The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  There is very little point in going on with the comments these five men made. They are hardly startling remarks; we’ve heard them endlessly for the past fourteen years. Yet they were so well capsulized, so concretized in their own slogan rigidity, that the conclusions they indicate—on the part of these five and all the Common Men—give us a primer of the fears and stupidities that will certainly kill us, and our planet, if they are not soon combated.

  Such as:

  “The two or three hundred years of injustice we whites are supposed to’ve perpetrated on blacks is a fraud.” (Giordano)

  “All the federal money for relief is going into the pockets of crooked politicians.” (Vincent de Tanfilis)

  “The Liberal Mafia has coerced the decent colored man. They were happy the way they were till all this noise started.” (Corbett)

  “I live in an integrated community. There are 27,000 whites and seventeen to thirty non-white families.” (Frank Mrak) And non-white could mean Mexican-American, Japanese, anything. But he thinks he lives in an integrated community.

  “Billy Graham says the protest movement on campus is due to the infiltration of dissident elements like Communists. This SDS sucks kids in on LSD and it’s a conspiracy.” (Frank Mrak) Not so incidentally, Mr. Mrak didn’t know the difference between SDS and LSD. He confused them, called one the other, and in general exhibited that most fundamental tip-off that we were dealing with the Common Man: inability to tell fact from fancy, reliance on rumor, gossip and the slogan.

  “Administrators on campuses have no backbone. They oughta take a firm line with kids.” (De Tanfilis)

  “The only reason we got permissive sex in this country is that people are making money off it. The only reason the radicals talk so much about the war is because the politicians stand to make money off it.” (Peter Brady, 30 years old)

  (Yes, I know the last remark above is totally incomprehensible, unbelievable, makes no sense and is the sort of thing you might expect to hear from a brain damage case, but Peter Brady was the youngest of the bunch. Younger than me, younger than most of you, and ostensibly one of the ones still “trustable” by the under-30 generation. Does this tell us anything?)

  There are ten or twelve more single-spaced pages of remarks, but why pursue it? Two weeks worth of columns is more than enough space to give these men their ups.

  It’s time to make a statement and take a position and try to formulate a generality that isn’t just hot air. And if such can be whomped-up from these crude materials, it is this:

  We have long been a country where nature imitates art. When Evan Hunter wrote The Blackboard Jungle with its wholly inaccurate portrait of what delinquency was like in the New York school system—and when the film was cobbled up from that once-removed fantasy, thereby making it a third-hand unreality image—the kids began imitating what they’d seen in the film and read in the book.

  We have a tendency to let our art forms exploit us. In the Forties, we were deluged with pro-war movies in which Robert Taylor or John Hodiak or John Garfield gritted his teeth and fired into the endlessly advancing ranks of the Japanazis, thereby proving to us that even though (at first) we were losing the war, we’d pull it out of the fire and save the American Way of Life—if only we’d Buy Bonds.

  So, similarly have we swallowed whole the myth of the Common Man. The Mr. Deeds or the Mr. Smith who, because of his homespun philosophy, common sense and garden variety decency, emerges just at the last moment, just before the town lynches the wrong man or sells its heritage to the international cartel or lets the bully finish off the town weakling—and he saves the day. We believe in the Common Man. The man who works with his hands. The man who makes up the labor unions and the merchant class and the middle-America homeowner. We believe in his good sense, in his perceptions of what is right or wrong.

  No good. It won’t work no more. The “common man” philosophy is based on simple truths, eternal verities, on black and white and right and wrong. But the world is not that kind of Giant Golden Book any longer. The world is an incredibly complex skein of interwoven potencies, of power in too many hands, of power corrupted and people used.

  The Common Man is no longer merely as outdated as the passenger pigeon. He is a living menace.

  He is the man who votes for Wallace because Wallace offers him easy cop-out solutions to the fears he feels. He is the man who thinks everybody can earn a living. He is the man who, because he personally never lynched a nigger, believes there is no such thing as prejudice.

  He is the man who believes only what affects him, what he sees, or what is most consistent with the status quo that will keep him afloat.

  The time for worshipping the Common Man is past. We can no longer tolerate him, or countenance his stupidity. He is the man who keeps our air polluted, our country at war, our schools infested with police stateism, our lives on the brink of oppression and our futures sold out for oil leases.

  The Common Man—the kind Susskind showed us with such sorry clarity—has to go. If we are to continue living in this doomed world, if we are to save ourselves, we must kill off the Common Man in us and bring forth the Renaissance Man.

  45: 31 OCTOBER 69

  After those last two blood-curdling columns about The Common Man (and the attendant mail that’s been pouring in, both with huzzahs from those of us who are scared shitless by TCM and with death-threats from several Common Men—thus proving every once in a while I hit a truth or two) this time I’d like to do a happyhappy tippy-toe commentary that will leave you with a smile on your lips and a song in your heart. There are two ways to do same: 1) review a show that has something going for it and talk nice about it or 2) blast the crap out of a stinker in Menckenesque terms.

  Either way is fun, so this week I’ll do both.

  (But first a small aside, having nothing to do with tv. Last week’s Freep featured an article by a chopper thug named Mike Brown. Mr. Brown is against a lot of things I think are very nice, but whereas I wouldn’t take up a .30-06 to stop him from hating Jews, Blacks, gays, Communists, Catholics, Freemasons, hippies and all the other species he cannot abide, as long as he didn’t get physical about it…Mr. Brown—how his own last name must bug him!—has banded together with a number of other over-six-foot proto-beefy bikers to DEFEND AMERICA BY VIOLENCE. Mr. Brown ought to get hip to the simple core truth that his problem is based on his own insecurity about being an adequate male. What you or I would do if we felt uptight like that, is go find us a lady and give her some pleasure. What Mr. Brown does is use Molotov cocktails on trucks. We’d use the penis, he uses the truncheon. Mr. Brown has banded together in the typical homosexual-fear unit and thrust between his legs not a loving woman but a snarling chopper. If he wasn’t so pitiable, he’d be ludicrous. All concerned folk who read Mr. Brown’s shriek of sexual impotency and frustration should send their freeze-dried semen to his lair, in hopes he will either face his emotional problems by making love, not stupidity, or—failing that—drive his air-cooled courage off a cliff in Coldwater at 100 mph.)

  Onward and upward with truth and/or beauty.

  First, the decimation. Second, the praising.

  Up for destruction, one 90-minute movie produced for ABC by Aaron Spelling’s jellybean operation over at Paramount. It was on the network a week ago Tuesday, and it was called The Monk. When—as a potential writer of 90-minute movies for this series for “World Television Premieres”—I was called in several months ago to sit through a screening of this classic cheapie cornball abomination, I could not really believe ABC would go ahead and put it on the air.

  It was so bad, so completely and thoroughly without redeeming value, of any kind, I felt certain the ABC khans would varf, retch, rush for toilets, and then come back and possibly lynch Spelling; the director, George McCowan; the scenarist, Tony Barrett; and even the principal accomplices thespically speaking, George Maharis, Janet Leigh, Carl Betz, William Smithers and even Jack Albertson, who should have known better. But they didn’t,
the ding-dongs. They ran it. They even took out ads for it.

  Gawd, now that’s what I call a frenzy for suicide.

  In case you are among the blissful millions who missed this epic of stupidity, allow me to describe what it was about the show that makes it the lowest point thus far in a low season.

  The idea is a fresh one. It’s about this private eye…

  The original idea was conceived (if that is the word…spawned might be more on-target) by Blake Edwards, who created Peter Gunn some ten years ago. I understand the Monk idea was an earlier one, and was drawered when Peter Gunn took off. Edwards never finished the original version. Spelling bought it (I suppose because it had Edwards’ name on it; surely it had nothing else going for it). He assigned the script-writing chores to Tony Barrett, a very nice man who used to write extensively for the Gunn series and worked for Spelling on Burke’s Law. But Tony Barrett opted for cliché, and what he wrote would have looked pale on the Gunn series itself. It’s the hack detective story about the big-time mob attorney who’s afraid he’s gonna be bumped off unless Gus Monk protects him, and Monk says fuck off you hood, and the attorney gets bumped, naturally, only it wasn’t the attorney in that flaming car it

  was…well, you know the rest.

  I’ll tell you about the level of originality of this dog: during the screening, Maharis is leaving Miss Leigh to go off on a mission of spectacular (ho hum) danger and as he reaches the door, Janet says, “Gus…” and he turns around and looks at her, and me, sitting in the darkened viewing room, I say, “Be careful,” a second before Janet says, “…be careful.” At which point I got up and went out and got a pint of orange drink and a burrito from the studio coffee wagon. When I came back, not much had happened that I didn’t remember happening in 77 Sunset Strip back in 1959.

  Maharis acted with all the wizard skill and animation of a poison dart-victim weighted down by anvils, trying to walk across the Bay of Biscayne on the bottom. Miss Leigh, who was cute and sensitive and fine to watch in this kind of role in The Manchurian Candidate and Psycho and even as far back as Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, has allowed herself to either grow hard and brittle and leathery looking—like a dyke who ain’t happy about being a dyke—or wasn’t hip to the way they were shooting her. Everybody else mugged and overacted and slimed up the premises, thus telling us all we need to know about Mr. McCowan’s directorial strengths, and in all it was marked n.g. from the git-go.

  At some point along the way—and this is the point of reviewing such an obstinately shitty flick—the powers that khan…should. They should get hip to the fact that old men who wrote Raymond Chandler-fashion twenty years ago can’t retool for contemporary drama. They should stop letting themselves get whipsawed by fast talking Executive Producers like Danny Thomas and Aaron Spelling, who sell them meadow muffins which are called chocolate eclairs. They should begin to realize that they have a nice, viable form in the 90-minute movie, and stop castrating it by buying safe, hackneyed, cliché stories resuscitated from moldering issues of the pulp Argosy, vintage 1934. They should finally throw up their hands and admit that crud won’t get it (if you haven’t checked lately, ABC, you’re trailing in the Ratings Race) and see if they could get somewhere with quality.

  Like the guy who died on stage, and it was suggested from the audience that they give him an enema, it might not help…but it couldn’t hurt.

  Taaaa-daaaaah!!

  It also couldn’t hurt to watch a lovely show called My World—And Welcome To It that NBC brings us every Monday night at 7:30. It’s a half-hour sitcom, but many marks above the Lucy level. Based on drawings and anecdotes and short pieces by James Thurber, it has a charming cynicism and unabashed joy in life that no series since the ill-fated It’s A Man’s World of 1962 has managed to capture.

  William Windom, as the Thurberesque cartoonist chivvied by his sensible wife, his elderly (before her time) girl-child, and a random pack of dogs, editors, dream fantasies, plights of our time and garden variety horrors of contemporary society, runs the gamut from staunch nobility in the face of madness to bemused resignation that They Are Out To Get Him. He is Everyman with a green eyeshade.

  The really great thing about this series, though, is that it attempts to use video as a medium. There is animation and cartoon backdrop and stop-action and all kindsa groovy things. It’s visually very interesting. And using the Thurber material inventively (they’ve played with such famous bits as The Unicorn In the Garden, If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox and the legendary anecdote about Harold Ross of the New Yorker insisting on knowing which of two hippos in a cartoon was the one delivering the punchline) they seem hellbent intent on singlehandedly raising the quality of tv situation comedy.

  And so I shouldn’t get stoned by agents for neglecting their clients, let me hasten to add that as inept an acting job Janet Leigh and Raymond St. Jacques and William Smithers and Maharis did in The Monk, that’s how good the acting of Joan Hotchkis (as the wife) and Lisa Gerritsen (as the aging toddler) is in My World—And Welcome To It.

  It ain’t often I recommend anything as unreservedly as this show. And to the guy who wrote in to TV Guide saying the show wasn’t doing appropriate honor to the work and memory of the god Thurber…well, sir, you are hereby consigned to an eternity watching Gilligan’s Island reruns.

  Trouble with people, Clem, is that they don’t know when they’s well off.

  46: 7 NOVEMBER 69

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO A SPECIAL COLUMN: The premier publication of the “new wave” in speculative fiction is an English magazine titled New Worlds. Recently, one of its editors, Charles Platt, wrote me a letter in which he solicited a contribution for an offbeat symposium on the theme of “1980.” He did not want the usual sort of predictive piece on what the effects of over-population or atomic energy would mean to the world of 1980, but rather (as he put it) “a writer’s personal, subjective, idiosyncratic reactions to the 1980’s—how they see the general idea of there being a future, themselves in it, aging, progress in the various arts…” Charles spoke very specifically of this column—having read it on a recent trip to the States—and he suggested I try something like it for New Worlds. Yes, why not. So…postulating I don’t pick up a .45 slug in the head before that time, here is a sample of The Glass Teat from the Los Angeles Free Press, dateline Thursday November 13th, 1980. Res ipsa loquitur.

  THE GLASS TEAT

  I’ve run out of pipe tobacco and I’m getting nervous. Maybe tomorrow or the next day I’ll have one of the kids try to slip into Pasadena and rob a pipe store. Maybe I’ll do it myself. For those of you who may be reading this—if the printing press hasn’t broken down again—you may gather that my wounds have healed sufficiently well for me to consider a smash&grab raid. Yes, your faithful columnist didn’t buy it last time out.

  But things here in the “underground” (if you’ll pardon the pretensions) are not good. The goddamed Good Folks are stepping up their activities. Christ only knows how they can find the extra money to finance stronger tac/squads…the way their taxes bleed them. But I suppose it’s money well spent, from their viewpoint: cleaning out the dissidents. As far as I know, we’re one of the last three or four pockets left in Southern California. And they almost brought down Chester Anderson’s chopper last week when he made his run to drop the Free Press on LA. But I suppose we’re still a pain in the ass, if hardly effective, because Mishkin came back on Sunday with the new wanted posters. My faithful readers will be delighted to know the price on this columnist has gone up to a full ten grand, plus a year’s meat-and-sweet ration points. Now that’s what I call critical acceptance.

  However, enough personal chit-chat.

  My subject for this week is the President’s speech on The War, carried over the four major networks. For those of you reading this column in shelters and the outback, it won’t provide anything more than another taste of the bitter gall we’ve grown to know as a steady diet. But for those of you Good Folks—true patriotic Americans�
�who find one of these newspapers lodged in your eucalyptus or missed being washed down the sewers by the watersweepers, it may offer a moment of doubt in your unshakeable faith. At worst, it can proffer a moment of humor, and god knows you poor fuckers don’t have many of those these days.

  He’s wearing makeup better these days. They’ve managed to disguise the insincerity of the jaw, the deviousness of the eye-pouches, the corruption of the jowls, the thug-like stippling of unshaved follicles, the cornball window’s peak.

  They’ve even managed to exquisitely cover the plastic surgery scars and the discoloration left by last December’s assassination attempt on him. (I still contend if Krassner had used a thermite jug instead of that damned Molotov cocktail, he’d have bagged the snake.

  But, if at first you don’t succeed…)

  But nothing serves to conceal his dissembling. Nothing works to cover his mealymouth. Nothing manages to fill in with substance the empty spaces of his endless promises. He used all the time-honored phrases—my fellow Americans, this Administration, the Search for Peace, let us turn our faces away from conflict, grave concern, you are entitled to your minority opinion—all of them. They were all there—arrayed in shabby tediousness. The War has been going on for seventeen years, my fellow Good Folk: how many times have you heard the Man mouth the words “peace with honor”?

  And he’s still wiping his nose publicly, on-camera.

  He revealed a secret letter he had sent to Premier Mbutu, offering nothing new or conclusive, merely babbling that the United States is anxious to make some progress at the Trobriand Island Conferences. Well, hell yes, gentle readers, he wants to make some progress at the talks. Now that Tanzania and Zambia have joined the “menace” of Black Communism the President tells us is washing its tide over all the civilized world, he’s scared out of his mind that his own American Black States—Kentucky, Georgia and Illinois—will get more out of hand. He hasn’t forgotten (or by any means forgiven) Governor Gregory; offering sanctuary to Dennis 3X and his militants after what they did in Washington was enough to make the Man declare Chicago ripe for low-yield