The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Again…I tremble and shudder and digress.

  Fear does that to me.

  Would that the crew-cut, lupine-faced architects of that damnable nightmare felt a like fear. But apparently they do not.

  As we saw on that documentary, they do not shudder at cramming kangaroo mice in metal containers, spraying them with nerve gas, and watching them die 44 seconds later. They do not cry at the piteous squeals of their lab animals as they jam needles into their underbellies, injecting death into their bloodstreams. They do not pause and consider their humanity as they urge human volunteers to breathe deeply of the disease germs sprayed through the mouthpieces.

  First Tuesday’s CBW segment was a seemingly endless compendium of nightmare images. We saw a film made some years ago—and only now released—of school children who had been given over with their parents’ consent (!) for experimentation with germ warfare. Tiny figures, gas-masked and overcoated, hustled into a contamination chamber. We saw a lecturer describing the life-masks we would have to wear…masks that come in enough sizes to fit persons from the ages of four to eighty. And a basket-carrier affair for tykes under the age of four. All done with aplomb and stately sincerity, as though the lunacy of what they were talking about did not exist.

  And about that word “vector”…

  One CBW experimenter, who had worked on a pilot project for disseminating disease germs via animal carriers, talked quietly and sensibly about having gone to an island in the Hawaiian chain, an uninhabited island, and turning loose a “vector” studded with diseased ticks. He talked of the “vector” doing this, and the “vector” doing that. And it became the key to understanding the level of debasement to which these “scientists” had descended. Not once did he say “dog” or “rabbit” or “hamster.” He called the creature a “vector.”

  They have encapsulated themselves, denied their gut feelings, for whatever motives they consider good and sufficient. And by dehumanizing the experiments, by using “vectors” instead of “rabbits” or “mice,” they can sleep nights.

  But can we? Knowing our lives are held in the hands of men who may one day refer to a human plague-carrier as a “vector”?

  And more horrors! more horrors! We saw rabbits used in an experiment to establish what only a tiny dose of nerve gas would do. A rabbit received merely a drop of some deadly fluid in his eye, and instantly the pupil contracted to a point where the creature was virtually blind. It took three weeks before the pupil returned to normal size. And that was with one infinitesimal drop.

  We saw sheep in a pen, injected or sprayed with the virulence. Their heads hung pathetically, like cerebral palsy victims, all muscle-tone gone. We saw a cat in a cage; he was fed a mouse; he pounced and grabbed the mouse, and disemboweled him, as cats will do, then we saw the cat injected with a nameless fluid (Sander Vanocur suggested it might be LSD of a particularly nasty formula) and another mouse sent into his cage. The cat’s fur literally stood up and he cowered in fear of the mouse. At one and the same moment it was hilarious—like a bad MGM cartoon—and terrifying to see the ingrained instinctual behavior of an animal, fixed since the species came into existence, suddenly reversed. And it made me wonder what kind of perpetual bummer a human being would suffer if such a weapon was used.

  But we were told repeatedly that these weapons were only experimental, that they were not “within our strike capabilities” at the moment. At the moment. But if that was so, how did NBC expect us to react to:

  The filmed report of US Air Force bombers that had seeded the clouds near Salt Lake City, in a supposedly “uninhabited” area, with anthrax…a seeding that had been miscalculated…and 600,000 sheep died horribly. True? Yes, we know it was true, for the Air Force has already paid the sheepherders in the area over $400,000 in restitution monies. The Air Force rep who was asked to comment on this admitted that the bombers had been a little “off course,” but he said only sheep had died. Yet we saw films of rabbits dying from the same disease, in the same area. And though the Air Force has never formally admitted culpability in the matter, the AF rep admitted that if those bombers had been only slightly more off-course, they would have hit the central reservoir that serves Salt Lake City. He mumbled a few words to the effect that the death toll would have been staggering.

  If they can do this…Now…with such little concern for their acts…what must they be prepared to do in the event of a genuine threat?

  It was an eye-opening presentation. For much of the nation. For those of us who were already aware of the chamber of horrors bacteriophage labs in New Jersey, Arkansas and Utah, it was only further documentation that they are proceeding apace, with little or no deterrent.

  And suddenly, blindingly, all the student dissent for control of this and a voice in that became ludicrous. Screw it, troops! Stop fucking around taking over Sproul Hall…start picketing those goddam CBW labs on the campuses of the University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, Stanford and Illinois Institute of Technology! Black, white, Mexican, Oriental, what the hell does any of it matter if we go blind and gag and feel the flesh ooze from our bones with running sores and agonizing death? One man, J. Robert Oppenheimer, stood up and said, “My god, what am I doing!?!” and the morality of the Bomb came under scrutiny. Oppenheimer was branded a traitor because he refused to accept the American Dream of killkillkill. History will call him a saint. If there is any history after this! Can the thinking young people of today do any less? What effect would concerted strikes at these labs have on the men who do the work? Perhaps none, but perhaps they might have to start examining what they are about!

  Karate and akida and kung-fu are self-defense systems that proclaim they are only to be used as deterrents; but the other half of that proclamation is that once having committed, you go to kill. The Bomb was created, and no one wanted to use it…but one man said the need is great enough, so use it. Now we have CBW and they tell us again we won’t ever use it.

  Liars! The bullshitters are with us again! The demons in lab smocks are there, filling their vials and depressing the plungers on their hypodermics! Use it…you bet your ass they’ll use it. For this is the result of all the stupid American Right Or Wrong patriotism that has so corrupted our country that we would wipe out the entire population of the Earth rather than see some other system of government in power. Pyrrhic victory, you imminent murderers!

  NBC didn’t editorialize. They ended on a note of justification. After all, wasn’t Russia into the same bag? Killkillkill. The great American Dream. On the First Tuesday of February NBC showed us the true face of that Dream. It was a death’s-head vision.

  After all that, Ken, I couldn’t laugh too hard at what the Smothers Brothers or Laugh-In had to offer.

  Frankly, I’m terrified.

  19: 14 FEBRUARY 69

  A few weeks ago, on the opening night of Sal Mineo’s directorial debut with Fortune And Men’s Eyes, I found myself sitting in the same row of the Coronet Theater as Doug McClure, a very nice guy and an actor of some quality who has been sadly misused by Universal Studios. We looked at each other, not having seen each other in several years, and instantly recognized a look of terror in each other. “Hey, Doug,” I whispered down the row, “make a deal with you: you leave town when NBC shows The King’s Pirate, and I’ll leave town when ABC runs The Oscar.” He laughed. We both laughed. But we both lived in terror of the evenings when our youthful indiscretions would catch up with us. I don’t know how Doug handled it, but a week ago Wednesday I simply took the phone off the hook. (Not soon enough. They got it three hours earlier in New York and a friend called to cheer me up, damn him!)

  I’ve apologized publicly, elsewhere, for having had a hand in writing that film; a film so embarrassingly bad, why any producer would give me a chance to write another one is beyond my understanding. So I won’t do a mea culpa here. All I’ll say, to those of you who may wonder where I get the chutzpah to denigrate other people’s failures when I have a veritable Krak
atoa of failure to my own credit, is that having been through the shit, friends, I recognize the taste when I encounter it. Or, as Hymie Kelly says in The Oscar: “If you lie down with pigs, you get up smelling like garbage.” Expiation is so refreshing!

  Onward!

  Ken, this guy I know, braced me a couple of weeks ago as to why I didn’t actively support Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I told him that with the ratings Laugh-In has been getting I didn’t think it needed any special boosting from me. Those ratings, incidentally, can be misleading, in terms of trends. ABC, the great imitator, tried to cash in on the “trend” with something called Turn-On which both premiered and vanished all in a night, like the ghost of Christmas Past, February 5th. It wasn’t that it was a bad show, it was that it was an awkward show, and someone canceled it after the first commercial. The fastest death scene since Tammy Grimes gurgled her last, and Championship Bowling Starring Milton Berle rolled a gutterball.

  ABC seems to be having better luck with What’s It All About, World? which is a scarifying fact of life on which I’ll comment shortly; but for now, I’ll return to my reasons for not hyping Laugh-In. They’re relatively simple, actually.

  When all the squares on the streets of Tustin and La Mirada are socking it to one another, betting each other’s bippies, offering to expose their Walnettos, intoning “werry inter-est-ink” in pseudo-Eichmann accents, and in general blowing in one anotherears to see if it’ll follow them anywhere, I figure this column isn’t needed for ersatz accolades.

  But the Smothers Brothers, it has been pointed out to me, are not faring quite as well. Though the hip folk are watching the show religiously (or anti-religiously, depending on where your Valhalla is located), what the Smothers Sons are getting a potload of is letters of moral indignation and raw-throated outrage from the neatsy-clean tickytacky types out there in the Great American Heartland. The scuttlefish.

  Well, the scuttlefish, it seems, don’t like the Smothers Boys sticking up for integrity and daring and a little truth and a lotta commitment, not to mention some honest concern for this great, glorious country of ours, as long as it’s being expressed by them long-haired, dope-puffing degenerates. And the networkers, heaven forefend, certainly don’t want to unsettle anyone. (Which is another reason I don’t stick up for Laugh-In; though it breaks me up with much of its humor, I think it’s a cop-out, and never gets near the gut of anything genuinely controversial. A few scrotum references are not my idea of a dangerous vision, contrary to the belief of some literary critics.)

  But the Smothers Guys do. I speak in particular of two items they’ve offered recently. The first was a scathing putdown of that saccharine Top 40 “hit” in which the mealymouth widower bemoans the fact that his coocoo-clock wife, Honey, has passed away. It was a cheap song, for openers, and I’ve got to hand it to the Smothers Types and their writers for doing it in royally, exposing the tawdry sentimentality of it for the shuck it was.

  But the second item was the heavier of the two. It was the ensemble offering, three weeks ago, with Burl Ives doing a Thornton Wilder Our Town to the strains of Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’. If you saw it, you know what came down. If you didn’t, I’ll describe it briefly.

  Ives comes back to his old home town. He is pleased to see that with all the rampage and riot running amuck in America Today, his old home town is still the same, still living by honest, simple values, unchanged from the turn of the century. And as he professes this belief, we are treated to blackout vignettes of what’s really happening in the town:

  A homicidal barber, cutting the hair of a hippie, rails about long-maned lunatics ruining his business, ruining the country, ruining everything. The hippie is terrified as the barber wields the razor, spouting endless violence. When the hippie gets out of the chair, the barber bids him goodbye, take it easy…and gives him the peace sign.

  A spinster schoolmarm in a drug store, getting her weekly supply of sleeping pills, diet pills, uppers, downers, sidewayers, and telling the druggist she’ll need all the tranquilizers she can get because she’s sitting on the jury trying the case of that terrible Jones boy. What’s he being tried for? asks the druggist. “Drugs,” says the teacher.

  The local clergy rapping. One of them is a “traditional” prelate, who reveals himself as a venal, materialistic schlepp, and the other tries to tell him about getting out and working with the people in the streets. Ives encounters the latter, and says is it all in the streets? Isn’t there anything sacred any more? Like the good old institution of marriage? The pastor says sure there is, why today he married a young couple in love…and we see them in silhouette. Ives beams…yes, love is still the same. And then the couple is lit up, and we see it’s a black and white marriage.

  Effective skit? You bet your ass it was. Simple, direct, eloquent, and enormously well-done because it was all underplayed, with just the right touches of comedy and not a cornball note in the entire production.

  But the important thing about that bit was in what it means in terms of the reactionary tenor of the country. And as I’ve said before, if you haven’t yet snapped to the reality that this is a hideously reactionary, scared little cloud-world, just consider the outrage letters of the middle-class viewers, who get hacked when they hear the Church, the Schools, the Home, the Sanctity of the Family Unit and Propriety maligned. Oh, sure, in the Thirty Cities Ratings, the Smothers Clan does well, but in the outlying regions, where most of the soap-suds are bought, they die. And the network notices this, make no mistake.

  So I guess supporting Smothers et al becomes a holy chore. Because that was a devilishly clever, well-thought-out pastiche, intended to state some cases for the abolition of arteriosclerotic thinking, in terms best conceived and semantically offered for winning over the scared squares.

  Dig, this is somewhere near where it’s at, I think: the majority of the people in this country really don’t know what’s happening. They can’t be shot down like dogs for this lack of information…they haven’t been given the opportunity for weighing one side against the other. The entrenched forces rule the mass media, in ways they deny because they don’t conceive of them as being misused. But we all know that the primary job of those in power is to stay in power; and if concepts such as the Smothers Troupe suggest each week go into practice, a lot of old tigers gonna have their teeth pulled, gonna get gelded, gonna get sent out to pasture. And they can’t have that.

  So, inexorably, they will kill a show like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. They have to. It threatens them too much. Courage and honesty such as Smothers II show us each week must be protected. And if a couple of hundred dingdongs can get something like Star Trek renewed, it would seem to behoove all of us who care, to start writing letters to CBS to counteract the potency of those assassin diatribes from Mashed Potato Falls, Wyoming. It’s that, or watch the satire segment of prime-time get taken over by shows like What’s It All About, World?, a horror of right-wing imbecility that is already in the process of catching on with the crewcut set.

  A subject which I intend to eviscerate in this space next week. Watch the show tonight, so next week we can rap about it with mutual insights. There may even be a test.

  20: 21 FEBRUARY 69

  The answer is: I haven’t the foggiest damned idea!

  The question is: What’s It All About, World?

  Now maybe I’m suffering from oxygen starvation, maybe I’m dry-hallucinating (that’s like dry-heaving without the use of chemicals), maybe I’m getting spirit messages from another continuum in the form of a tv show no one else is seeing, but for the last three Thursdays, at 9:00, I’ve been tuning in Channel 7, the ABC outlet, and I’ve been having the damnedest experience!

  First comes the image of this awfully clean dude I recall from Walt Disney movies. He’s usually wearing a turtleneck and a Nehru jacket; wearing them the way the white-socks-and-brown-shoes guys wear them; awkwardly, as if he were trying to hook a corner of the identification image with “the
young people”; makes me want to stop wearing turtlenecks and Nehru jackets, if he’s the kinda cat wearing them. Then he starts singing. But sincere, you know. Really sincere. How this land is my land, how it’s his land, from California to the New York island. But quietly proud, y’know. Humble. Sincere as a gas station attendant telling you your oil filter needs replacing.

  One thing is, he doesn’t sing so good. Has this musical range from E to B#. I kinda blink, tap the heel of my hand against the side of my head, maybe my hearing is impaired.

  Then on comes this announcer who tells us this is a sparkling, contemporary new show, What’s It All About, World? And it’s filled—he tells us—with pungent, scathing satire on the events of the day, the world around us, the problems and turmoil of our times, all done with rare good humor. So I sit back and wait to see this new entry in the satire sweepstakes, having been pleasured by Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

  For openers, the show bares its muscles and shows us where its courage is at. It tackles one of the truly pressing topics of the day, fearlessly, satirically, pungently. How to save money when shopping.

  Got to hand it to Ilson & Chambers, the producers: they sure as hell managed to avoid dealing with any of those stale, overworked topics of the day like rioting, racial upheaval, militancy in the suburbs, student dissent, police brutality, nuclear proliferation, the war in Viet Nam, the breakdown of law’ n’ order, the growth of organized crime, the horrors of chemical-bacteriological warfare, school dropouts, starvation in Appalachia, misuse of Federal land grants, the hazards of offshore oil drilling, censorship, the upheaval in the Church, black anti-Semitism, the generation gap or corruption in government. They struck directly to the heart of today’s most pressing social problem: how to save money when shopping.