The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  After I returned from Rio, after I’d had the time to let what I’d seen there sink in, I included some thoughts about it all in an introduction I did for my most recent book of short stories. I’d like to excerpt those sections from the introduction and present them here, as something of a preamble.

  THE WAVES IN RIO

  Standing in the hotel window staring out at the Atlantic Ocean, nightcrashing onto the Copacabana beach. Down in Brazil on a fool’s mission, talking to myself. Standing in the window of a stranger whom I suddenly know well, while down the Avenida Atlantica in another window, one I know well, who has suddenly become a stranger.

  Watching the onyx waves rippling in toward shore, suddenly facing-out like green bottle glass, cresting white with lace, reaching, pawing toward shore, and spasming once finally, before vanishing into the sponge sand. I am a noble moron. I compose a poem.

  My poem says, standing here, staring out across the works of man, wondering what the hell I’m doing here, an alien in a place he can never know…and there are the waves. Boiling across two thousand miles of emptiness in the terrible darkness, all alone, all the way from Lagos like the Gold Coast blacks who came, stacked belly-to-butt like spoons in the bellies and butts of alien ships. All that way, racing so far, to hurl themselves up on this alien beach, like me.

  Now why in the name of reason would anyone, anything, travel that far

  …just to be alone?

  Christ on the mountain looks down over Rio de Janeiro, arms spread, benediction silently flowing from stone lips. He was sculpted by an Italian, and brought to this mountain, staring off toward Sugar Loaf. There are lights hidden in Christ. Once a year—you know when—a remote switch is thrown at the other end of those lights, in the Vatican, and the Pope lights Cristo Redentor.

  This is the Christ of the wealthy who live in the bauhaus apartments out along Leblon; the Christ of the blue carpet bettors at the Jockey Club; the Christ of those who dine on fondue orientale at the Swiss Chalet; the Christ of those who sail into Rio harbor on proud white yachts so proud and so white the sun blinds anyone staring directly at them. This is the Christ on the mountain.

  Rio de Janeiro is a city of startling contrasts: from the yachts and the Jockey Club and the bauhaus apartments…to the shanty villages glued to the sides of the hills, where the poor scrabble for existence in their tropic paradise. Favellas they are called. Down there below the big Christ, but above even the wealthy, the Gold Coast blacks have deposited their descendants, and the poor mestizos crowd one atop another in shanties built of corrugated shed roofing and wood slat that rots in the pulsing heat. They rise up in a crazy-quilt city above the city. And above them is a smaller hill. And on that hill they have erected another Christ. The Christ of the poor.

  They are not noble morons. They are not writers who draw senseless parallels between the great white Christ on the mountain, and the little black Christ on the hill. They only know he is Christ the Redeemer. And though they have not enough cruzeiros to buy food for their rickety children, they have centavos to buy cheap tallow candles to set out on the altar of the street church. Christ will redeem them. They know it.

  They are alone. In their own land, they are alone. Christ will never save them. Nor will men ever save them. They will spend their days like the waves from Africa, throwing themselves onto the beach of pitiless living.

  They are no better than you or I.

  It is only truth to tell you that as night approaches we are all aliens, down here on this alien Earth. To tell you that not Christ nor men nor the governments of men will save you. To tell you that we must all work and struggle and revolt against those who live in yesterday, before all our tomorrows are stolen away from us. To tell you no one will come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. God is within you. Save yourselves.

  Otherwise, why would you have traveled all this way…just to be alone?

  That was written in March. Two weeks ago, on Saturday, September 6th, the people of Brazil formalized their belief that god was, indeed, within them

  …that no one was coming down from any mountain to save them from the unspeakable dictatorship that rules Brazil as if it were a humid madhouse. Members of what the American establishment press call a “Castroite terrorist group” (the same kind of terrorist group to which Paul Revere belonged) kidnapped the U.S. Ambassador, C. Burke Elbrick. Two days later, with the release of fifteen political prisoners being held by the detestable military junta that had taken over Brazil, Elbrick was turned loose.

  I will not go into any lengthy discussions of our part in the disgraceful treatment of an entire nation’s people—we’ve done it too often, in too many other places. Suffice it to say, the poetic justice inherent in the kidnapping of the Norteamericano Ambassador is sufficiently pellucid to delight even a Thomas Hardy.

  We supported the dictatorship, with money and arms and trade pacts. Even when the people of Rio could not pass unmolested in their own streets—littered with tanks and armed soldiers—we expressed no concern.

  So when they decided to break out, the National Liberation Action organization and their militant arm, MR-8, went for pay dirt. They didn’t kidnap Foreign Minister Jose Magalhaes Pinto or the Generals leading the First, Second or Third Armies—they copped Elbrick. They knew which side the bread was buttered on.

  At long last, the Brazilians decided to take some concrete action against the level of poverty, illiteracy and degradation in which they’d been forced to exist. And they went for the money. They didn’t bother with the puppets, they went for the puppet master. And won the day. Yeah!

  But what has all this to do with television? Well, it had a lot more to do with it in the unrevised column you might have been reading had not MR-8 slapped chloroform over Elbrick’s ambassadorial snout. Because, before September 6th, television (and to an even greater degree, radio) in Brazil was one of the most potent weapons used to keep the people happily mud-condemned. Before the Age of the Machine it was god and Religion that kept the poor blacks in America hardly content but certainly befuddled. In Brazil, in the Age of the Machine, it is god and Religion and clowns like Silvio Santos from Sao Paulo and Chacrinha from Rio.

  The latter is a grossly boorish television star, cavorting about like a Saturday morning kiddie show emcee, hosting one of the most popular shows in Brazil. The former is Chacrinha’s counterpart from “more serious, sober Sao Paulo.” Some serious; some sober. His program consists of selecting the ugliest man in Brazil, the fattest man, the longest moustache, the most ridiculous name of an individual, and something called City Against City, in which the insipid rivalries of the cariocas (Rio residents) and the paulista (from Sao Paulo) are exploited. Under the guise of an amusing inter-city contest, the tv medium manages to keep alive and fiery a sectional hatred no more sensible than that of Catholics and Protestants in North Ireland. The name of the game is divide and keep subservient.

  Santos is a classic example of the bread-and-circuses Quisling whose lust for the buck (or in this case new cruzeiros) forces him into such public positions as the one expressed in a recent interview:

  “But what do you want me to do? A certain publication criticizes me. It wants me to present programs of a higher level. But tv is a fierce battle to capture the audience. There’s no middle ground, either you have an audience or you don’t. Who doesn’t, disappears.

  “I was always crazy about money.

  “There are certain programs which are bad for my image. For instance, the City Against City show. When one of the cities loses, all of the people from that city turn against me. Even though it’s prejudicial to me, it can’t be taken off the air because of its popularity with the viewers. Because of this, many shows which were considered horrible—and I agree that they were—couldn’t be taken off.

  “I’m the most optimistic guy in Brazil.”

  His optimism is based, probably, on his position as a 34-year-old millionaire (in Brazilian terms) with more side-int
erests than Senator Dodd.

  Santos is only one of many manifestations of the corrupt and debased nature of Brazilian television. Even as the Roman arena and stock car races have kept the groundlings too busy being entertained to know their heads are being turned around by their governments, television has been turned to this most odious of uses.

  Telethons on which physical deformities and terminal cases have been exhibited as grand guignol works of art.

  News reports filtered, laundered, managed and castrated by such government agencies (horrifying object-lessons to those among you who think Yanqui tv ought to be government overseen) as the IBOPE, the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics. News reports that come on almost simultaneously on every radio station and tv channel, each one a carbon copy of the others.

  Frequent news blackouts, when things get sticky…such as now.

  No documentaries, save travel talks.

  The deification of the absurdly banal in such comedy soap operas as The Trapp Family. You think our daytime soapers are bad. They are as a cold sore to mouth cancer when compared to their Brazilian counterparts.

  A level of programming guaranteed to provide no thought, no controversy, no enrichment.

  By aiding and abetting the Brazilian Establishment in keeping the illiterate mass desensitized to the winds of revolution and change sweeping over the world, by substituting cheap slapstick for social involvement, by permitting the nationwide audience to believe it cannot rise above its station in life, television in Brazil has become a more effective riot control weapon than tanks or mace or troops.

  It seems almost as though Brazilian video (divided between tv Globo and tv Tupi) is engaged in a program of barring the way to the twentieth century for the common man. The twentieth? Hell, consider the twenty-first century! And consider how Brazilian television handled the Apollo 11 moonflight:

  No preparations were made to utilize the facilities of INTELSAT properly. Where almost every other nation in the world had been rigging its equipment and schedules for a month before the lunar landing, Brazilian television went on its imbecilic way with its usual belly-laugh programming, and on the day of the landing, beginning in the early afternoon, rather than showing what was happening at Houston, rather than relaying information as accurately as every other televising country was doing, Brazilian tv broadcast the microcephalic antics of Silvio Santos followed immediately by the loon Chacrinha.

  Kindly note these were special programs, cut specifically for that day. It was as if on the day of JFK’s funeral, CBS and NBC had prepared two special three-hour segments of Green Acres or Queen For A Day to be shown in lieu of the grim proceedings. Granted, it makes life a little more smiley, but it could hardly be construed as serving the needs of the viewing audience by keeping them in touch with the world around them.

  And if it seems this is a gringo’s carping about a state of affairs that does not bother the Brazilian people, I offer the following excerpt from the Jornol Do Brasil of 23 July:

  “Instead of torturing the public with their foolish exuberance, Rio stations could have easily filled in the remaining time, while waiting for the heroic arrival of the first man on the moon, with really interesting news such as that sent minute by minute over the teletype.

  “But…it was necessary to give a little local color to the transmissions, and at the precise moment in which man was entering a new era, Rio tv viewers were informed that the presence of a man on the moon would not alter the tides, nor would it change women’s menstrual cycles. While everyone held his breath in expectation of the unequaled feat, the composers of Mangueira (a samba school) were asked if they would agree to have a parade for the moon-men.”

  O Pasquim, in its July issue, related an even more incredible state-of-affairs during the moonshot. It seems that rather than having any intelligent and accredited commentators onscreen during the mission, the “keep the people uninformed” program was pursued by having an inept commentator named Hilton Gomes interview a “scientist” named Heron Domingues and a “philosopher” named Rubens Amaral, who opened their stint by shaking hands and taking credit for man’s arrival on Luna.

  (What follows is excerpted intact, translated from the Portuguese.)

  “I want to give you my heartiest congratulations for this magnificent feat,” Heron Domingues said smiling.

  “But this would have been impossible without your collaboration,” replied Rubens Amaral, with false modesty.

  “The fact is,” observed Heron, “that the public understands our efforts.”

  “And has been telephoning constantly,” interrupted Amaral, “in a show of solidarity for our work.”

  (If you, gentle reader, are shaking your head in righteous confusion, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger.)

  (Then followed a fifteen-point resume of all the asinine and inept and downright scientifically inaccurate remarks made by these three ding-dongs. I’ll only repeat a few here…they’re sufficient to boggle the mind.)

  (Remember: these are the two “experts” selected, presumably, from the cream of Brazilian intelligentsia, to inform the folk of what was going down. Or up.)

  “The temperature at the moment is 150-degrees centigrade—we don’t know if this is above or below zero.” (Domingues)

  “In the right leg of Armstrong’s spacesuit is a sample of Lunar soil, which is different from ours.” (Amaral)

  “The man won’t leave any footprints on the moon.” (Domingues)

  “Armstrong is a cameraman, or shall we say, one of our television colleagues?” (Gomes)

  “We’ve just gone to the window to check, and the moon really is a long way off.” (Gomes and/or Amaral)

  “There exists two hypotheses about the Luna-5: one ridiculous and the other absurd.” (Domingues)

  “Really…interesting.” (Amaral in a rare moment of lucidity)

  “The respiration of the Americans is throbbing.” (Amaral, brilliantly translating NASA’s information that “the heartbeats had quickened.”)

  “Without the attention and kindness of our tv viewers, this great feat would have been impossible.” O Pasquim commented on this one: “It’s interesting to note that he didn’t reveal the exact way in which tv viewers helped. According to reliable sources, it was by means of prayers.”)

  At last report, Santos, Chacrina, Gomes, Amaral and Domingues were being sought by an outraged and finally uprisen Brazilian populace, to star in a new tv series called Biggest Asshole On The Moon. Paulistas and cariocas were placing bets in their respective cities to see which one of these estimable pawns of the establishment would make the loudest squeal as he was fired from a giant cannon at the moon. Which really is a long way off.

  40: 26 SEPTEMBER 69

  This week another shower of goodies. They ran the banned Smothers Brothers show on KTTV; I caught an even half-dozen of the new shows in debut performances; there were two important specials I want to gibber about—Woody Allen and The Battered Child—and it’ll probably all slop over to next week’s installment, but that’s what I’m into, so don’t wander too far.

  The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that CBS censored into the relative oblivion of independent airing last April 6th was viewed on something over eighty stations nationally, Wednesday, September 10th.

  After all the foofaraw about how obscene it was, after CBS’s martinet position about “defending American morality,” the show came as something of a let-down. Artistically, it was far from the best SmoBro product, and objectively, it was light-years away from their most controversial. The plain fact—horrifyingly obvious considered in the context of the total show—is that CBS was chickenshit frightened of Senator Pastore. There was nothing else on the show even remotely controversial. Oh sure, there was a pseudo-Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald duet between Tommy Smothers and Nancy Wilson, but it was in painfully good taste, and even accepting for an instant the shuck offered by CBS that their southern affiliates would have dropped the show for that duet, it would take
someone who had been oblivious to the black/white things the southern stations have been showing, since I Spy, to believe it for a moment.

  No, what that banned segment shows us, showed all of the country, was that not only are the network potentates a gaggle of cringing, petrified, spineless twerps, they are ripe patsys for extortion and blackmail. Pastore is the blackmailer—a power-mad little Caesar with the Monkey Trial morality of a troglodyte—and CBS was his willing victim this time.

  And just what element of the SmoBro show was it that held CBS in such quivering thrall? Was it Tommy’s unclothed penis? Was it a full-face scene from Oh, Calcutta? Was it Kate Smith going down on a chacma baboon? Hell no, it was merely Dan Rowan mealy mouthing whether or not to give the Fickle Finger of Fate Award to Senator John Pastore, that’s what it was.

  As blatant and mind-croggling an example of personal censorship as we have ever witnessed on network television. Whether Pastore actually saw the tape of the show and blew heavy about it, or CBS just pre-censored itself, the crime was revolting, as gutless, as unethical as even the dimmest, dumbest viewer could desire. CBS saying the show was censored for “moral” reasons is about as valid as Lester Maddox refusing to integrate on grounds of “states’ rights.” It is another example of the moral corruption of our politicians, not of our television personalities.

  Now that we’ve seen it—not just a few tv critics and newspapermen, none of whom, incidentally, had the balls to speak up since April 6th, but all of us—what will CBS do? Knowing we know them for what they are. Knowing their pat little up-the-line obfuscations won’t play any more. Knowing we have proof they don’t give a damn about serving the public interest. Knowing we understand the contempt they have for us, the ease with which they’ll sell us out. What are they going to do, those fatcat heroes, those shadow entrepreneurs, those lizard-blood killers of every truth, every hope, every dream? Do we get mad, CBS? Do we want to kill? Oh, babies, you’ll never know. You’ll never suspect, but let me tell you how deep it runs, what you’re building, where it’s going to go, till the day they come after you at your tower in CBS Television City. Like this: