonder Woman stays nurturing (to some hunks on her team and a stray Russian peasant) while she kicks Nihilism Man's butt!  Wonder Woman, you rock!]

On the drive home I absently turned on the radio and heard one of my favorite songs, the Pretenders', "My City was Gone."  Trying to relax to the soothing mantra, I pondered Wonder Woman and feminism.  The biological sciences will soon give us the ability to turn femininity and masculinity into anything we want them to be. If we're going to make educated decisions about that, we should look more realistically at what it means to be male and female. Hopefully we won't be burdened with too much Hollywood schlock on the subject.

Movie review: "A Quiet Passion"

I cannot live with You-
It would be Life-
And Life is over there-
Behind the Shelf

Emily Dickinson

A new movie about Emily Dickinson is always special.  "A Quiet Passion," insightfully directed by Terrence Davies, didn't make it to the desert, so last night I schlepped 57 miles to the Encino Laemlee Theater in the San Fernando Valley to see it.

The Encino theater is one of six Laemlee "art houses" spread around L.A., though you might also call them "senior citizen centers."  At the Encino Laemlee there were several older people in the ticket line.  The man at the head of the line was struggling to figure out first the schedule and then how to pay for his ticket, and I had my usual flash of inappropriate and uncalled for anger, thinking how slow this old guy was, before an anxious inner voice reminded me that I too am an old guy and that someone might be wanting me to hurry up. At the window I was so intent on a quick and youthful seeming purchase I didn't wonder until I had said them how the words One senior for a quiet passion might have sounded to the gum chewing teenager across from me, though she continued to chew gum and think about a better job as she impassively punched out my ticket.

I didn't expect a full house, since this was the Tuesday after the previous Friday's opening, which was probably better attended. The pool of like-minded souls I had nevertheless expected to find was as diminutive a human sample as I've seen at a Laemlee: a group of four or five women in an upper row, one couple halfway down, and one guy by himself in the front row. I had dozens of empty rows to choose from. Sweet!  

The movie starts with a group​ of soon to be graduated girls at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts in 1846, standing at attention as they are dressed down by a fearsome headmistress who demands that the girls who have decided to go to Christ move to her left, and that the girls who are undecided move to her right. Young Dickinson (wonderfully played by Emma Bell) is then revealed standing in the middle, in neither group, in the grips of some hidden theology.

This adherence to inner feeling stays with Dickinson throughout life, costing her all her friends and suitors- both male and female- and often the love of her family. Dickinson in later years (remarkably played by Cynthia Nixon) takes us down a slope from youthful playfulness and innocent precocity to physical degeneration and horrifying self-knowledge, lived out in Dickinson's wealthy and prominent father's house.  

Davies dwells on illness as Ingmar Bergman often did, with shots almost a minute long of Dickinson having a seizure, or staggering across her room (which she does not leave for the last 15 years of her life) in the throes of various collapses.  She was diagnosed with a kidney disorder that probably lead to her death at age 55, but her mental state would have been called melancholia or hysteria. There are long shots of her face, staring in her candle-lit room at something far away, or very close.

To live is so startling it leaves little room for anything else.

Her hope of escape from her cloistered life was fame and recognition for her poetry, but publication came in mutilated dribbles (seven poems total, revised without her consent by condescending male editors).  She knew her poetry was different, special. The film suggests that she knew she would be posthumously famous.  Davies gives her this striking line, spoken to her sister:

If I had fame, I would have a kind of love that is barred to me now.

Young people who wonder what draws older audiences to such movies may be told a secret: the story of Emily Dickinson is intensely erotic.  From her prized position beside her domineering father (her mother is a background figure), to her infatuations with married men who spurn her, to her intense feelings for female friends and her devastation when they marry, she is a black hole of longing for people who race away from her like a red-shifting universe.  During the mourning period for her mother, while the family is dressed in black, she wears white.  Her sister exclaims, "But we are in mourning!," and Dickinson replies, "So am I!"  She wears virginal white for the rest of her life.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, that is poetry.

She lived in a cold universe, I thought in the car heading home.  On the radio Stephen Hawking predicted that humans will need to leave the earth within one hundred years or go extinct.  What if Hawking was trapped in a room, No Exit style, with Emily Dickinson?  Would he compare her idea of a black hole to his?  

It was almost midnight when I walked into my one-roomer in the desert. There on my couch, having crawled in an open window, was Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster.  I had not seen him in weeks.

We need to talk, Robert thought at me.

Please, Robert, I thought back, no politics tonight.

Why didn't you take me with you to the Emily Dickinson movie?

I forget he can read my mind.

Sorry, Robert, sometimes I'm embarrassed by my species, what a hard time it's having as it takes over the world.

The takeover of the world Dickinson had in mind would have been different.

We agreed on that.

Update on Robert/human encroachment

Dear Readers,

I'm sorry to have left you up in the air regarding my partner in crime (i.e. cross-species communication) whom I've billed "Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster."  You'll recall last week there was an attempted abduction of Robert by his fellow gilas, a mob I haven't met, led by a faction that believes humans are gilas' enemy and that Robert is a traitor for communicating with me.  I've been too busy chasing down leads in this story to do any blogging, but I wanted to give you some updates.  Robert is hiding out in the hills, in coyote territory, and he's not very comfortable or safe.  He is able to pick up snippets of gila thought, which he relays to me.

I've gathered from Robert that the Gila Nation, as they have come to call themselves, communicated briefly with the CIA's ultra-secret Telepathic Unit (keep reading below for more on the TU).  The idea was that gilas, as a telepathic species, could teach things to the TU (which is interested mostly in psychological warfare). The TU, Robert believes, promised the gilas some sort of subservient place in the new order where humans will run everything everywhere, and this naturally was a non-starter and relations did not progress well.   

So the Gila Nation (or GN),  backed off politely from working with the TU and humans in general.  Robert, stuck between hungry coyotes and hostile fellow gilas, has done his best to glean current GN intentions.  He reports that the gilas are in furious communication with other telepathic elements in the biosphere, of which, he says, there are many.  

Also, last night, I received one of Robert's signature messages to our species:

Humans of earth!  You have no idea how obnoxious and out of control you are.   If you could see it you would be horrified.  Some of you do see it and kill yourselves.  Do you know why gilas never kill themselves?  Because nothing is ever our fault.  People kill themselves because they think things are their fault, and if you're human, they probably are, because just about everything is your fault. You are so impossibly vain and arrogant that you will unite the gilas and all other sentient elements of the biosphere against you, and there will be a conspiracy against humanity not only from the biosphere but from the very core of the earth.  The conspiracy will emanate from the same force that spat you out of the savannah and into the desert, where you plotted your revenge.  Now you think you've won; you are confused.  You think you are supposed to keep going, to prove to the entire "observable universe" that you have a proper place, that you belong.  You dummies- you don't even know what 'belonging' means.  You should listen to your poets more!

Sorry, don't shoot the messenger!  Robert's thoughts seem incomplete, but could you do better if a coyote were sniffing four feet from the rock you were under?

Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster has been attacked!

Alarming news!  After I released Robert's dour Thanksgiving message (next post), I walked into the desert night and thought I saw a strange comet, which then appeared to be an airplane.  As I watched the descending light I received a frantic telepathic message, accompanied with lots of static and some interference that sounded like muffled yelling.  Finally I made out Robert's "voice" (thoughts have distinctive qualities, as voices do), screaming (a high intensity thought) something like, "They're attacking me...fellow gilas...bastards!"  

There followed a terrible sound of anguish, and I feared Robert was no more.  But it turned out he had done the damage to one of his attackers, giving Robert a short respite and time to clarify his message:

"Harry, we’re in trouble!  Gilas are able to group together for common cause on rare occasions when it's necessary.  We haven't done it since the end of the last ice age, when we had to make some decisions.  In reaction to encroaching human civilization, we've grouped together again into something humans might call a ‘council.’  The council has factions, and one of them believes that my relationship with you, my willingness to engage telepathically, my public sharing of the gila's internal world- that these things are endangering all gilas, so that humans, upon learning of another sentient species on the planet, will reenact their historic role of ensuring its extinction."

"Jesus, Robert!"

"As usual, Harry, with the bon mot.  If I may continue, the anti-human faction has plotted to abduct me so that I can no longer communicate with you or any humans."

"Shit."

"Again, Harry, the human facility with language is astonishing."

"I mean, damn...what will you do?  What should I do?"

"There's more, and I'm learning it as we speak...oh my!"

"What?"

It's really true that when the gods want to punish us they grant our wishes.  I admit I've longed for release from the dreadful constriction of this post-election time, when everyone's mind is confined in a probability box where all is potential, nothing is realized.  I've yearned to be released from the box, to unfurl my compressed emotions, not knowing if they will deliver unbridled ecstasy, warm joy, bemused contempt, indifference, confusion, rage or despair.  I knew that Robert was about to open the box.

"A forceful gila," Robert continued, "whom I'll call Butch, organized the attempted hit on me.  Butch tells his followers that humans with their volatility and apparent suicidal tendencies have become an imminent threat to the gila species, and that I am a traitor.  He has organized telepathic attacks on America, as the closest human target, over your holiday season."

"Oh my god!  What kind of attacks?"

"Hallucinations, not unlike your 'fake news.'  The few stray gila thoughts I've intercepted indicate they intend to stimulate discord between people who are close, so that someone might be talking to a family member or friend and suddenly be filled with fury and resentment towards them.  If this happens, people should remove themselves from the scene, breathe deeply for a few minutes and rise above it.  

Robert's thoughts ceased, and I waited breathlessly.  

Robert resumed his report: "Harry, thank god I can hack through Butch's firewall...he's communicating with your MIC...."

"What!"

"Yes, your Military Industrial Complex.  Isn't that the theoretical entity you've been writing about?"

"It's not theoretical, any more than the gun lobby is theoretical."

"Ok, well the gila monster nation, if I may call it that, has contacted your MIC...they are communicating at this moment."

"Can you pick-up any of it?"

"Just bits.  The MIC is very interested in the gila method of sowing discord.  The gilas want to conduct an action tomorrow, using the holiday...they argue that humans will be unsuspecting and vulnerable, many travelling far from home...the MIC responds that high profile attacks on Thanksgiving would incite too much emotion, too much blood-lust for their current timetable."

"Hold on Robert!  What sort of alliance is this?  What can a bunch of gila monsters offer the MIC?  And what does Butch suppose the MIC can do for gilas?"

"Believe me, I'd like to know that too! Part of it has to do with gilas' telepathic abilities, which the MIC would like to develop in humans, for military purposes.  What do you think your MIC ultimately wants?"

I answered, "The MIC seeks to betray the middle and lower socio-economic classes because they will not fit into the automated, jobless and bioengineered society to come.  The superannuated humans are to be led into a global conflict in which they will be preoccupied with staying alive, and thus not able to complain that the new human race, which historian Yuval Harrari calls Homo Deus, will not include them.  But I'm wondering what the gila monsters hope to get from this alliance."

"Harry, you and your readers will have to wait for answers until I can infiltrate further.  Meanwhile…I'm picking up a consensus...the gilas have agreed to keep a low profile with tomorrow's telepathic disruptions, and the MIC agrees to some of Butch's ideas (e.g. at selected homes, just as the turkey is being carved, the carver and all the guests will hallucinate that the turkey becomes a living gila monster who grins and says, 'Who's human now?'). Though the MIC will benefit from general confusion and mayhem spread by gilas, it reserves the big blow-ups for itself.  Harry, you and I are in the same boat, each fighting for the soul of his species!"

Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster's Thanksgiving message: "I'm thankful for my rock"

Forward by Harry the Human 

My companion, Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster, has been learning about the American custom of Thanksgiving from our media, and he asked me about thankfulness, which he understands is the central concept of the holiday.  The media presentations and my response prompted him to write the piece below, which I submit without prejudgment, thankful that our planet still harbors sentient life forms other than our own, no matter what they think.  Happy Thanksgiving!  Harry the Human


Thanksgiving message from Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster

Greetings human race!  Thanks once again for permitting me to observe and comment upon your customs.  I've been following the American holiday of Thanksgiving for a few years, and this one in particular has a poignant quality, in my view, as you appear unsure what to be grateful for.

Of course, the holiday is designed for just such an environment, in which there is scant evidence of a beneficent providence showering you with gifts. The mythic event in your history that engendered Thanksgiving was a situation of dire need and emergency, in which your founding explorers faced a nightmarish reality: their dependence on indigenous cultures, which they knew even then, subconsciously perhaps, could never accommodate the founders' ultimate need to supplant them.

In the current case, your presidential election, just before Thanksgiving, jolted you with its unprecedented message of national meaninglessness and uncertainty.  Not only do many of you doubt the definition of your nation that you were taught as children, you face the ascendency of a hostile military establishment and complicit media that seek to lure you into destruction and death.  

But, as noted, it's the right time for Thanksgiving, when there is little in the external world to be thankful for, so you look to your immediate world and are thankful for your family, your friends, your life, and hopefully, if you have one, the inner world of your mind.

What a contrast with the life of a blessed species like gila "monsters"!  We don't distinguish between "luck," which is random and fickle, and our lives, which tend to be constant (barring our occasional consumption by coyotes). Harry plans to take me to his friend Doug's Thanksgiving dinner, where I expect to be showcased like the oddity I am.  That's fine with me- I'll enjoy adding to my ongoing study of your species- but if the assembled guests, per your custom, demand to know what I'm thankful for, I will reply (to those receptive to telepathy), "I am thankful for the rock I habitually sit on."

I expect the immediate response will be, "Oh, the poor humble creature!  While we are thankful for family and HBO and material gifts of all sorts, this animal is thankful for his rock!" And secretly they will think, "I'm thankful I'm not a gila monster, a species so impoverished it lifts a clawed foot in praise of raw, cheap earth!"

Of course if anyone's interested, I'll explain that a gila's "rock" is more than a rock- it's the central turf of an entire life, a life where the environment fits the organism.  That is something no human can be thankful for.  The very mass-produced table you sit at, the tormented animals you eat, the combined jumble of wires, wood, concrete and cacophony of your extended habitats - so complex and far removed from the planet that you might as well already be colonizing Mars- plus the chaos you now face as you discover that your social contract, once again, is dangerously out of date: these are tricky elements to be thankful for.  Would you be thankful, I wonder, if you knew what it feels like to be me sitting on my rock?

The adults may not understand, but human children present will have the insight born of the vestigial memory of "sitting on your rock."  Watch children play in designated areas, where artificial "rocks," territorial projections, are the center of play, as the children reenact eons of competition for what you would now call a "safe space," where you are free to exist as you are.  The children's endless competition for these spaces suggests the endless human search for them, and the elusive quality of success.

If anyone asks, I'll tell the assembled guests that sitting on a rock of one's own is the ultimate expression of the gila's ascendency, involving qualities suggested by human terms like, "success," "enlightenment," "self-realization," etc.   I'll try to keep in mind that it would be rude and cruel to overly tout our safe-space rocks, since humans generally are bereft of them.  You have been scouring and tearing the earth apart for millennia in search of rocks, since you lost your safe space in the forest, when you were animals.  The Thanksgiving dinner itself is now your rock, your safe space, which is why adults, who better understand the human world, always announce their thankfulness for family, while the primitive youngsters talk about presents and money spent.

You have a character from your inventive Dr. Seuss named "the Grinch" (whose heart is "two sizes too small"), who seeks to befoul one of your major religious observances, that commemorating the birth of your creator god's son (the Grinch is ultimately converted by the holiday's joyfull spirit).  Must I be your Grinch for Thanksgiving?  I don't relish the role.  I want to be an honest cross-species ambassador, delivering assistance and goodwill.  I really do.  But honestly, it's not easy.  

I hope our gracious hosts on Thursday will permit me to raise a glass (figuratively) to toast the future of humanity, when it will rise from its current troubled and confused state to take its place on rocks of wisdom scattered through the cosmos, now vacant and awaiting new arrivals.

 Thankfully, Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster

Mediacracy

Robert caught me unawares towards midnight, on my return from the Cinemark at Antelope Valley Mall where I had watched Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet (wonderful), courtesy of the British National Theater Live ("live" meaning pre-recorded before a living audience).  You can imagine my preoccupied state after three hours of lines like, 

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Stumbling up the rock strewn path to my door, wondering if my words would go to heaven, I heard the distinctive clicking sound of Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster, whose talents and relative sociability have allowed me to make him famous.  How much money have I made off Robert?  None. Story of my life.

"Hey, Harry the Human, can I have your autograph?" he hissed from under the front steps, where he had apparently been awaiting my return.

"What's up, Robert?," I called down to the darkness in front of my feet, feigning, a bit, my joy at seeing him (he can be exhausting), "I just watched Shakespeare's Hamlet. Are you familiar with it?"  Robert spends hours a day behind the Lancaster Public Library, telepathically scanning great quantities of human culture.

"I am indeed," replied Robert.  "Shakespeare is unique, I find."

"I agree, but how do you find him unique?" I asked, suppressing a yawn and trying to be polite.

"As a gila monster I find all your artists unique, but Shakespeare is the only modern author to attach himself to power, I mean to actual powerful people."

"Like Elizabeth I and James I."

"Yes.  The remarkable thing is that these monarchs enjoyed the display of their chaotic interior and ambitious minds, along with a propensity for self-destruction."

Robert was obviously in a talkative mood.  "For a lizard you sure have a big vocabulary," I ventured, suddenly longing for the silence of my kitchen.

"If you were one inch long," Robert mused, "I would probably eat you."

I stood for a moment, looking up at the blazing full moon, supposedly a super-moon for being so close to the earth.  Signs, always signs....

"Sorry, Robert, I'm tired."

"Well, I just wanted to inform you of an epiphany I had after several hours of listening to news programs."  [Robert can telepathically tune-in to our broadcasts]

"What, that they're biased?"

"You are lacking a word, a word for ‘rule by media.’"

I considered this, and found that Robert was correct; we have no such word.

Robert continued, "To remedy this, I coined a new meaning for a refashioned old word, mediocre, to add to the existing terms for human hegemony that are suffixed with 'archy' and 'acy' (e.g. democracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, autocracy) and came up with 'mediacracy' for 'rule by media.' The modern use of ‘media’ did not exist when you invented the Greek and Latin terms for types of government, so you let the natural phonemic contender for rule by propaganda, 'mediocre,' get captured by its root 'medius,' meaning 'middle,' as in 'people who are dull and stupid because they are in the exact middle of human qualities,' which, when you think about it, is a sad commentary on your species."

I was not in the mood: "Robert, I'm going to enter my house now and think about Hamlet.  Your new word is interesting, perhaps tomorrow...."

"You hominid dope!  I'm telling you that this lack of word is affecting your political discourse."

Letting off a deep sigh, "Ok...how is that?"

"Your entire window on government is provided only by your media.  Unless you travel to Washington and take a guided tour of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House, you can't see by yourself what you're voting for."

"Yes, ok."

"Harry, you only see and hear what the media offers you, with the words they offer.  People are furious with government for being a plutocracy, an oligarchy, an autocracy. That's what you learn from the media, but it's pretty clear that people are fuming at the media as much as at government, though that is not reported.  It's the media that has screwed up everyone's perceptions, inducing you to believe that racial hatred is rampant everywhere in the country, when it's not, and that Americans can't talk to each other when they disagree, which they can.  Your species is about to go to war in Syria and North Korea because your media informs you that this would be normal and logical.  Surprise: it's not normal and logical."  

I stared again at the blazing moon.  "Yeah, so what am I supposed to do about it?  For one thing, how do you prove that the media controls what we think.  Most people think they think what they think because they think it."

Robert slowly shook his wrinkled head.  "Harry, you are getting more eloquent by the day.  Must be my influence.  All you have to do is point out that there are never widely reported scandals about news anchors and reporters. They apparently never steal or commit sexual indiscretions or take bribes or report the news to suit someone.  When was the last time you read about a reprehensible journalist or reporter?  Are they not as pure as the driven snow?"

I looked at Robert for a moment, nodded in acceptance, opened my door, walked in, closed the door, sat on the squishy couch and pondered:

A knavish speech sleeps in a fool's ear.

   

Gila monsters abhor a vacuum

Robert, my telepathically connected gila monster friend out in Pearblossom, was scarce for a while after my return from San Diego, but this morning I saw him crawling towards my modest shack, a most unprecedented behavior.  He clearly had something on his mind.

 He halted about twenty feet away and transmitted these thoughts:  

Your species is going to hell in a handbasket, to use your expression.

Thanks for the reminder, I thought back, wary of Robert's conviction that gila's are the pinnacle of sentient life.

I'm talking about your presidential election tomorrow.  Your species are idiots.

I had had enough:  

Robert, as much as I've enjoyed our conversations, I'm getting tired of your holier-than-thou-species attitude.  If you've got something useful to relate, please do so now.

Sure, thought Robert, turning slowly around to trudge back towards his habitual rock, now thinking at me over his shoulder, You've got a dangerous vacuum developing. Gila's have learned to stay clear of vacuums.

What vacuum?

The vacuum of your government.  What you call 'the people,' meaning those of you who are subservient to the masters, look now at this thing your masters have created which they call your 'government,' and they see a vacuum.  There is nothing there.

There's plenty there.  Much is at stake in this election.  How would you know anything about human culture?

Robert's reaction was to stop, spit (gila's have toxic saliva, so the gesture was one of extreme disgust and hostility), turn his head slowly towards me, and think: 

Today, when the subservient humans look at their government, they see dysfunction and inaction, born of years of no one in government having anything to do but spend money and write reports.  When a crisis appears, whether it's the collapse of one of your political parties, or climate change, or humanity's fate after bioengineering and artificial intelligence, no one knows what to do, and even if they did know what to do no one has authority to do it.  You have a vacuum where a government should be.  Very dangerous!  Gila's are self-governing and don't have this sort of problem.

Well aren't gila's wonderful! 

Robert stared at me, immobile as a statue, and thought: 

I don't know why I try to teach you anything.  You're as dense as the rest of your species.

If you have in mind helping me or humanity at large, that's news to me.

Robert made me wait a beat for his response.  The day was getting hot.  Being cold blooded, Robert liked it.  He blinked once and thought: 

Your masters are highly uncomfortable now, scrutinized and exposed in this fashion by so many underlings.  They don't like what's happening.  Whoever wins on Tuesday, everyone will see that a piece of the government did not function, was not there...they will see a vacuum.

And you're saying that's dangerous?

Highly.  This is one of the most dangerous moments your kind has faced since we've been watching you.  Your masters will be so threatened by the revelation that there is no actual leadership that they will need to distract the underlings with something catastrophic, like a terrorist attack followed by war hysteria.  You are in grave danger.

So it's come to this: A gila monster warns a human that World War III will emerge from the vacuum where government should be.  You can't make this stuff up.