The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  The product is the same old product. Soap opera.

  Except Robbins’ product has enzymes.

  Newly activated, sparkling with green and blue and gold spots. Before your eyes. The green is from moral rot, the blue is the alleged better blood of the jet set, and the gold is fool’s.

  Advertised as a “television novel,” The Survivors is simply daytime tearjerking without even a nod toward verisimilitude. It’s the downhome story of the Carlyle family: simple, good-hearted billionaires who lead lives like you or I. Septuageneric Daddy owns his own bank and is shtupping his thirtyish secretary on the side. Indolent playboy son races at Monaco, quits three laps short of winning to chase a piece of tail, and gets himself and his Lear jet hijacked to a Latin duchy in the throes of revolution. Daughter is a clotheshorse with an illegitimate son who’s married to an elegant embezzler notable for having clipped Daddy to the tinkly tune of seven hundred grand.

  Why go on? Add the dimension of thespic luminaries like Ralph Bellamy, Kevin McCarthy, George Hamilton and Lana Turner, and you have the total package. No better or worse than the general sling of slop we get? Is that what you think? Oh, come come, my friends. Just reconsider the cast: Bellamy, McCarthy…Hamilton and Turner. Two fine actors and two gold lamé loxes whose “acting” ability is so scant it can only be termed amoebic. So why opt for glitterfolk like Hamilton and Turner, chockablocking them with genuine talents like Bellamy and McCarthy, when you have your choice of every fine actress and actor in town?

  Because Lana Turner and George Hamilton are intrinsically involved in the myth world The Survivors tries to tell us is an actuality. Hamilton’s spotty past is well-known, as is Miss Turner’s. They are living, walking, talking symbols of the recherché mode of existence on which this series builds its rationale.

  Which brings us to the rotten core of the matter.

  Mr. Robbins, whose novels are ennobled by the words dishonest and illiterate, has made a not inconsiderable fortune by proffering to all the scuttlefish living lives of dreariness and encapsulation, a phantom image of a world in which the rich get richer and there are no poorer. A world in which black men do not exist, in which women are fit for little better than consumer consumption of the Tiffany/Cartier level—and having illegitimate babies. A world in which the pettiest problems become high drama merely because they occur in a red velvet snake pit.

  Chromed and rhinestoned, Robbins has marketed a world where everyone is J. Paul Getty or Aristotle Onassis, and considering the lives and hopes of the Average Man would be as unthinkable as one of the Czar’s cossacks worrying which peasant’s cabbage patch he was galloping through. It is a view of the universe that was disgracefully irrational fifty years ago, and is totally out of place in the world of today.

  The vapid, incestuous, self-concerned fools who people Robbins’ series are the very people against whom every revolution in the world is directed. The Wall Street bankers who backed Batista against Castro, thereby assisting in driving Fidel into the waiting arms of Communism. The munitions men, the high-rollers, the wastrel playboys, the maudlin women with their overweening concern for their falling breasts and mansion peccadilloes. The blind and the precious. Those to whom creature comforts come before ethic. The emotionally and intellectually de-sensitized. The rhodium-plated ghouls who live off the masses, whose fortunes and perpetuations of fortunes can only be realized when field laborers are forced to work for 30¢ an hour. These are the contemporary nobility Harold Robbins and his bloated associates at ABC have chosen to offer us as idols. I would be willing to wager the much-belabored network jingoism of “viewer identification” was not mentioned with great frequency when this epic was being assembled. For there is no one in this series with whom to identify. The men are all crippled by their corruptions and intravenous tie-lines to the corrupt power structure; the women are all indolent leeches, living off that same corruption and merely offering their bodies to their men as payment. They are modern courtesans (albeit with that little piece of paper that makes it legal) and their men are little better than cheaphustle 42nd Street johns.

  Once again ABC has proved that it will go with “name power” rather than quality. It has swallowed the Robbins shuck—as distasteful as it may be—and convinced itself that what it’s digested is caviar, not guano. It has lied to itself in believing we can’t see that Miss Turner has grown older and more lined without having improved one whit as an actress. (No amount of Lord & Taylor clothes will cover it.) It has lied to itself in believing that we will accept a paragon of moral and ethical turpitude like no-neck George Hamilton as a model of Concerned Humanity. (As an actor, he is the compleat gigolo.) It has lied to itself in believing that a world about to commit suicide is interested or enriched by a weekly viewing of the very societal elements most responsible for anguish in our times; and that by gilding them, we will accept their right to rule.

  If the series was at least an accurate portrait of that materialistic, destructive coterie of thieves and killers, it would serve as an object lesson—perhaps to delineate the face of the enemy for the younger generation. But ABC has even shied away from that nitty-gritty, and has slapped together every cliché and hack theme of a hundred Robbins and Robbins-imitated novels. And what punishment will they be meted for it?

  Mr. Robbins will make a billion megabucks, ABC will get it sponsored up the ass and out the gullet, and the peons in the Great American Heartland will accept this as just another affirmation of the impossibility of ever climbing out of the mud.

  Troops, they come wearing white-on-white, with diamond cufflinks and plastic hair. And if this series inspires you to any feelings but a desire to tear down their towers, then you are already lost.

  I do not think it mere chance that Robbins, in the fullness of his contempt for the true human condition, chose the name of this series. If he, and ABC, and the people whose shadow images are played by these actors, have their way, they indeed will be the only survivors.

  43: 17 OCTOBER 69

  “THE COMMON MAN”: PART I

  I cannot remember being more disturbed or depressed about something I’d seen on television than what concerns me this week. So unraveling and serious is it, I feel, that I don’t think there’ll be much ranting or pyrotechnics. You can usually tell when Igenuinely bent out of shape; I get very quiet.

  Helen McKenna, a reader of this column from San Diego, sent me a carbon of a “letter of concern” she’d written to ABC, NBC and CBS. Her concern stemmed from an article in the September 27 issue of TV Guide. The article, by Edith Efron, was titled The “Silent Majority” Comes Into Focus. It was another in TV Guide’s more or less continuing series of reassurances to the Common Man in its readership that all the unpleasant things happening in this country will pass, that this craziness stemming from longhairs and unruly adolescents is essentially unimportant, that the Common Man will prevail, as he always has in the past.

  It was a lie, of course; an elaborate lie as distasteful to those of us who know it will not pass, who see those “America—Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers and fear their undercurrent inferences, as TV Guide’s wretched editorial vindication of the CBS cancellation of the Smothers Brothers. TV Guide is edited out of Radnor, Pennsylvania and that is a small town where the thunder of a world in upheaval reverberates back merely as a laugh track gone slightly out of synch.

  Miss McKenna’s letter, a small moan for nobility in a land sadly lacking in same, came three days after I’d seen the two hours of television which so frighten and shake me this installment. They seemed to tie in together so well, I would like to address this column to Miss McKenna and all the Helen McKennas who know our time is running out, that we have come to the brink of nightmare and must find new answers or perish in our own poisons.

  I am glad she did not see the program I’m about to discuss, for had she, she would have known (as I now know) that Miss Efron and TV Guide well understood the audience they were addressing with their perpetuations of the lies that b
asically America is sound at the grass roots, that the Common Man, like the Fifth Cavalry in a late late show western, will rush to save us at the final desperate stroke of midnight.

  The show aired over KCET Channel 28, the educational channel, on Friday, October 3rd. It was The David Susskind Show and it was titled “The White Middle Class.” In two hours of gut-level conversation, Mr. Susskind gave a forum to five typical, average, middle class white Americans. Not rabid Birchers, not hysterical religious fanatics, not insensitive bigots…just five ordinary Common Men. And they revealed themselves to be typically American.

  And—dear god, why am I so numb and resigned?—that was the horror of them.

  The five men were:

  Mike Giordano, 47 years old, from Newark, New Jersey; take-home pay $140 a week as a factory mechanic; net annual income, $8500; father of nine.

  Frank Mrak, 44 years old, from Cleveland, Ohio; works in an employment agency and moonlights a second job selling life insurance for a total income of $10,000 annually; he was the subject of a Life piece on the working class.

  Paul Corbett, 40 years old, a traveling salesman from Philadelphia; six children, and a net income of $9000 a year. Remember this man.

  Vincent De Tanfilis, 41 years old, works for an insurance agency; married, with two children, he lives in Norwalk, Connecticut; he earns between nine and ten thousand dollars per year.

  Peter Brady, 30 years old, with five children; a truck driver who lives in Freeport, Long Island, he works as a part-time bartender, and makes between eight and nine thousand dollars a year.

  Five sensible men. Rational men who might easily and with no denigration be labeled “pillars of the community.” I saw them as epitomizations of the Common Man. The basic fiber of the American way of life. And so I could set down with absolute accuracy what they said, how they felt, I asked KCET to run the show for me at a private screening. There could be no room for error in this column, and I wanted to set it down just right. So on Monday, October 6th, with a cassette recorder to capture their every word, I sat in a darkened viewing room and lived again that most terrifying two hours with five models of what the bulk of our country considers the Common Man…the “good” man.

  And this is what they said; their words, unedited.

  On the subject of welfare: “The most colossal fraud ever perpetrated on this country.” (Giordano) / “They are nothing but a bunch of thieves who want what I worked for. It is not Christian for me to do for people who won’t do for themselves. Paul’s admonition to the Apostles was, ‘If you do not work, you do not eat.’” (Corbett) / “It’s all going into the pockets of those who don’t deserve it, malingerers, crooked politicians. Someone is lining his pockets.” (De Tanfilis) / “They’re stealing from us legally, and they call it welfare.” (Corbett) / “The hard core unemployed can’t cut it. They all want to start at the top. They don’t want to start at the bottom the way I did, the way my father did. We can’t all be bus drivers; some of us have to be passengers. We can’t all be chiefs; we have to be Indians.” (Giordano)

  On the subject of Viet Nam, the arms race and money spent by the Pentagon on weaponry: “Seventy-seven billion for armaments? I’m in favor of it, because that’s to support our nation, not to destroy it.” (Corbett) / “I find it alarming that the Russians are expanding their forces while we are decreasing ours.” (Corbett) / “I have absolute faith in the Pentagon. I believe they are the only ones qualified to set their budget. I don’t care if it’s a hundred billion or a hundred and ten billion; I don’t care.” (Mrak) / “I’m against the Viet Nam war, but not as a dove. I’m against it because when I was in World War II I learned that you fight a war to win it; and I’m against the way we’ve been fighting the war…dragging it out.” (Mrak) / “We should drop the atom bomb.” (Corbett) / “You peaceniks have been around for centuries. The guy who yells peace is the guy who always gets war, but the guy who stands up and says you mess with me and I’ll give you war…he gets peace.” (Giordano) / (referring to a young man with long hair who spoke from the audience:) “Withdraw! Withdraw! You people…what’s the matter with winning? I know the people in Washington are continuing the war, so they can soak up the tax

  dollars…and the war could have been won seven years ago…by getting in there and really fighting!” (De Tanfilis) / “The ones that are prolonging this war are the long-haired brats. Because the government listens to ‘em, and the more they scream the more the war gets on the front pages.” (Brady) / (Corbett asked Susskind if he didn’t think we should have won the war long ago. Susskind said no, he didn’t think we should have been there in the first place. Corbett then said, “I suppose you think we shouldn’t have gone to war against the Nazis, huh?” Susskind said they weren’t comparable situations. And Corbett said:) “Oh, I see, you don’t think Communists are as bad as Nazis.” / (Susskind asked if it might not just be barely possible that the United States had been wrong in entering the war. All five shouted, “No!” as one. And then Corbett said:) “No, sir! If they’re against Communism, they can’t be wrong. You can’t make a deal with the devil. J. Edgar Hoover says it’s a conspiracy to destroy America, therefore it’s evil. It must be stamped out at the roots, even if we have to stamp out all of Russia.” / “There’s too much weaponry. We all ought to sit down and say we’re going to get rid of the super-weapons and just go back to safe weapons.” (Giordano) / “It’s the liberal Mafia that keeps this war from being won.” (Corbett)

  It is difficult to proceed, setting down so much jingoism and muddy thinking. On the one hand these men all deplore the high income tax that keeps them working six days a week and leaching all joy from their existences, they deplore the ten per cent surcharge that was instigated by a man they elected, and extended by a second man they elected…but on the other hand they find nothing wrong in the bulk of their tax dollar being spent on the Viet Nam war or on military hardware that has been proved either boondoggle or ineffectual before it’s built.

  They were, to a man, paranoid. There were conspiracies everywhere. The Black Militant conspiracy. The White Liberal Conspiracy. The Communist Conspiracy. The Bureaucratic Conspiracy. The Conspiracy of the Judiciary. All their troubles stem from poor people on welfare rolls and from “bleeding heart liberals” who steal from them.

  These were the opinions, the very words, of the average citizens who make up the bulk of this nation’s population. There were more. Many more statements about the law, about the protest movement, about blacks, about relief and welfare to the aged and infirm, about racial prejudice and integration. They are startling and baldly revealing statements.

  They were the thoughts and fears of the Common Man.

  My space this issue has run out. There is considerably more that needs to be said here, and more space needed, so I beg your indulgence, and ask that you return here next week for the second part of this study of Who We Are, Who They Are, and the problem of the Common Man.

  44: 25 OCTOBER 69

  “THE COMMON MAN”: PART II

  “Black people just can’t cut it. They don’t have the intellectual ability. Now I know how the Liberal Mafia can discredit somebody who speaks his mind like that. They call him a bigot and a racist, and that makes you no good. It means what you say is no good. But I’m no bigot and I don’t even know what a racist is. What is a racist? Can somebody tell me what a racist is? If you go to the Ivory Coast in Africa, kids of four and five years old are making baskets and learning how to make things. But if you go into North Philadelphia or Bedford-Stuyvesant or Harlem you see the old man sitting around with his bottle of wine, which is paid for by me, the hard-working taxpayer.”

  That quotation is actually two men speaking. Paul Corbett, 40, a traveling salesman…and Mike Giordano, 47, a factory mechanic. I’ve fused the two quotes together because during the two hours of the Susskind interview these two men were the most outspokenly racist and bigoted, the most jingoistic and illogical. What each said might easily have come from the other’s mout
h, and during the period excerpted above, their comments overlapped as they rushed to get their gut-feelings out. I don’t think either of them could honestly fault me for melding them into one definitive personality.

  Because Messrs. Corbett and Giordano—and their three compatriots—were speaking the words of contemporary middle-class America. They were expressing the secret and frequently not-so-secret beliefs of The Common Man in our country today.

  Giordano also said, a trifle hysterically, “All I want is to be left alone! I’m not asking anyone for anything! I just want to be left alone. Every time I turn on the tv someone is telling me how bad off the blacks are, how the little kids fight off rats in the slums. I don’t want to feel guilty, I just wanna be left alone!”

  It was a pathetic sight. A grown man very nearly on the verge of tears as he expressed his confusion and fear of the world around him. He’s a working man, an average sort of joe who knows only that thousands of dollars for which he worked brutally hard (he says) are being stolen from him by the aged, the infirm, the destitute, those who have illegitimate babies, who lay up in their ghettos with wine he’s buying…while four-year-olds on the Ivory Coast are making good living wages at cottage industry.

  These are the men who voted for Wallace. They insist they are not bigots and racists, yet they cannot define the terms and seem to have no awareness that it is they to whom we refer when we speak of these types.

  Giordano owns guns. He bought them to protect his property. The way he put it, unedited: “I hope I never have to use the gun I bought, but I would be remiss in my duty if I did not protect my house…I have to protect myself, I have to protect my house.” Do you see something rather peculiar there? He doesn’t say he has to protect his wife and his nine children…he says he has to protect his house.