The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  (PLAQUE FOR THE MOON LANDING

  (Here Men First Set Foot Outside The Earth On Their Way To The Far Stars. They Speak Of Peace But Wherever They Go They Bring War. The Rockets On Which They Arrived Were Developed To Carry Instant Death And Can Within A Few Minutes Turn Their Green Planet Into Another Lifeless Moon. Their Destructive Ingenuity Knows No Limits And Their Wanton Pollution No Restraint. Let The Rest Of The Universe Beware.)

  In the background, as I write this, Jeff Beck is playing, and all that nice stuff gives me hope that perhaps I’m grown too cynical, and there may be hope.

  But…ambivalence!

  You see, they accuse me of being a science fiction writer, among other things. Well, yes, I have been a reader of the form since I first came upon Jack Williamson’s story Twelve Hours To Live in a 1946 issue of Startling Stories. I remember very well, back in 1952, when I was 17 and in high school in Cleveland, a reporter for the Cleveland Press coming to interview me and the other members of the fledgling Cleveland SF Society. I remember this clown’s unrestrained laughter when I told him (and this was pre-Sputnik) that we would surely have men on the moon within fifteen years. He wrote an article that made us all look like morons, made us seem to be coocoos who probably believed in ghosts, elves, a flat Earth and other improbables like an actor becoming Presidential timber. A few years later, when Sputnik went up, I took my copy of that article and went to find the reporter, at the Press offices, to rub his porcine nose in it. But he’d died. It was a bitch of an anti-climax.

  So you see, I’ve been dreaming—along with all the other sf fans—about that moment when the first men would get Lunar dust on their boots. Unfortunately, for me, it was another anti-climax.

  I’ll admit I was knocked out by Buzz Aldrin bounding about the Moon like a kangaroo, but there were so many negative vibes attendant on the project that it really brought me down.

  For instance, nitty-gritty, we did it like jerks. It cost us I can’t remember how many billions to put all that scrap metal up there, merely to haul men, when a mechanical probe such as the Russians postulated could have done the same thing, and achieved the very same results. But the plain fact is that we wouldn’t have gotten the appropriations for the project if it hadn’t hauled the three astronauts. People just don’t get excited about machines going to the Moon, but they do about other men. The Russians correctly bummed us for risking lives in a flamboyant publicity gig that could have been accomplished as easily by a robot.

  But a robot wouldn’t have been as inspiring for Nixon and his carnival. “Participation Day,” indeed! And that simpering buffoon on board the Hornet when they splashed down. The insipid remarks he made were almost as stultifying as the dumb things the astronauts themselves said from space. (I, for one, am sick to the teeth of hearing the Bible quoted to me from Out There. It’s bad enough we have to put up with so much outdated philosophy back here on the mudball. It would have pleasured me no end had they landed and come upon the First Church of Throgg the Omniscient, there in the Sea of Tranquility. Wow, can you see the seizure Bishop Sheen would have had!?!) (Or maybe, simply, god appearing in a burning bush and saying, “Okay, you guys, knock off that shit!”)

  You see, it just sorta killed all the adventure for me. Maybe because I’d taken that first journey so many times being led by Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who dreamed all these dreams twenty years ago. I can see why all the rest of you dug it…inherently it is the single most exciting thing that’s happened since Christ splashed down on Calvary, but for the guys who knew without a doubt that it was coming—all the science fiction fans and writers—it was a letdown…I guess. At least a little.

  But I understand there were some marvelous serendipitous benefits: such as the crime rate in the country dropping to almost nothing. All the crooks and heistmen and cat burglars were in front of their sets, too. Right up to the point where Nixon said the Apollo 11 flight had brought the world closer together than ever before.

  After which point the crooks turned off their sets, and went out to mug old ladies for seventy-four cents.

  *

  It was my own fault, my error, and I deserved precisely what I got. Turning for the David Frost talk show on Channel 11, I hit 7, the phone rang, I turned around to answer it, and when I turned back, I was watching The King Family. Oh, my dear god. Can such things be!?!

  There were a great many studiedly square-looking people of varying ages (slightly overweight suburban ladies with plastic hair dominated; the kind of chicks who tell their old men, no, I can’t fuck tonight, Fred, I had my hair done today), and they sorta sang.

  I guess that’s what they were doing, when they weren’t being homey and cute.

  Hincty songs so devoid of even that mystical “blue-eyed soul” that I had to dash to my music and lay on about forty minutes of Shakey Jake, The Dells and Richie Havens.

  What kind of people dig The King Family? Can anyone tell me? Aside from wanting to ball three or four of the King Kousins, there was such a dearth of meritorious reasons for watching that show, I cannot fathom why various syndicates and networks keep thrusting the Kings before our already squared eyeballs. For they seem to me to represent in totality a template of all that is fabricated, artificial, lowbrow and meretricious on the American Scene. They strive so massively to be cleancut that I suspect most of the men in the group have hernias.

  How I would love to see a live King Family segment after someone had dumped specially made acid in the water cooler. “And now, all you friendly folks out there in the Great American Heartland, something special! Right here, tonight, on our show, you’re going to see an authentic King Family orgy, with the King Kiddies and the King Kousins engaging in one hundred and thirty-five vile and noxious sexual perversions, all at once…and while the King Sisters make it with (respectively) a St. Bernard, a Tibetan Yak, a Sumatran black panther and a sex-crazed chicken, Alvino Rey will play accompaniment on his talking electric tissue-paper-and-comb; his selection for tonight is the Love Theme From Marat/Sade. And for a once in a lifetime showbiz thrill, weeven brought Granny King on tonight with her specialty number, wherein she machine-guns two hundred, assorted blackjack and slot machine losers from the six biggest casinos in Las Vegas! Okay, gang, everybody start rubbing on the Velveeta!”

  The King Family is the Harold Robbins of music. More below the belt than that I cannot get.

  *

  One of the commitments that kept me from writing this column for seven weeks was a stint as Guest Lecturer at the University of Colorado Writers’ Conference in the Rockies. I did two weeks in company with such eminent writers as Richard Gehman, George P. Elliott, Vance Bourjaily and Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Alan Dugan and Richard Eberhart.

  On Friday, June 27th, I was hauled, along with Gehman and the incredible Dugan, into Denver, to do a talk show on KOA-TV.

  The host of the show, a self-satisfied, rigid-minded gentleman named Bill Barker, cozied with the three of us before we taped (the show was to be aired the following Sunday night). He stressed one point: this was a freewheeling interview show in which he most sought a level of depth-analysis that would enrich the subject. He was not after cheap sensationalism or the sort of “controversy” Joe Pyne seeks. We felt relieved; Gehman, as one of the premier non-fiction magazine writers of the past thirty years, had a store of anecdotes and opinions to impart…and Dugan, who had won not only the Pulitzer for his brilliant poetry but also the National Book Award and the Prix de Rome, was an outspoken student of the passing scene. As for myself, I relished the opportunity to speak about the Writers’ Conference and what it was doing to bring forth young talent.

  Yet I should have known better. Though milder in his approach than Pyne, Barker was no better, no more noble than any other cheapjack interviewer on the boondock stations. The show opened with Barker asking us what he considered to be the responsibility of the writer. It was a strangely phrased question, foggy in its implications, but all three of u
s had done sufficient camera-time to re-parse it, knowing that to look confused or hesitant during an interview is to instantly invalidate anything you might say for a viewing audience. We began rapping about the writer’s responsibility to tell the truth, to keep au courant, to be committed, to pursue every facet of a subject till he could present a fully rounded portrait.

  Dugan—a tall, distinguished-looking, gentle man—made a side comment, nothing more than that, that it was also necessary to reproduce the speech of people almost phonographically, even if it meant using obscenity. It was a casual remark, but Barker pounced on it like a vulture finding carrion.

  It led us into an ugly, circuitous argument about the necessity of the creator using whatever language he felt was most necessary to making his point. Barker started laying that “why must you use filthy language” number on us. Dugan responded that if the word fuck appeared in the normal speech patterns of someone in a story or poem, to substitute copulate or a similar euphemism would be to corrupt the veracity of the image. Barker got uptight and started saying Dugan was a child with a foul mouth, using the words for shock value. This, to a man whose credentials as an artist are unimpeachable.

  Things went from bad to horrendous. Barker baited Dugan, who rose to the bait only inasmuch as he used more fucks and damns and shits, just to drive Barker up the wall; thereby proving that the words were loaded for Barker, and caused him pain; it also allowed me to point out that it was the responsibility of the artist to de-fang those poisonous words so their meanings, not their emotional impacts were what counted.

  Barker refused to listen. He raved and screeched, and when the show was finished, it looked like fine old Belgian lace, so filled was it with bleeps.

  I’d confronted the stultifying provincialism before. You may recall my report on the tv talk show I did in Texas. But it keynoted for me one of the timorous areas of television programming, one of the disastrous hypocrisies that render so much of television impotent and valueless.

  I recalled one of the major networks’ broadcast of a filmed report on the President’s Commission Analysis of Violence, some months ago. It was told through the medium of interviews with people on the streets who had been interviewed for the Report, and interspersed with charts and quotes from the Report itself. Every time someone used an obscenity, it was bleeped. It made for a curiously comic program. Not merely because the viewer would substitute something far more offensive for the bleep, but because it was a flagrant example of television trying to protect its audience from that which it already knew.

  Is there anyone in America over the age of six months who is not familiar with the vagaries of the vulgar, all the way from shucky-darn to cunt? Is there anyone who will not admit that these are mere words, that they bear no more de facto power than a soap bubble?

  Then precisely what is it that makes them taboo? From whom are we keeping these words? From the fringe coocoos who are offended when an astronaut says damn or shit when something unpleasant has happened onboard his rocket? Are we to remain a nation of hypocrites, lumbered by our most provincial and hidebound elements? It is as valid a concept as writing every book on the level of Dick and Jane in order not to corrupt the minds of the young.

  It becomes readily obvious, if one extrapolates, that more and louder use of these words would rapidly render them as meaningless and powerless as “where it’s at,” “do your thing,” “confrontation” and such similar jingoisms. And what would emerge from such a situation would be a need to speak better, more precise, more original and imaginative obscenities. Which could only enrich the language. So…yours for bigger and better fucks…

  36: 15 AUGUST 69

  Commencing the middle of September, stay away from restaurants on Tuesday nights.

  Because, if I’m correct in my evaluation of the dangers, of provincialism in the thinking of network programming, Tuesday night television is going to be so gawd-awful on NBC that everyone will flock out to eat, and you won’t be able to get seated for two hours.

  I’ll work from the specific to the general on this one: hang on, it gets hairy.

  September 16th is the Tuesday night season premiere on NBC. Let us consider what the top television network in the country has prepared for us:

  7:30…I Dream of Jeannie

  8:00…The Debbie Reynolds Show

  8:30…Julia

  9:00…Tuesday Night Movies, debuting in this fresh, bright, innovative 1969–70 season with Doris Day in The Ballad of Josie.

  (About this last: one of the genuinely horrendous gut experiences of my recent past was finding myself crossing and re-crossing the continent via airplane several years ago, and being “treated” to The Ballad of Josie not once, twice or thrice, but four times in a month. Common decency forbids my explicating quite how bad the film is. Suffice it to say that it was the first time I ever considered leaving a movie in the middle, when I was 31,000 feet in the air; but until I solved the problem by locking myself in the plane’s toilet with a William Golding novel, death seemed a more desirable choice than sitting through Doris in the Wild West again.)

  There is no need to dwell on the already established and potentially inevitable level of paucity proffered by these series. If it were not for the ingenuousness of Miss Barbara Eden—one of the surest comediennes going—and Larry Hagman’s herculean efforts at bringing some dignity to what is essentially a mindless enterprise, Tuesday night on NBC would be totally without light. And having given praise in the only quarter where it is deserved, I reluctantly address myself to considerations of ghastliness.

  Bearing in the back of the mind the many paradigms of NBC’s other female-oriented shows, as well as those on other networks—Lucille Ball, Doris Day, Petticoat Junction, Mothers-In-Law, Family Affair, That Girl, The Flying Nun, Bewitched (the one superlatively intelligent exception is The Ghost & Mrs. Muir)—one comes to a realization that Someone Up There is not only thirty years behind the times in terms of the Female Liberation Movement, but is easily thirty years behind in accepting reality. Even as blacks despise stereotypes of themselves in the mass media (though even the square Network Programmers are hip to how laughable it would be to try and get away with a Stepin Fetchit character), so do intelligent women, I’ve found. Dithering fumblefoots as portrayed by Lucille Ball or Marlo Thomas are as repellent to women of dignity and pride as Julia is the black community as a whole. As I understand it, that is not precisely what Afro-Americans intend when they refer to “pride in black.” But I digress. We were rapping about women.

  The Female Liberation Movement—and I have this on the best authority: a seven-foot blonde who manages to combine sensual femininity with a don’t-fuck-with-me-self-assurance—is most lumbered by its own fifth column. Subversion from within. So many women have been brainwashed by the image of the happy little homemaker, birthing babies and cooing over the wonders of pre-soak Axion that it is virtually impossible to convince the mass of chicks that they are really truly emancipated, and don’t have to stagger about wearing a subservient facade.

  And because of this fifth column, Network Programmers—who are 99% male, and what is worse 100% male chauvinist—keep playing to that image. Every season sees its share of Blondie-Doppelgängers. This coming season, Tuesday night on NBC will be surfeited with them.

  Tossing aside the terminally damning obviousness that what they are dealing in are hoary clichés, the more serious indictment that can be laid on this kind of thinking is that it helps perpetuate an unrealistic view of an entire segment of the population. It aids and abets the dangerous gapping between reality and image in our society. When the ideal held up for a modern American woman to revere and emulate is no more demanding than Debbie Reynolds (as she plays it on her series), what can we expect but another generation of simpering female Dagwood Bumsteads? The only out the contemporary chick is offered in terms of tv images is Samantha (a witch), Jeannie (a genie), or Sister Bertrille (who can fly). The message is painfully clear; if you can’t wiggle your nose and
make miracles, or hop into the sky and fly away, or flip your ponytail and change the world, girls, pack it in and settle for being some guy’s unpaid slavey. Because all those other women you see cavorting in phosphor-dot reality are inept, hampered with children, prone to execrable involvements or simply accident prone.

  Around us, we see women taking the reins more and more in a world seemingly bent on being cruel to itself. There is hope, we feel, in the more sensitive rationality of women—to stop wars, to give the underdog an even break, to clean up the messes we guys have made. Yet on tv if we see a Committed Woman, she is usually a housewife taking time off from making Nesselrode pie to carry a placard for allowing school kids to put on their yearly musicale. And she’ll probably wind up in the slammer for it. But with funny. How does this compare with the women I’ve seen on protest marches and rallies, who’ve been beaten senseless by cops’ riotsticks? How does this compare with the women who went for a walk in 118° heat in the Imperial Valley, to support the grape boycott? How does this compare with the genuinely incredible women who ramrodded the Bradley campaign or fight for free speech, or went to Chicago and Washington and Selma?

  This year we’re going to get doctors who are heroes, school teachers who are heroes, lawyers who are heroes, and of course cops who are heroes. None of them are female. (Peggy Lipton on Mod Squad doesn’t count. She isn’t strictly speaking a cop, she’s a noble fink for the fuzz, and besides, Pete and Linc usually wind up saving her attractive fanny.)

  It’s another scintillant tv season of lies and unusually off-center representations of still one more social element. Except this time it’s a social element that is composed of half the population.

  One can only wonder how much longer the birds are going to allow themselves to be used as consumer machines for pimple-disguiser, hair-remover, smell-deadener and uplift bras. How much longer before they start demanding some authentic portrayals of themselves as human beings?