The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  And Ace took a bath on the book.

  And when they found out what was behind it, they jumped out of the contract for THE OTHER GLASS TEAT with sighs of relief that they’d only lost two grand, and not their lives.

  So for the next four years THE GLASS TEAT—which had sold enormously well on either Coast, where all you radical swine congregate, polluting the precious bodily fluids of Amurrrica—began to acquire something of an underground reputation. I received hundreds of letters from college students and teachers who were using the book in their classes, handing around one dog-eared copy because they couldn’t find others, dog-eared or otherwise. Reviews continued appearing, all of them admiring. And here’s a little photo-extract from the Journal of Popular Culture just to prove I haven’t been dreaming all of this.

  Excerpted from:

  JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

  v. 7, no. 4, Spring 1974.

  TELEVISION AND TELEVISION CRITICISM:

  A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Compiled by John L. Wright

  Arlen, Michael J. Living Room War. New York: Viking, 1969.

  Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art. See pp. 188–198, “A Forecast of Television.” Berkeley: University of California, 1957.

  Berelson, Bernard. Content Analysis in Communication Research. Glencoer Free Press, 1952.

  Bluem, A. William and Roger Manvell, eds. Television: The Creative Experience. New York: Hastings House, 1967.

  Brown, Les. Television: The Business Behind the Box. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

  Burgheim, Richard. “Television Reviewing,” Harper’s (August 1969), 98–101.

  Carney, Thomas F. Content Analysis. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1972.

  Carpenter, Richard. “Ritual, Aesthetics, and TV,” Journal of Popular Culture (Fall 1969), 251.

  CBS. The Eighth Art. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962.

  Chester, Giraud, and others. Television and Radio, 4th Edition. New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1971.

  Cole, Barry G., ed. Television: A Selection of Readings from TV Guide Magazine. New York: Free Press, 1970.

  Compton, Neil. “Television and Reality,” Commentary (September 1968), 82–86.

  Currie, Rolf Hector. “The Stylization of the Dramatic Television Image.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1962.

  Daedalus (Spring 1960). Symposium on “Mass Culture and Mass Media.”

  DeFleur, Melvin L. Theories of Mass Communication. 2nd Edition. New York: David McKay, 1970.

  Donner, Stanley T., ed. The Meaning of Commercial Television. Austin: University of Texas, 1967.

  Elliott, Philip. The Making of a Television Series. London: Constable, 1972.

  Ellison, Harlan. The Glass Teat. New York: Ace, 1970.

  Ephron, Nora. And Now…Here’s Johnny. New York: Avon, 1968.

  Greenberg, Daniel A. “Television—Its Critics and Criticism (A Survey and Analysis).” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Wayne State University, 1965.

  Gumpert, Gary. “Television Theatre as an Art Form.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Wayne State University, 1963.

  And now, 1983, THE GLASS TEAT is back. As the sixth in Ace Books’s series of Ellison reissues and new titles. The sixth in the series of twelve because the letters still keep coming from people who want to know where they can buy a copy. Because the things said in this book, even though ostensibly concerned with tv programs most of which have been off-the-air for the last ten-plus years, still pertain. The subtexts are still current. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Mission: Impossible or Magnum, P.I., The Beverly Hillbillies or The Little House on the Prairie, The Brady Bunch or Too Close for Comfort. The names change, but the banality remains. If you’ve caught samples of this season’s fare, you know damned well I could be writing about network slops from the early Devonian Age and still have it all dead-on.

  Only it’s fifteen years since I started writing those first fumbling Free Press observations about television and nothing much has happened. Nothing much except:

  Agnew and Nixon proved all the warnings I trumpeted about their evil were accurate.

  Agnew and Nixon succeeded in crushing the spirit of the rebellious Sixties, smoothing the way for the deadhead Seventies.

  The networks have grown more frightened and restrictive.

  The audience-testing methods and de facto blacklists of actors, directors and writers have become firmly entrenched.

  Almost all genuine creative talents have fled the medium.

  Middle-class mediocrity and law’n’order programming have become the rule.

  We’re all fifteen years older and not one scintilla wiser.

  So here comes THE GLASS TEAT again. To be read as a slice of your recent past. To serve as a stock-taker. And if it doesn’t suffice, get ready for the next month when Ace will risk the wrath of the gods and republish—in glorious black and white, 52 wonderful columns 52—THE OTHER GLASS TEAT!

  I suggest you buy it and hide it. Because, unless something strange and wonderful happens between the time I write this (5:54 P.M., 6 January 83) and the time you buy this book, and Nixon kicks off, he’ll still be alive and can always make a comeback. Don’t laugh. We thought the crazy sonofabitch was politically dead when we wouldn’t elect him Governor of California in 1962.

  Which brings me to a freaky idea. A weekly situation comedy about a nutso politician who actually committed suicide in 1960, resuscitated by voodoo, who keeps coming back to life every four years, a zombie, and keeps getting elected by all the nerds and gits who forget how creepy he was last time around. Now let’s see, who’ll we get to play the politician?

  How about Reagan? Nah. Type-casting never works.

  Anyhow, I’ll see you next month. Maybe.

  —Harlan Ellison

  23” WORTH OF INTRODUCTION

  If you believe that “all the news that’s fit to print” is what you’ll find in The New York Times, and if you believe all the news they find fit to print, chances run good you’ve never stumbled across my column of television criticism. “The Glass Teat” appears weekly (when I’m not off in the Great American Heartland gathering source material) in the liveliest underground newspaper in the United States, The Los Angeles Free Press. (Known to friends and bomb-throwing right-wingers alike as “The Freep.”)

  It has been running for a year and a half, approximately, as you buy this book. It has netted for me piles of abusive, threatening letters, some critical praise from men in the Industry whom I respect—such as Walter Cronkite, Joseph Stefano, Christopher Knopf, and several other familiar newscasters who’d rather I didn’t use their names—damned little financial return, an assurance from ABC that my scripts are no longer welcome at that network, two attempts on my life that didn’t come nearly close enough, an ill-deserved reputation in the subculture as a guy over thirty who can be trusted, and a forum from which to express my fears and sorrows about the way we’re fucking up this country.

  Oh yes, by the way: I occasionally use profanity.

  But, you see, that’s one of the lovely things about the Freep. You can say what you want to say, in the way you want to say it. That’s sort of de rigueur with the underground press. Despite its frequent lapses into bad taste and paranoia, it has become the last bastion of genuinely free journalistic speech in America. Though frequently denied press credentials accorded to any other legitimate news medium (which sometimes makes for muddiness in the reportage due to subcutaneous sources of information), the underground press persists in presenting the other side of the news we are daily fed through tv, radio and newspapers via “official sources” and the spokesmen of the Establishment.

  How this column came to be is a short story to tell, and I do not think you will revile me overmuch for taking the time here to tell it.

  In 1962 (or was it ‘63?) I first met Arthur Kunkin, who is the publisher of the Freep. He was at that time trying to get the paper started, using as its model the now-terribly-strai
ght Village Voice. He asked me to contribute to the paper, and along in that first year I did a drama review. But the pressures of other writing kept me from becoming a regular contributor.

  Years passed. In late September 1968, both in attendance at a dull Hollywood party, Art and I bumped into each other and the conversation went exactly like this:

  KUNKIN: Hey, Harlan, how are you?

  ELLISON: Great, Art. How’s the paper doing?

  KUNKIN: Fine. Why don’t you do something for us?

  ELLISON: Why don’t I do a tv column?

  KUNKIN: Okay.

  ELLISON: I can say what I want to say, and nobody edits it? Not a period, not a comma, strictly untouched?

  KUNKIN: Of course.

  ELLISON: Great. I’ll do it.

  KUNKIN: Your first deadline is day after tomorrow.

  And he walked away from me. I went home that night and sat down and wrote the first installment of “The Glass Teat” (which you will find herein, slightly rewritten at the request of Ace’s splendid editor, Mr. Terry Carr, who quite rightly felt that in fumbling out a first try I had not approximated either the tone or quality of what was to follow; the rewrite was done by myself, and aside from dropping repetitive references to other columns in this book, which speak for themselves, the installments appear exactly as they were written and first published…though typographically more articulate…until recently the Freep’s typesetters apparently had never heard of italics).

  During the year and a half of the column’s existence, the tenor of the times has changed radically, and the horrors that now hold sway over us have grown more malignant. This column was conceived to fulfill the role of social gadfly. It was born out of a need to examine what comes to us across the channel waves and to extrapolate from its smallness to the bigness of the trends or concepts to which it speaks. A situation comedy is not merely a situation comedy. It means something. Why do we—who know The Beverly Hillbillies is bullshit—sit and watch such banality? What does the acceptance of death but not sex on network tv tell us about ourselves and the broadcaster’s image of us? How accurate is tv news reportage? Why is there so much bad tv and who is responsible for it?

  These and other unanswerables I’ve attempted to answer in the pages of the Freep each week, through the frequently transparent device of working over the cultural whipping-boy, the medium of television.

  But make no mistake. I am not really talking about tv here. I am talking about dissidence, repression, censorship, the brutality and stupidity of much of our culture, the threat of the Common Man, the dangers of being passive in a time when the individual is merely cannon-fodder, the lying and cheating and killing our “patriots” do in the sweet name of the American Way.

  As for my credentials, I am thirty-five, a writer by profession with 22 books, over 700 magazine stories and articles, several dozen tv scripts and half a dozen motion pictures to my credit. I am not a Communist, a drunkard, a doper, a lunatic, a straight, a hippie, a Democrat, a Republican, an astrology freak, a macrobiotic nut, a subscriber to The National Review, or even a member of the staff of the Freep. I am all alone out here, setting down what I’ve seen and what it means to me.

  If that has some worth, then this is a good book. If I’m an idiot with only peripheral vision, then at least maybe the writing was amusing.

  There are warnings herein. I hope some of you get their message before it’s too late. ‘Cause, baby, time is running out.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  Hollywood, California

  26 December 1969

  1: 4 OCTOBER 68

  Hello. You ought to be frightened. You ought to be scared witless. You think you’re safe, all snuggled down in front of your picture tube, don’t you? They’ve got you believing all you’re seeing is shadow play, phosphordot lunacies sprinkled out of a clever scenarist’s imagination. Clever of them. They’ve lulled you. McLuhan was right: give me your young every Saturday morning from eight till noon, and they’re mine till I send them off to die in a new war (don’t ask me which one, Mommy and Daddy, I haven’t checked my schedule for this week; but I’ll consult TV Guide and see what prime-time they have open next year and that’s where I’ll send your bouncing baby boy).

  They’ve taken the most incredibly potent medium of imparting information the world has ever known, and they’ve turned it against you. To burn out your brains. To lull you with pretty pictures. To convince you nothing’s going on out there, nothing really important. To convince you throwing garbage in the river after your picnic is okay, as long as the factories can do it, too. To convince you all those bearded, longhair freaks are murderers and dumb Communist dupes. To convince you that Viet Nam is more a “struggle for Democracy” than a necessity for selling American goods. To convince you that certain things should not be said because it will warp the minds of the young. To convince you that this country is still locked into a 1901-Midwestern stasis, and anyone who tries to propel us beyond that chauvinism and bigotry is a criminal.

  I want to start gently, with this first column, to ease you into the world-

  as-it-is with some questions and some observations. For instance: I want to talk for a few seconds about the war on dissent, as manifested on that big momma mammary we call The Tube. (Marvel, gentle readers, at the cultural shorthand: The Pill, The Man, The Tube. You can only use that kind of shorthand when you’ve got one, only one of each, and everyone knows it. Yeah: The Establishment.)

  I want to ask the right questions, because every time I leap into learned discussion with my straight-shooting, clear-thinking contemporaries or adversaries, they whip it on me that there is no concerted war against dissent in this country, and sure as hell not on television. (That most public of possessions given into the trust of the networks. And god knows no one named General Sarnoff would use that public trust to back up The Establishment! Men of honor, all!)

  I’d like to ask why Mayor Daley, the Butcher to the Hog Butcher of the World (as Sandburg called Chicago), expended all those dollars preparing a clever cop-out tv show of 60 solid minutes of socko entertainment, to prove that his cossacks didn’t really bust any heads in the streets of the Windy City? I want to ask why nobody offered the Yippies a bundle of loot to prepare their side of it? Where were the Guggenheim or Rockefeller grants? There were certainly enough filmmakers in that monster crowd who could have done something equally as artful as Daley’s Lady Macbeth routine. (“My hands are clean!” she wept, wiping away the blood.)

  I want to ask, most humble and scuff-kicking, if that all-American Channel 5 would have scheduled such a documentary as quickly? And showed it as often? But why bother asking rhetorical questions. Mark Twain it was, when once asked why such awful things went on in the world, who confided with sincerity to the woman who had inquired, that it was because the Universe is run by god and god (so saith Clemens) “Is a malign thug.”

  So let me ask a much simpler one. If there is no war on dissent, no illiterate conspiracy to discredit anyone and everyone who speaks out against The System, why did the following happen last Sunday, September 29th at approximately 5:15 on our esteemed NBC outlet here in LA, the equal-time Channel 4?:

  Robert Abernathy was chairing a show called News Conference. The guest at whom the panel was firing questions was Dr. Benjamin Spock, well-known aging gut-fighter, baby doctor and peacenik/jailbird (as he is known in Orange County). The first half of the show dealt with the fact that (obviously) because Spock’s baby book had advised parents to be permissive with their kids, we were now reaping the harvest of that submissive attitude by harboring a generation of cranky, rebellious kids who didn’t know what was good for them or the country. Spock fielded it all with great dignity and articulation. Spock is an impressive dude. He isn’t one of them redolent, longhaired, cross-eyed hippie freaks. He is a gentle man of prepossessing demeanor, international reputation and obvious common sense. Hard to discredit a man like that.

  Yet NBC managed. With Machiavellian ease.

&nbs
p; At the half-time commercial break, we were treated to a “public service announcement.” It was ostensibly on buying savings bonds. It was headlined: “Buy Bonds Where You Work…They Do” and of course the workman shown was a 24-year army vet, sweating in Viet Nam. He did his little number about how he’d bought a bond a month for eighteen dollars and change, every month for 24 years, and one of these days he was going to get R&R’d out of VC-territory, start cashing in some of that twenty-five grand he had stashed away, and blow it in Bangkok having—in his words—”a ball.” Then the vet vanished, and the screen went black, and the headline appeared again. Now in the usual run-of-the-commercial style, the headline would have held, without sound, to let the message sink in. But this time there was a soundtrack overdubbed (obviously cut at a later date than the video segment) in which he added, “Oh, and by the way, I just extended my tour over here in Viet Nam for another six months, because all of us guys believe in what we’re fighting for over here.”

  Then Spock came back and they popped their first question at him: “Why do you feel we should be out of Viet Nam?”

  Pow! That man was dead. With his mouth he dug his grave. Into a pre-recorded interview had been inserted that one special “public service announcement” out of the millions every network runs—concerned with multiple sclerosis, drunkenness, help the blind, drive carefully and help save our water birds—that could invalidate everything Spock said.

  So I want to ask: no war on dissent?

  And having asked so many questions, I herewith promise that as long as I am allowed to continue writing this column, I will continue to ask questions, and report some personal answers arrived-at from seeing what they set before us on the screen every day.

  (I say allowed, for unbidden, the dead eyes of Martin Luther King and Lenny Bruce and Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X swim before me. And behind them Peter Zenger and Galileo and Thomas More and poor Jesus Christ, all of whom were too stupid to know the only way the assassins overlook you is if you keep your head down and your mouth shut. This all smacks of melodrama, for which I have an unnatural love, and yet I feel the stormy stirrings of madness in the land, and even though I don’t seek the role of spokesman, any more than Lenny did, the time has come to speak out, to hold back the Visigoths, and that sure as hell makes the spokesman ripe for a bullet in the brain. So while you can enjoy me, gentle readers, I urge you do so, and ask the questions along with me.)