The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  H-bombs.

  Of course he wants peace, the snake! He wants peace on terms no one will give him. He wants more mindless flag-waving. He wants us to believe that there is some incredible nobility in our interfering in the internal affairs of seventeen Asiatic and African nations! He wants it all to go back the way it was, when he was a whey-faced lad in a small Florida town, forty years ago. He wants the death toll that now stands at 855,000 to rise to a nice even million. And he wants you to swallow higher taxes so the Pentagon can raise its budget and build the spacedrop platform without worrying where its next billion is coming from. Won’t that be a charmer, gentle readers: your sons and husbands and brothers dropping straight down from deep space into India and Rhodesia.

  The Man gibbered you, friends. He said nothing new. He merely tried to pull the fangs of the December Offensive you know we dissidents will be mounting next month. He doesn’t want a repetition of last year’s Grade School Uprising.

  He wants to make certain that the last few of us out here scrounging for canned goods to stave off scurvy don’t get any help or succor from “confused, misled Americans who fail to realize that by aiding the dissident elements in our society you are helping to prolong the war.” Well, he needn’t worry. It’s been seventeen years, and those of us who long ago committed ourselves to saving you poor scuttlefish from your own gullibility, we know we won’t get any help. We’ve had our example. Bobby Seale died in a Federal Penitentiary six weeks ago. Pneumonia. Sure, it was pneumonia. How many of you remember Bobby Seale?

  You want some straight talk, gentle readers…you want to know how we really feel about it?

  Most of the spark has gone out of us. We can afford to tell you truths like that. We aren’t on the same wavelength as those of you who lie publicly to keep up “morale” and buy “public support” with lies. We can tell the truth because nothing can stop us from doing what we have to do. We know we can’t win, we know we can’t change the course of history. But we do it because it’s reflex now. We’re resigned to living like animals in these sections of the Great United States you’ve come to call the outback. We’re secure in the knowledge that one after another, we’ll be picked off and killed. The tac/squads don’t even take prisoners any more. They got their new orders last year: flatten them.

  You don’t know, you’ll never know. You’ve let yourselves be lied to so often and so ineptly, you’re willing accomplices to your own destruction.

  How do we feel about it? We feel that if there is a god he’ll hasten the ecological debacle you’ve permitted to spread. He’ll kill off the diatoms in the ocean faster, and he’ll deplete the oxygen supply, and we’ll all go under at the same time, gasping for air like iron lung rejects.

  But if that doesn’t come to pass, here’s how we figure it: the Man and “Confucius” Ta Ch’ing and Mbutu will one day say fuck it, and turn loose the Doomsday Machines. And if—as predicted—it kills off ninety-six per cent of the population of the Earth, that’ll be cool. Because you deserve no better.

  And as for me, I personally look at it like this: if I’m in the ninety-six per cent that gets zapped, then I’m dead and I’m sleeping and I’m at peace at least and I don’t have to fight a fight you scuttlefish never wanted me to fight. If I’m in the four per cent that manages to escape alive, well, I’ve learned how to live in a rabbit warren, and I’ll survive.

  Either way, I’ll be delivered from ever again having to sit and be bored by the tv appearances of a man whose obvious disregard for humanity puts him solidly at the front of a nation that is notable for self-loathing.

  My only regret is that I’m out of pipe tobacco. It’s funny how little things come to mean so much at the final extreme.

  Goodbye, gentle readers. I always end my columns these days with those words. Chances are very good that by this time next week one or the other of us won’t be around.

  47: 14 NOVEMBER 69

  This week, painful reappraisal and viewing-with alarm. The former is something I do only when irrevocably pressed to the wall by the realization that my godhood is fraying at the edges and the latter I do so often it has become the systole and diastole of my routine existence. Nonetheless, painful though they may be, they must be done this week.

  Reconsideration of ABC’s The New People is definitely in order, because after the first show—the airing of the pilot segment by Rod Serling—I recommended this sixty-minute’s hype. Well, friends, they sucked me in, too. I will confess that much of my feeling of having been impressed by The New People was due to Richard Kiley’s bravura performance as the last adult left alive when a planeload of peregrinating teen-agers gets downed on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. Kiley brought to the situation of a melting-pot of young minds forced to create a new society in their own image, a strength and order that catalytically forced the weaker characters of the kids to react in some positive and impressive ways. But Kiley’s character was only in the pilot segment, used to set the scene. Then he was killed off. Now the shows rest heavily on the shoulders of unknowns like Peter Ratray, David Moses, Zooey Hall, Tiffany Bolling, Dennis Olivieri and Jill Jaress. And occasionally on the backs of semi-knowns like Rick Dreyfuss and Brenda Scott.

  But, surprisingly, the blame for this show’s having gone instantly and disastrously downhill does not lie with the kids. They are quantum-jumps below even McQueen, Garner, Farrow or Barbara Hershey (all of whom were doing comparable tv parts at approximately the same ages) in talent, but they are game, and they do the best they can with the shabby material they get for scripts. For therein lies the reason The New People is mired down in the horse latitudes of the ratings. The basic concept of the show is a viable one; while not entirely fresh (they’ve been doing the old “how will people react in a microcosm of society” shtick since Outward Bound), it is workable. The production values are more than satisfactory, having managed to squeak by in establishing an entire AEC-abandoned test site city—a bit that does not bear too close examination before it becomes patently ridiculous, yet one we are willing to accept if the rest of the show functions logically. The direction and photography are hardly distinguished, but in a field where second-rate talent is the best one can hope to get when your real talents all flee to theatrical films, it is acceptable.

  So all that remains on which to rationally dump the blame for the increasing failure of this show, is the script work. And there it takes no great depths of perceptivity to recognize why The New People has come a cropper.

  The second week’s plot was an impossible farrago of clichés harkening back all the way to Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters or the discovery that the anopheles mosquito causes malaria; one of those insane dumbplots in which people begin keeling over from The Dreaded Plague and some kid who had a semester of Pharmacology 101 brews-up the antidote from Brillo pad squeezings and the memory of his Granny’s faithful spiderweb poultice chest-rub.

  I can’t tell you much about the third week’s plot because the teaser and six minutes of act one were all I could stomach of acting so porcine and dialogue so pretentious that they instantly buried the story of one of the castaways who was either pushed or fell off a cliff. If you’ve ever watched a show that telegraphed itself as being unviewable a few minutes into the story, you’ll know what it was that impelled me to switch over to Laugh-In. (And while I’m at it, may I point out to the manufacturers of The New People that of all the ridiculous, insipid, insulting and generally all-around moronic theme songs jammed up the noses of the viewing public—dating all the way back to such classics as 77 Sunset Strip snap! snap! and Hawaiian Eye—The New People is far and away the most offensive. Not merely because of its lack of musical value, but because of its cheap attempt to “reach the younger viewer” with what the old farts who created it think is a contemporary sound. Not only is it a far cry from even kitsch value as a contemporary sound, but it is a tieline into understanding why hypocrisy is spotted instantly by today’s tv viewer. Particularly the younger ones. They know this is
a young idea, written and produced by old people, trying to sound young. And they won’t go for it. And that’s why The New People has not pulled the core of viewers it needed to succeed. Older viewers can’t identify with a bunch of young snots, and the young people won’t be a party to being hustled.)

  The fourth segment had hold of a marvelous idea, but once more opted for the obvious, cliché treatment, thereby emasculating the basic concept. Take a Suth’rin kid whose big love is automobiles, and stick him on an island where there are no cars, and how does he go about getting himself wheels; and further, once he has them, what does he do with them? It was a nice idea, synched-in with the theme of how much individual responsibility does a man have in a society where you can’t really be made to pay for your acts? It was enough to hold one’s attention, but it was hardly the heavyweight drama this series promised.

  Fifth week, turn off again. Dulls the senses. Bludgeons the spirit. Twitches the fingers toward knob-turn. Laugh-In got my business. Again.

  Sixth week, Brenda Scott played a hysteric to Peter Ratray’s strong, semi-silent type. The kids get a little stir-crazy and some of them decide to build a raft to float off the island. Plotted as tightly as one of those see-through knit dresses, it was pedestrian, predictable, riddled with improbabilities and coincidences, and resembled for logic the attempt of Shipwreck Kelly to go over Niagara Falls in a Dixie Cup.

  I’ve reappraised at such length a series that is obviously a bummer, for the sole reason of trying to save it. The basic idea, I repeat for the fourth time, is a solid one. There is something of consequence inherent in the plight of forty kids trying to create a workable society on an island unaffected by the world their elders made—save in the corruptions passed on to them by their elders.

  But the producers of The New People are traveling down the road to cancellation tread by so many other series: the road that is paved with the hack scripts of old men and/or weary writers. There are young writers in town who know how to mirror the attitudes of the young, who know how to present problems that concern all of us now, who have a sense and a feel and a compassion for what’s going down today. These are the writers who should be employed on The New People. They should be given their head, should have the reins let out on them, should be allowed to run with their ideas. Not hobbled and held in by arbitrary ideas of “what is so” by producers and networkers whose closest approach to the minds of the young is when they ride down the Strip of a Saturday night with their windows and their minds closed.

  It should not fall to a television critic to point out to a show’s creative personnel the insanity of having a show about the minds and hearts of young people—being written by old people. If I want an authority on how to chop-and-channel a Mercury, I don’t hire the lady who won second place in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

  And as for viewing-with-alarm, I am alarmed that the wonderful Music Scene show (which, unfortunately, comes on not only directly opposite My World—And Welcome To It but just before The New People, thereby laying two heavy strikes on it for openers) is down near the bottom in ABC ratings. This is a program that deserves to continue. It is wryly cynical, has sparkle and dash and originality, and even manages to make some scalpel slashes at the current scene.

  David Steinberg and his compatriots are the most ebullient and compelling hosts we have been offered in many moons, and to see them back on the bread lines would be a shame.

  Regularly, they showcase talent we don’t see nearly enough of: Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, Three Dog Night, Isaac Hayes, Richie Havens and Buffy Sainte-Marie. And they do it with innovation and sincerity.

  I urge those of you who have not yet caught on to Music Scene to do so at once. It’s so good the scythe-wielder of tv attrition will certainly mow it down forthwith. Or perhaps, having sounded the alarum, we can do something to prevent this winner going the ways of the Smothers Bros.

  48: 28 NOVEMBER 69

  Television and its occult machinations have finally produced their first genuinely tragic figure. How odd: we might have thought Senator Joseph McCarthy the proper one to be so recognized. TV stripped him raw—aided by the US Army and old Joe Welch—and in the last days of the now-famous McCarthy-Army hearings we saw that paragon of despotism bludgeoned from his position as a destroyer of lives, from his position as a disseminator of fear and hatred, from his position as the antichrist of Democracy…to a sobbing, hysterical mass of ruined flesh. Soon after, he died. Destroyed by television. Surely McCarthy was the frontrunner for the title. Then came William Talman, whose career was thrown up for grabs on the Perry Mason series because of bad publicity attendant on some minor dope-&-sex peccadillo; cancer added to his tragic stature. But his friends stood by him, to their everlasting credit, and he remained with the show. Yet he was a candidate. And then we saw Lyndon Johnson creamed by tv. By dissent and the rising gorge of American disgust at the way he manhandled the highest office in the land. If not McCarthy or Talman, then certainly weary old LBJ.

  But no. None of them hold a candle to the man who emerges as the sorriest creature ever to flash across the land in phosphor-dot reality.

  Art Linkletter is the most tragic figure.

  It is difficult to bring myself to club a man when he’s down, and make no mistake (as that incipiently tragic wager of war, Mr. Nixon, would say), Art Linkletter is down. So what you read here is carefully considered and even more carefully written.

  Because the deadly irony of what has happened to Art Linkletter forces one to pause and consider just how uncaring the universe really is. For here is a man who helped build a multi-million dollar show business career in large part from the cute sayings of children, who never managed to glean from all those years kneeling beside tots with their directness and simple truth, enough perceptivity or perspective to help his own daughter as she crawled inexorably toward her own death. It is a universe that allows stupidity to exist, and so we must conclude the universe simply doesn’t give a damn.

  Diane Linkletter, twenty years old and quite pretty, threw herself from a sixth-floor window in West Hollywood on Saturday, October 4th of this year. She was on a bad trip with acid. (Dear god, how silly and futile resound the hip terminology of the in-group: “bad trip.” What must she have been seeing, thinking, feeling as the LSD drove her down six floors to end the worst possible, short trip anyone can imagine?)

  And she left behind Art Linkletter, who comes, too late, to a concern for young people.

  Remorse, guilt, sorrow. He has no corner on the market, and saying other parents have experienced similar tragedies makes no mark. Life is not a comparison of other people’s chamber of horrors. Yet Art Linkletter’s purgatory is a very special one, for it was fashioned on network television and furnished by his persistent refusal to understand.

  As the story is told, immediately after he learned of his daughter’s death, Linkletter tried to quash the item. It would have been ugly for the world to know the daughter of such a man—a man so immediately identified with children—had been so alienated that she had taken her life in such a hideous fashion. But for whatever reasons, he verified the report that, yes, it had been acid. And weeks later he appeared on television (tv again), having appeared before Nixon’s committee on drug use. Now he was cast in the tragic role of grieving father, and emerged as a fighter in the war against drugs.

  Well, fine. Not being a doper, I can’t get very worked up about marijuana, but I’ve had enough friends and friends of friends blacked-out by heavier stuff to welcome anybody as an ally. But Art Linkletter seems still to fail to understand.

  He fails to recognize the simple truth that when drugs were confined solely to the black ghetto, and hundreds of thousands of minority kids were getting their lives fucked-up, no one cared. Oh, the “authorities” made their token raids and arrests, but the great white world didn’t care, didn’t really think it mattered. But now that a Jesse Unruh’s son gets busted for pot, now that an Art Linkletter’s daughter dies behind drug use…now, now the wh
ite community in the person of Art Linkletter cries out in anguish.

  Too late, Mr. Linkletter! Too goddamned little and too goddamned late! Because you still don’t know that your Diane’s death was only symptomatically caused by LSD. It was caused by the world you, in great part, helped create for all the Dianes. It was caused by you and all the righteous “good folk” who continue to believe the hoary clichés of your own youth. That anyone can make it in America if he has the will and determination. That authority is always right, that children should respect their parents whether they’ve earned the respect or not, that hard work brings its just reward, that nice girls don’t do this or that, that good little boys don’t do that or the other. It was caused by all the people like yourself who’ve allowed the police to turn loose the hoses and the dogs and the tear gas and the cattle prods on “the enemy” in our streets.

  Who is the enemy, Mr. Linkletter?

  Is it the dreaded Communist Menace?

  Is it the anarchist rabble?

  Is it the drug-crazed dissenters?

  No, Mr. Linkletter, it’s your own kids.

  How many parents will end their days sorrowing for their kids like you, because they fail to recognize the insanity of turning hate and prison and death against an “enemy” who is simply your kids?

  Do you yet understand the nature of your tragedy, Linkletter, all of you? Do you understand that your tragedy is in what happened to the college dissenters convicted last week, in police photographing twelve and sixteen-year-old kids in the Valley as “subversives” because they wanted to join the Moratorium Day marching, in the trial of the Chicago Conspiracy 8, in the gagging of Bobby Seale. Can you dig it, Mr. Linkletter—Bobby Seale is your son!