The Glass Teat
Page 5
It goes to something stronger than merely one’s personal taste in television shows. It goes straight to the heart of an inescapable truth: if the world is going to be changed, gang, if we’re going to find out where the eternal verities have gone, if we’re going to rescue ourselves before the swine mass sends us unfeelingly and uncaringly down the trough to be slaughtered, we have to face it: they will not help us. They will applaud now that LBJ has stopped the bombing, but they see no inconsistency in having beaten and arrested all the clear-sighted protesters who said it three years ago, before how many thousands of innocent cats got their brains spilled? And now that what those protesters protested for has come to pass, will they rise up and say free them, reinstate them, honor them?
We know the answer to that.
The answer is: they’re too busy watching Gomer Pyle cavort around in a Marine Corps that never gets anywhere near jellied gasoline and burning babies.
Dear god, we must face the truth: for the mass in America today, the most powerful medium of education and information has become a surrogate of Linus’s blue blanket.
A ghastly glass teat!
7: 15 NOVEMBER 68
The week was a veritable cornucopia of television-oriented goodies. It was a time when we were exposed to the incredible tunnel-vision of our public officials (or those seeking to be same) as regards the potentialities of the medium.
Instead of recognizing that television, in its McLuhanesque fantasy/reality, can spot a phony and pin a liar, Humphrey persisted in mouthing jingoism and concealing his true personality, and lost an election.
To our everlasting gratitude, however, the other side of the coin was exhibited by Max Rafferty, one of the few truly evil men I have encountered. He is a liar, a cunning ghoul with a nature that has apparently never been sullied by the presence of a scruple. On Wednesday morning, when he lumbered before the cameras in his campaign headquarters to concede the election to Cranston, he was asked what it was in particular that he thought cost him the race. Though I’m sure he didn’t mean it in the way I interpret it, he said it was obviously because the people dug Cranston more than him. And he was correct. Though Cranston is by no means a Great White Hope (and certainly no Great Black Hope) he was demonstrably not an insipid man, nor a brute, nor a mudslinger, nor a phony…all of which are charges that can be laid at the feet of Rafferty with some success. The tube revealed Rafferty for what he was. And so, in a year when he had everything going for him, he lost. As he deserved to lose.
Rafferty, thank god, failed to understand the ways in which the medium could expose him. His guru, Nixon (I gag at having to call him President Nixon), finally came to understand the nature of the beast, after the licking he took at its hands in 1960. But the word never drifted down to Rafferty. For which small thanks can be given. Would that Humphrey had been as hip to tv as was JFK.
It became obvious this last week, inundated as we were with political “specials,” that the days of the fraud in politics are numbered. Or, more correctly, the inept fraud. The baby-kissing, slogan-mouthing hypocrite: the machine politician. tv’s eye is much too merciless, and the generations raised on tv are wise to the fraudulent; they’ve seen too many commercials to ever again be taken in by demagogues and political used car salesmen. (In this respect, I suppose we owe a helluva debt to Ralph Williams whose hardsell parallels that of the office-seekers. Once having had one’s skull napalmed by the Ralph Williams scene, one need never fear having the wool pulled over one’s eyes by a Wallace or a Rafferty.)
Yet the demise of the one postulates the rise of another. The Show Biz Politician. Reagan is a classic example, of course. In a way, the Kennedys are another. I think the element is charisma. If a man can look sincere on the tube, if he can seem to be honest and forthright and courageous, he can sweep an election merely by employing the visual media.
In which case, the term “bad actor” would come to have a new, more ominous meaning.
Another goodie from the week that was: one of the pollsters, in conjunction with one of the major networks, promulgated a survey of feeling on the part of the American Public about Johnson’s bombing halt of North Viet Nam. Seventy-three per cent said it was a groove, they were nuts about the idea, oh boy, gosh-wow, simply peachy keen. Now I don’t know what boils your blood, gentle reader, but that is the same 73mother% that was out in the streets shouting “Lynch! Lynch!” at the kids who showed up at Century City, who chased the Dow recruiters, who burned their draft cards, who sat-in at a dozen universities, who marched to Washington, who got their skulls crushed in Chicago streets by the all-powerful John Laws. They are the same hypocritical 73% who refuse now to draw a line between all of that dissent, through Johnson’s vanished popularity, past Johnson’s decision (forced on him) not to run, ending with the bomb halt. Do you think there is no connection? Are they that incredibly unaware that they still think all those people with indictments against them, all those kids and old men lying-up in slammers across the country, all those girls and boys who’ve been fined or thrown out of school, are Communists? Where is the sense that we hear Nixon and Humphrey and Wallace rattle on about? Where is the awakening? At what point do those 73tvoriented% say, “Hey, wait a minute! If we agree with the bomb halt, and all those kids were demanding a bomb halt, then those kids were the same as us, only they saw it before we did! Then that means they’re okay, they’re real Americans, too. So let’s spring ‘em…let’s erase those charges…let’s hand them back their fines…let’s reinstate them in college…let’s let Spock off the hook!” At what stage of cultural adolescence do the people assume responsibility for their mistakes? At what point does the shuck cease?
And if the people refuse to face up to what they’ve done, where is the responsibility of our video conscience? Which network will take the initiative?
I hurl a challenge.
History has now proved the years of dissenting anent Viet Nam were intelligently directed. History has now shown that those who suffered, suffered for all of us, carrying a banner that only the bravest could carry. As Thoreau has put it: “He serves the state best who opposes it most.” Those who chose to go to jail rather than cop-out on their morality and their country, they are patriots. And so I hurl the challenge to the major networks:
Which of you will take a stand on this truth? Which of you will prepare a special in which you set forth this obviousness? Which of you will serve us, the people…and us, the country…as you say you do?
Which of you will point out what the dissenters have done for America, and the world?
Specials on traffic safety and Stonehenge and Miss America and the mating habits of the Great Arctic Tern are marvelous. But they cannot compare in importance to a special in which the value of the dissenters is finally acknowledged.
A country that needs to know the depth of its guilt unconsciously awaits this special.
Which of you will perform this service? At this stage it isn’t even an act of bravery, so that ought to make it well within the reach of your talents.
8: 22 NOVEMBER 68
Having just emerged from the Valley of the Shadow, I’ve got to admit it, gang. I blew it. I had my chance, and I blew it.
Watched myself on the Joe Pyne Show last Saturday night. There I was, called on to defend my belief that we are getting managed, slanted, corrupted right-wing news as a matter of course, called on as a spokesman for all of you, and even for The Free Press, and I blew it.
I even tried to play it cagey. Came the day that Steve Kane, Pyne’s coordinator, called, my secretary Crazy June came into my office and said, “It’s the Pyne Show. Should I tell them Excuse A or Excuse B?” Excuse A is the one in which Crazy June returns to the phone weeping, and advises the pain in the ass on the other end that Harlan is dying of cancer of the lymph glands and can’t come to the phone. Excuse B is the one where she tells them I’ve just left to conduct a guided tour through the heart of Mt. Vesuvius. It usually works. They usually get the idea. Go away.
So I figured the Pyne People were gluttons for punishment and why the hell not. I took the call and Kane said he’d been reading my columns in these pages and why didn’t I come on and espouse Truth and Beauty and Wisdom to all the snake pit freaks who watch Joe.
(Now we all know that is a hype. Those people are sado-masochists of the purest stripe. They watch Pyne only because the Roman Arena was shut down, and they have nowhere else to go where they can turn thumbsdown and see some poor slob get a trident through his chest. The redneck schlepps who dig Pyne’s brand of hypocrisy and brutishness are the ones who can be convinced only by demagogues and rabble-rousers.)
But he said that Joe wasn’t feeling too well (I’d heard Pyne was about to cash in his chips via the carcinoma route…and in fact, when I’d done the show previously, and a woman in the audience had asked Duggan how Joe was doing, Duggan had replied that Joe had been discharged from the hospital; to which my friend Brian Kirby, in the audience, had replied, “Yeah, dishonorably.”) and he would probably just moderate while I debated with someone from some video network news staff, like Jerry Dunphy. Well, the thought of being able to ask Dunphy when the last time was that he’d actually been out on the firing line covering a story appealed to me so much, I accepted. I was told to be at the studio on Monday night, the 11th, at 6:00, to tape the show for the following Saturday’s airing.
Came a week ago Monday, I was cagey, as I said. I wore clothes that were just square enough so the boobs who view the show wouldn’t discount what I had to say even before I said it on the grounds that I was obviously one of those long-haired, unreliable, dope-drenched, crummy hippies. But clothes that were just groovy enough so The People would know I was an agent provacateur gadflying the Establishment. (It was so successful a disguise that a goodlooking chick waiting backstage, juiced out of her jug on somethingorother, told someone that I looked much straighter than my columns would indicate. Sorry about that, baby, I’m just one of those damned souls with a foot in either world.)
To my sadness, I wasn’t matched with Dunphy, but with a very nice, ultra-straight cat named David Crane, head of the news department at KLAC; in effect, though Pyne makes many times what he makes, Crane is Pyne’s boss.
And we went on the air—in case you missed it, I hope—and Pyne opened up with, “Well, Harlan Ellison, you say we aren’t getting honest news. Tell us about it?”
“Just like that?” I asked.
“No, I can prompt you,” Pyne came back.
“That’s okay,” I recovered. “I think I can tough it out.” And I launched into a recap of my column four or five weeks ago in which I said the cameras always focus on the barefooted members of every dissenting rally, but never the Doctors or Teachers or Squares in suits.
Crane came back reasonably by saying that what I was asking for was bias. That Daley in Chicago was upset because all the newsmen had shown was kids getting beat, but not cops…and what I wanted was the complete other view. He said what newsmen had to do was be impartial.
Well, that seemed sensible to me, so I didn’t argue. Here I was, sitting there with my best indicting Synanon Games technique, ready to rip these two guys up the middle, and they outfoxed me. They both came on so gentle, so sweet, so honest, so sensible, that I was forced to agree with them.
When Pyne asked me what way I would have it, I responded, “I’d like to see a few more tv newsmen on the firing line.” And Crane then tossed back the old analogy about a soldier learning more about the war from headquarters than from his little piece of the battle. I had to agree with that, too.
It went that way for a long time.
Crane asked if I thought a newsman would get a better story if he’d been clobbered on the head by a cop’s baton. I said no, but it might give him a helluva insight.
One woman clapped.
I suggested that, for instance, the reportage of the Selma-Montgomery march had been slanted because there were 450,000 people marching but no network coverage I’d ever seen indicated there’d been more than 100,000. Crane jumped back that I was obviously deluded merely because I’d been on the march and so had not seen all the coverage he’d seen, which had showed just oodles and oodles of people.
The audience clapped for Crane.
I sat there like a good little boy and tried to work up enough of a mad through the fifteen-minute segment to call both of them lackeys of the Wall Street Imperialist Conspiracy, but Crane was more often right than not, Pyne laid back and let Crane do the work, and I found myself sounding like a cranky tot.
So I blew it, gang.
They convinced me. It’s a great world we’re living in. The news isn’t managed. We’re getting the straight scoop on everything. When idiot Bob Wright does a “documentary” on hippies and stands on the Strip with his cameras ordering kids to walk up and down so he can shoot dirty feet, when newscasters report only that “rioting” students at San Fernando State used “dirty words associated with the Free Speech Movement,” when Nixon spots are inserted in prime time before and after the most popular shows as opposed to Humphrey spots that bracket such heavyweight programs as Land of the Giants and re-runs of the Roller Derby…they are oversights that can be discounted.
Crane is a good man. I don’t doubt it. He very probably considers himself a liberal. He probably is, which tells you all you need to know about liberalism in Our Times. Pyne is a good man. No, let me retract that. The milk of human kindness isn’t running that syruply in my veins. Pyne is sharp. He is by no means the lout he appears to be on-camera. He is, without even knowing it, a major mouth in the illiterate, silent conspiracy against dissent in this country. He is a reactionary—by avocation; there are those who remember him when he was a poor liberal—and the election has proved that we are a reactionary nation. So be it. I’m willing to go along with it.
Fuck’m. It’s like Jefferson said: “People get pretty much the kind of government they deserve,” and this state deserves Reagan, and this country deserves Nixon. I’m convinced. It’s a good life. It is, it really really is. I was wrong. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s amiss.
It’s as Joe, good sweet dear golden Joe, said to me, as his closing shot. Crane had just ended with the line that the American People ought to thank god for their Freedom of the Press, and wonderful twinkling Joe looked at me and said, “I think you ought to remember that, Harlan Ellison…now go…and sin no more.”
Yes, Daddy.
9: 29 NOVEMBER 68
Two years ago I was asked by Esquire to do a lead article on the new kind of woman emerging from Los Angeles and environs. After extensive research and interviews of several hundred women from all stratas of Clown Town society, ranging from teeny-boppers and goo-goo girls to stewardesses, high school teachers, housewives, secretaries, starlets and post-debs, I amassed a longish piece which I titled “Kiss Me And You’ll Live Forever—You’ll Be A Frog, But You’ll Live Forever.” Esquire called it “The New American Woman,” butchered it mercilessly, used a bad taste cover, and compelled me to remove my name from the piece. But the word leaked out that I’d done the article, and very soon I was being inundated with assignments from magazines to “write opinions about women.” I was even forced (a peculiar word for a writer, but perfectly appropriate in this case) to do a series of columns on women for Confidential. Then, last year, Cosmopolitan rigged some phony number about the most eligible bachelors in Hollywood, and threw me into the list, I presume as a sop to the working classes. All of this is pre-stated as sorta credentials for what is to follow in this column, with the staunchly made declaration that I happen t
o dig girls very much. I am by no means a misogynist.
Which brings me to the subject of this week’s revelation of Truth in Our Times: a little blonde cupcake named Kam Nelson, who disports herself weekdays 5:30 to 6:00 on KHJ Channel 9’s The Groovy Show. In case any of you reading this are over the age of seventeen and don’t catch The Groovy Show, let me hip you that it is a high school-oriented tribal ritual in which an aging elf named Sam Riddle hosts Top Thirty records for dancing.
But it is not Mr. Riddle—a gentleman who manifests all the paranoia about growing old that terrors those who make their living off the young—with whom I’ll deal here. It is Miss Nelson.
Describing her is like cataloguing mist. She is more vacuity than substance. Her appearance is what my secretary Crazy June calls “the Chinese waiter look”: they all look alike, and it’s difficult to figure out which one stiffed you for the Moo Goo Gai Pan. Miss Nelson has that look; the look of no-look at all. Her face is one of those pretty little girl shots that, having vanished from your sight, vanishes from your mind. The reference point being that there is no character in the face. At 17, Miss Nelson has long blonde hair, nice legs and a baby-fat face with cheeks like a hamster storing nuts for winter. But it is not her appearance, truly, that comes under attention here. I mention it only to establish her as a visual, physical role-model for all the girls presumably watching The Groovy Show.