The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  But, having said that, now I must deal with the show and the realities to which it pays service.

  (When I discussed the film with you, after the screening, Leslie, my statements had an implied “but” in them. I didn’t vocalize the “but” at that time. This is it.)

  But…

  Though the show deals with the desire of a segment of the black community for a national state of its own, though it plays changes on all manner of current events (LeRoi Jones’s having once been accused of peaching on a brother, Cleaver’s fugitive status, bombings of dissent newspapers), though it portrays a wide spectrum of black feelings all the way from the search for African roots in clothes and manners to the perfectly logical fear of the heat, still the show emerges as a heavy-handed sermon. And denies reality in the most vulnerable areas, seeking to present itself as white liberal.

  Franciosa plays a swashbuckling version of every guilt-ridden paddy parlor liberal, mouthing inane platitudes about brotherhood and integration, even at one point turning away from a conversation in badly acted frustration at “all the violence and destruction.” He says he’s sick of it. Well, shit, baby, everybody’s sick of it…most of all the blacks who’ve been hammered by the worst of it.

  The drama jabs at some delicate sores on the body of racial strife in America, but never really draws blood. It backs off. I’ll give you an example: the killing and fire-bombing have been blamed on Joe X, the leader of a militant group called the Black Battery. He has been cornered in a warehouse, and the laws are in the process of smoking him out, with the plainly stated probability that he will be killed in the imbroglio. Franciosa has uncovered the real culprit, and has gone to Joe X’s sister, to get her to tell him where Joe is hiding out (he doesn’t know the cops have found him, but knows time is growing short). She won’t tell him. The tension is building. It is one of those moments of genuine conflict during which anything can be said and be gotten away with. Franciosa pleads with her; she is adamant; he gets furious, frustrated. He says trust me, and she says why should I, and he gibbers some more about her knowing him well enough by now to blah blah blah (plotwise, there’s no doubting why she’s holding back; she doesn’t know him well enough to gauge him as anything more than a nosey Whitey). Finally, a third party convinces Claudia to tell him. A cop-out. What should have happened was Franciosa leaning over and saying, in as rotten a tone as he could muster, “Listen, you dumb black bitch, I’m trying to save your stupid brother’s life! Now if you can’t find the smarts to help me help him, we’ll forget the whole damned thing and you can count the riot gun holes in him at the funeral!”

  But that would have been going too far. That would have been forcing both Mr. Stevens, the writer, and Mr. Franciosa, the actor, to relate as human beings, the way real people would have reacted. But the white liberal reaction took hold, and the thought of calling a black bitch a black bitch was too dangerous.

  Understand something: I am being presumptuous in telling Stevens how to rewrite his show. I am very likely overstepping the bounds of good criticism and letting the writer in me hold sway. But I explain it (though don’t excuse it) by contending that, as Stevens put it, “this is an opportunity to use the Establishment’s own instrument to disseminate a little information,” and opportunities like this arise too seldom—on a medium where Julia is the new image of the black totality—to back off even a little. The responsibility for Stevens was far greater than usual. No one expects Family Affair or Bonanza to open any eyes, to say anything fresh and daring about the horrors that surround us; Stevens had that opportunity, and in his own words, all he added was “tabasco to the pudding.” A stick of dynamite in that tapioca might have been harder to get down the censors’ gullets, but the responsibility was there!

  I’ve urged you to see The Black Answer tomorrow night on Name Of The Game, and I do not think you will treat me unkindly for the urging, but it is almost entirely for the portrayal of the proud black woman by Abbey Lincoln, for the adeptly carried preachment of black militant position by Ivan Dixon, and the noteworthy talent of D’Urville Martin that you should so expend ninety minutes of your time.

  Stevens contends that this show will hit hardest at the “silent majority” of which Nixon prattled, not the hip minority that is aware of what’s coming down. I hope he’s right. We so desperately need him to be right.

  12: 28 DECEMBER 68

  Now the truth is revealed. My guilty secret. I am a devout Saturday morning cartoon watcher. I could cop-out and explain it all by saying a tv critic has to watch everything, but there would probably be a fink in the crowd who would point out that if such was the case, why did I miss the much-lauded Michelangelo special last week, not to mention the Elvis, Brigitte and Ann-Margret bashes? Or I could bring mist and tears to the eyes of my readers by reconstructing my hideous childhood when, as a result of being one of the shittiest kids in Painesville, Ohio, I was unable to make friends, and was thus (fortunately for me and the World of Literature) shunted off into a land of dreams, inhabited by the denizens of horror movies, comic books, pulp magazines and Golden Age radio. (It was a wild world where my companions were Doc Savage, the Shadow, Plastic Man, Sheena of the Jungle, Kharis the mummy, Simone Simon, Capt. Midnight, Jack/Doc/& Reggie, The Spectre and Lawrence Talbot the Wolf Man; you can readily understand why I get along so well with film producers and hippies.)

  But none of this would actually, strictly be the truth. And since I have begun the unseemly habit of dealing in honesty with you, gentle readers, I must confess boldly that I watch the Saturday morning cartoon shows because they are a consummate groove. I dig them; that simple.

  You can sympathize, accordingly, with my upset at the major networks’ fear&trembling as regards what they show the little no-neck monsters every Saturday ayem. Last season, there was such a hue and cry raised by paranoid parents (who can’t cop to being responsible for their kids’ traumas, so have to blame it on everything from Hong Kong Flu to masturbation, with comic books and tv getting a big blast), that the kiddie shows—notably the animateds—were warping their urchins’ minds, that radical changes were proposed in Saturday morning programming. The nitwit parents were aided in their Holy War by that perennial doomcrier, Dr. Fredric Wertham, the man almost solely responsible for the institution in the Fifties of the Comics Code Authority, a bluenose regulatory apparatus dedicated to keeping the world as pure as the driven snow.

  Refuting Wertham and the running-scared set is no difficult problem. Arrayed against the Wertham philosophy that tv (and comic book) violence cause children to use meat-cleavers on their mummies are hundreds of psychologists and psychiatrists who contend that filmed horror and terror are good for kids, that they offer a purgative, a release for adolescent tensions and hostilities. On a personal level, I can vouch for the accuracy of that theory. Every guy I know who grooved behind horror movies and comic books when he was a tot is today a productive, beautiful person, with imagination and a sense of wonder. The few I know who were only allowed to read Albert Payson Terhune and see movies where the virtues of god and Dogs were extolled are square, hidebound, bigoted, short-sighted schlepps who sport SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL COSSACK bumper stickers.

  There is a thing called “tolerable terror” that kids derive from seeing Superman battling the Giant Tapioca Pudding That Swallowed Pittsburgh. There is a sense of wakening mysteries in the soul that kids derive from seeing Frankenstein stalk the moors. There is a keying-in to exaggeration of the human condition in following the battle against ee-vil waged by the Lone Ranger and Spider Man. To deprive kids of these simplifications of the complex world of good and bad, when they are at an intellectual stage where they cannot grasp the subtleties of inter-personal relationships and global politics, is to deprive them of the one genuine training ground for their thinking, on a level to which they can relate.

  But I carp needlessly. Kids will still find their outlets, even if Saturday morning is turned over to cute gophers and harmless old men in clown suits. (What I’m
concerned about is what I’ll do for amusement on Saturday mornings; the chick is still asleep, and nudging her first thing on a Saturday morning can only serve to ruin a warm and growing relationship.)

  Yet the days of the super-heroes may be numbered, and for those of you who have not as yet fallen down on what joys present themselves pre-noon every Saturday, let me clue you to several shows of worth.

  Nine o’clock, Channel 7, the adventures of the Incredible Spider Man. Peter Parker, who is, in reality, the dreaded nemesis of evil-doers everywhere, Spider-Man, while a high school science student, was bitten by a radioactive spider (don’t boggle, read on); he acquired the super-powers of a spider, as a result. Wall-climbing agility, gymnastic excellence, clear-thinking…and his acne cleared up overnight. Considered to be an outcast and a menace by the Establishment (as portrayed by J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of a great metropolitan daily—faintly reminiscent of Mr. Luce at his crankiest), Spider-Man goes his lone, revolutionary way, socking it to malefactors and bumbling cops with a nice impartiality. His struggles every Saturday morning to implement the revolution would bring tears of joy to the most hardbitten placard-carrier.

  Nine-thirty on Saturday mornings is a toss-up. You can either dig Channel 7 and catch the adventures of a team of micro-reduced secret agents in their Fantastic Voyage (based on the s-f film of the same name) or turn to Channel 4 and groove with an insane rock group called The Banana Splits. In favor of the former is a team member named Guru who is a Hindu shaman of no mean talents. He can perform all manner of wonderful shticks while having been reduced to the size of a white corpuscle, and speeding along inside someone’s urine tract. Now, you gotta admit, a show that has a mystic microscopically moving midst minuscule matrixes manhandling maladjusted menaces means much mystery. How can you pass it up?

  (But if you have to, the Banana Splits is the way to go. There are these four lunatics in funny suits, see. One of them is a big dog, and another is a ball of hair with a long snout, see. And they play Fender bass and rhythm guitar and drums, see. And they knock each other around, and they’re live, not animated, like these other shows, see. And they’ve got some cartoons on the show, too, see. Like The Arabian Knights and The Three Musketeers and this live-action adventure called Danger Island, see, where there’s this buncha people trapped on an island fulla cannibals and other unsocial types, see. And the whole show is a wild, insane takeout, with some very nice rock music on top of everything. See?)

  Then at 10:30 on Channel 2 there’s the animated Batman/Superman Hour of Adventure, and need I say more? The Riddler is there, and the Penguin, and the Catwoman, and the Joker, and Robin, and Batgirl, and Superboy with his wonder dog Krypto, and it is some of the best animation on network tv, and if you dug the comics, you’ll love the films.

  (Did you ever wonder if Superman wore a jockstrap under that long underwear?)

  But the best, the very best, is a Jay Ward entry called George Of The Jungle. It usually gets usurped by a football game (as with the Army-Navy game a couple of weeks ago), but ABC puts it on sometime around four or five-ish. Check your local listings, as they say.

  On the George Of The Jungle show there is this extra-lovely fuckup Tarzan named George, who can’t swing on a vine without he bases his punim on a banyan tree. He’s not too bright, this George, and he’s got a girl friend named Ursula that he calls Fella, cause he don’t know the difference. There’s an ape named Ape who speaks with a Ronald Colman accent, and an elephant George thinks is a big dog: his name is Shep…

  (Ably assisting George in the supplementary segments of the show are Super Chicken—alias Henry Cabot Henhouse III—and a racer named Tom Slick.

  There is nothing on prime-time to compare with the social comment and satire being purveyed weekly on George Of The Jungle.)

  And so, having hipped you to all the wonders extant on the kiddie terrain, I sign off, having written this on a Friday, knowing that tomorrow morning I’ll be able to tune in on my favorite crime fighters and nutsos…and only wishing I knew a deranged chick who dug them, too, who wouldn’t get uptight when I kiss the back of her neck and whisper romantically, “Hey, honey, guess what? The Fantastic Four is on. Y’wanna watch, or y’wanna make it again?”

  13: 3 JANUARY 69

  Comes a moment of truth.

  Several weeks ago, in these pages, another Free Press columnist invoked the wrath of the readers by siding with The Establishment. Before what I am about to set down is construed as a like cop-out (pulling a mintz, as it has come to be called, he said innocently), let me inform my readers that acquaintances of mine in the nine-to-five scene handily castigate me for (as they put it) pandering to the muddy thinking of the “anarchists, hippies, unwashed degenerates and corrupt eggheads.” Apparently, I am neither fish nor fowl, sorta twixt and tween, neither of one camp nor the other, a chickenshit to both sides. Well, friends and rock-toters, I like to think of myself as an honest man, mayhap even a seeker after Truth. (Stop that giggling right now, wiseacre, or I’ll use phrases like “I tell it like it is.”)

  And this pathological concern with Truth leads me into areas where I’m forced to deny some of the things my gut tells me are groovy, simply because my head says they’re full of nonsense. All of the preceding, naturally, is geared to set you in the proper frame of mind for a denunciation of the Holy.

  But first, a word from my sponsor, the Great American Viewing Animal, which has asked me to remark on the following:

  As beautiful as Stevie Wonder may be on records, it was horrifying to see him on the Ed Sullivan Show several Sundays ago. There are blind musicians whose mannerisms on stage don’t make you feel like a descendant of Custer at a Buffy Sainte-Marie concert (Ray Charles, Feliciano, Shearing). But Stevie Wonder ain’t one of them. And if venal peddlers of the Sound like Sullivan have to slip in acts like Wonder between the trained dogs and acrobats, for Christ’s sake the least they can do is camera-shoot him in such a way that he doesn’t come off looking like a spastic.

  The Apollo moonshot was the biggest washout, dramawise, since Mama Cass opened in Vegas. Here it was, for all of us science fiction buffs, the most incredible step away from this war-crushed mudball since Columbus said, “C’mon you guys, knock off the mutiny shit; we’ll be in Cuba in a few days!” and the most exhilarating thing about it was Cronkite informing us that the English Flat Earth Society was prepared to reevaluate. Sure, okay, I’m woolgathering, but I just wish to god we’d get an astronaut with a sense of the dramatic. A guy who’d broadcast back from the darkside: “Jeezus, Houston, you ain’t gonna believe this, but as we passed over the Mare Imbrium, we saw this little pink-and-white gingerbread house, with smoke coming out of the chimney, and there was a tiny gray-haired lady out in front waving a banner that said Lemonade, 5¢ a glass…”

  And now, back to my main thesis this week, the Great Denunciation. Have I gotten you jollied enough?

  Well, I’ve carped repeatedly in these pages that one of the networks should air a rebuttal to Daley’s panegyric on Chicago (Wonderland of the Midwest). Two weeks ago, on Channel 11, one Sunday night, I saw it. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Yippies had an hour to state their case. It was telecast on the same channel that had aired Daley’s propaganda, with typical disclaimers that the opinions herewith set forth were not those of the blah blah blah. The ACLU had 45 minutes, the Yippies had 15 minutes.

  While the ACLU portion was nowhere nearly as artfully executed as the Daley film, a matter of money is all, it made its point with strength and conviction. Over and over we heard the now-classic Daley utterance, “The police are not there to create disorder, they’re there to preserve disorder.” There were touching and convincing interviews with college-age nursing students, McCarthy delegates, newsreel cameramen, straight types who could get the message across to the squares.

  When the ACLU forty-five minutes was ended, one had the feeling that while it might not convince the 74% of the Great Unwashed who applauded the actions of the Chicago pol
ice (even after the release of the Walker Report) that the dissenters were not Communist-inspired anarchists bent on the assassination of the Hump, still it might put a nubbin of doubt in their dense skulls. Hurrah! Gold stars for a job well done.

  Then came the Yippies’ 15 minutes.

  In just 15 short minutes, the Yippies managed to negate everything that had gone before.

  Let me make a point: I quite agree that there is a need for humor and satire and ridicule in the Dissent Movement (if that’s what it’s called). The Establishment and its lies are what novelist John D. MacDonald once referred to as “a thing. Heart empty as a paper bag, eyes of clever glass.” Any possible way at our command to make the piranha look ridiculous and jabberwockly should be taken.

  But when it becomes (apparently) impossible for the strategists to realize they are in a war, and that war may well be hell but certainly ain’t funny, then they must be labeled irresponsible. Not irresponsible to those nebulous jingoisms of Our Times—Law&Order, Civic Conscience, Human Rights, Respect For Our Appointed Leaders—none of that jello, friends, because those are the slogans the piranhas use to keep everyone in line. But irresponsible to the Cause and, more important, down in the nitty-gritty, to the troops. To the foot-soldiers in the war who are getting expelled from high schools and colleges all over this Cheyne-Stokes country. Irresponsible to the thousands who used their odd-job money to get to Chicago to protest, and for their concern got busted heads and police records. Irresponsible to all of (them, us, me, you, all of the above) who have spent endless hours in doctors’ offices getting repaired after Our Appointed Leaders used heavy clout against us. Irresponsible to those of us who don’t conceive of the war as a love-in or a gambol or a frolic. There’s nothing funny about three John Laws stomping on your arm till they break it.