The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Diane’s death grew logically out of her disillusionment. I never knew her, I don’t know you, but I know what was in her gut, because it comes from the guts of hundreds of other Dianes and Bobby Seales with whom I’ve come in contact. Disillusionment at Art Linkletter for helping to preserve a hypocritical and repressive laissez-faire society in which Diane and her contemporaries were lied-to every day of their lives. Lied to by tv (and that’s you, Art), lied to by authority, lied to by the dichotomy between what you told her the world was like and what she found it to be for herself.

  Jingo-ism! Dammit, jingo-ism. “Generation gap,” “silent majority,” “the American way,” “the menace of Communism,” “student radicals,” “the drug culture.” All of it is bullshit! It’s death, Mr. Linkletter. Death and blood and suicide and stupidity.

  I bought your record, Mr. Linkletter. The one made with Diane before she died. We Love You, Call Collect it’s called, and there’re photos of you and Diane on the cover. I’m not going to be gross and suggest you take any delight in this 45 rpm item. I suppose you’ve continued to let it sell in hopes some kid or parent may learn a lesson from it. I hear your voice break and tears in your words on this record, and I hope I’m not being hustled; I hope that was something more than theatrical histrionics. It would be too horrible to consider it anything else.

  But the record is another part of your on-camera guilt, Mr. Linkletter. Because it proffers the same weary clichés to the young people that your generation has always proffered. It resounds with the helpless confusion and sorrow of people who have found the world in which they grew up totally different from the world of today. Well, what did you expect? You’ve allowed that world to poison itself with war for fifty years, you’ve permitted corruption and racism to flourish, you’ve sacrificed everything beautiful and meaningful to the building of bigger and better military establishments, political machines, television careers…

  I understand also that Art Linkletter is going down to Synanon, to find out about drug use. It’s a step in the right direction. But it’s only a tool to be used in finally prying open that locked skull-box of set ideas and rigid beliefs. I’m not exactly sure how I came to be addressing Mr. Linkletter directly in this column, but I’ve switched back to the impersonal to prevent any of you who might pass it off as one man’s anguish, from wriggling free.

  For Art Linkletter has made his bed and now he’ll have to sleep in it. What happened to him can happen to all of us. Unless we act now to stop the senseless stupidity and hatred that seem destined to rule this country. I can summon very little pity for Art Linkletter; for Diane, yes, quite a lot. Because I know how lost and helpless she must have felt. How lost and helpless all those kids in their real or mental prisons now feel.

  You are tv, Mr. Linkletter. You have the power to go to school again, to understand all the reasons why Diane died. And once having learned, to speak up. To go to the council chambers of Nixons and Agnews and cry to them as you cry to us on your record.

  Because you’re only the first. The first major figure in the tv pantheon to discover that what you shot across the tube for so many years was waste and frippery and lies. In the council chambers of the networks, several weeks ago, the heads of the big three joined to establish a “youth” liaison with the younger generation, to find out what they are thinking, what they are about, what they want. They picked a kid named Waxman, I believe, to be the voice of youth.

  You might speak to them about that, Mr. Linkletter. And tell them you’d like to spend some time going to school, and then assisting in forging that link between the generations. And the first step is not to lie, and the second is to try to understand.

  There’s no help for Art Linkletter. He’s lost his, and I would certainly find it impossible to pack the guilt he’ll have to pack. But guilt and sorrow can be softened by making sure what has happened to oneself happens to no one else.

  It will take a strong and intelligent and very probably selfless man to carry such a load. Only time will tell if Art Linkletter packs the gear. Until then, he is merely the most tragic figure produced by the tv Generation.

  49: 5 DECEMBER 69

  I swear to Christ, sometimes I feel as though I’ve tumbled assoverteakettle down a rabbit hole. What I mean, maybe you aren’t getting the same stuff over your tv set I’m getting on mine. Because the stuff on mine is crazy as a neon doughnut and I refuse to believe I’m seeing straight. Maybe all those Zonk-rays from the color set are turning my brains to cottage cheese. With chives.

  On the Frank Reynolds ABC news I see where a US Marine has copped to the rumors of a Vietnamese massacre being true. And I see photographs that were taken on the spot, genuinely horrendous photographs. They look like replays of Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald. Piles of emaciated bodies. Children with their faces blown off by riflefire. Mothers with bullet holes through their heads, stilled in the act of trying to hurl their babies from them. And the babies, lying twisted as Raggedy Ann dolls, as dead as their mothers. Somewhere between 170 and 700 people. Civilians. The total has not yet been agreed upon. Maybe VC-supporters, maybe not. But civilians, either way. Dead; all of them dead.

  It happened 20 months ago, at My Lai, and we’re just now finding out about it. When the first photos appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, there was instant snarling from the Pentagon. It wasn’t true. It didn’t happen. The first Marine to talk about it was a psychopathic liar. And every day the Tom Reddin News on Channel 5 began with a map of Southeast Asia behind The Man, and he smiled and said triumphantly, “Today, further proof that the ‘alleged’ massacre of Viet Namese civilians never happened! Pinkville is a calloused lie!”

  And then the dam broke. And one after another the men who had participated in the crime came forward and extended their hands like Lady Macbeth and said they were finding it difficult to wash away the damned spot.

  So now the Army has “taken steps” to set things to rights. They’ve initiated court-martial proceedings against the Lieutenant who ordered the massacre. And some twenty-odd others. (I won’t even comment on the military position of letting the mass murderers wander around on their own recognizance. All I’ll say is that Sirhan Sirhan only bumped one man, and he was indicted without bail. But then, he killed an Amurrican, not them little slant-eyed devils.)

  Now I don’t know how you feel about this whole thing, there’s an entire range of emotions one can experience, I suppose, but I’d suspect they have to weigh heavily on the side of revulsion, shame and horror. Yet my tv set showed me a gentleman in the House of Representatives who got up and deplored the military’s preferring charges, on the grounds that it would make any soldier who committed (what he called) an “error in judgment” liable to prosecution as a “common criminal.” Well, I’ll agree with the rep; that Lieutenant is hardly a “common” criminal. I cannot conceive of the sort of mind that can butcher a hundred and seventy unarmed men, women and children—but it is unquestionably not “common.”

  So, you see what I mean about nutsy things coming in on my tube? Here is this shameful disgrace blotched on the escutcheon of the United States, and some ding-dong asshole in the House of Representatives is uptight because it might force other potential slaughterers to pause and consider abiding by the terms of the Geneva Convention.

  But that’s hardly an isolated dichotomy. Reagan finally gets around to having an ecological conference, to discuss how much longer we’ll be polluting the state (not to mention the entire planet), and for two days we are bombarded with much high-flown political-sounding rhetoric intended to convince us that The Gipper is finally hip to the peril. He’ll do things, he says. He’ll take steps. And the very next day my tv set shows me the resumption of oil drilling in the Santa Barbara channel. Those poor slobs living out there dash out in fishing boats to prevent the oil company from hauling in their platform, and Reagan is still mulching about saying he’s going to save the land. Because oil leases mean heavy sugar to the state and federal governments, and you know t
he oil lobby isn’t going to let death and destruction get in the way of their showing a profit on their ledgers.

  And the bill to double the income tax deduction for individuals is defeated soundly, but the oil men get another oil depletion allowance.

  And tv news is primarily Establishment-oriented, but Spiro attacks them for being in any way fair to the dissent movement. To the resounding support of the Great American Masses.

  And a soldier goes AWOL and finds sanctuary in a Unitarian church, and the Army brands the guy a traitor because he puked on the bayonet range when one of his buddies was told to “Kill Kill Kill” and he said he didn’t believe in killing, and they beat the shit out of him.

  Oh, lemme tell ya. Crazy stuff.

  The interesting thing about all this, of course, is that—among other serendipitous side-effects—almost every deep-rooted belief of Americana is being exploded into lies and confusion. So with everything they’ve ever accepted as rockbed fact being proved a fraud, television viewers are flocking in ever greater numbers to situation comedies, where the ideals and beliefs of their youths thirty and forty years ago are still maintained. They can watch Lucy and Petticoat and Green Acres and continue to believe that that life still exists. In some mythical terra incognita, they know not where.

  But how do they react to the massacre, the good folk who have always believed that Our Fighting Men are good and decent and honorable? How do they shiver and quake to the explosion of the Jack Armstrong myth? Do they rationalize it as the act of an isolated kill-crazy Lieutenant? If so, what about all the other guys in that outfit who joined in, dragging people to the edge of the ravine as their victims pleaded to be left alive, as they turned their weapons on them? Do they think about the conditioning that permits a man to murder children and hold his tongue about it for twenty months?

  If ever there was an apocalyptic incident that speaks to the death of the past in this country, this week we have it. We can ignore the pollution, we can permit the political corruption, we can deny the paranoia and racism of our culture, we can substitute personal experiences with shitty Jews or blacks or Catholics or young people or old people for a careful, reasoned understanding of the human condition—but we cannot ignore this massacre.

  In discussing this matter with friends, I’ve been reminded of the Viet Cong Massacre during the Tet Offensive, in which four thousand men, women and children were dumped into shallow graves and then clubbed or shot to death. Understand something: I do not carry VC flags. I am no lover of killers, be they Oriental or Caucasoid or Negroid. Hell, yes, they are vermin for the act. And not even saying they were murdering their own people is an excuse. What makes you think I have an answer? Love thy neighbor? That doesn’t work either. History certainly gives us enough proof of it. But these are our guys. These are the direct lineal descendants of Robert Taylor and John Garfield and Victor McLaglen and Humphrey Bogart on Bataan and Corregidor and Iwo Jima and Kiska and Attu. These are our guys, godammit! Not those evil little yellow men with the sibilant hisses and the bamboo shoots under the fingernails. These are Johnny and Billy and Gus from Trenton and Denver and Cleveland. They aren’t supposed to be infanticides.

  So now we learn the truth we always knew. We are as rotten as them. Violence knows no color barrier. Those who ball their fists keep going until they slaughter children. Now America has to face it.

  No, Spiro, we can’t let you silence the news media. We need to know the truth. Unpleasant as it may be, we have to have the truth now.

  There isn’t enough blood or time left in the world to permit your kind of dissembling, Spiro.

  Hey…Spiro…you know what you are, man? You’re the guy who greased that Lieutenant’s trigger-finger.

  50: 2 JANUARY 70

  POISONED BY THE FANGS OF SPIRO: PART I

  Ugly, baby. Just righteously ugly. Dayton, Ohio, I mean. (Yeah, that’s why my column’s been absent for the last few weeks. I went to Dayton to deliver a lecture, and what happened there was such a bummer, such a downer, such a shitter, that I didn’t even have the stuff to write a column. I’ll tell you all about it. Might take three columns, but I’ll lay it all on you, because it has to do with the power of fear generated by one of the great tv stars of our times, Spiro T. Agnew.)

  I come to you, bloody and slightly bowed. To be perfectly honest, friends, I feel like Peter Fonda, AKA Captain America, living a real-life version of Easy Rider.

  The hero of Easy Rider comes up against the violent fear and insanity of midcentury America, and gets his head blown off for his trouble. I didn’t get my head blown off, merely got my mouth closed, but the background is much the same, and from the encounter I’ve drawn some inescapable conclusions, the first of which is:

  AMERICA IS ENTERING A PERIOD OF REPRESSION AND WITCH-HUNTING THAT WILL MAKE THE TERROR TIMES OF THE McCARTHY ERA SEEM LIKE THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

  I will now proceed, through the fascinating relating of my travails, to document my thesis. Pax.

  Early in September, I was contacted by the Dayton Living Arts Center, in the person of Barbara Benham, its Creative Writing Director. She wanted me to come to Ohio in the capacity of a “Guest Artist” to both work with the students in the science fiction writing course, and to deliver an evening lecture to adults and college level students. We started negotiations.

  (The Living Arts Center itself is a groove. It is a federally funded operational Project to Advance Creativity in Education—PACE—financed under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Its purposes are to “identify, nurture, and evaluate the creative potential of youngsters whose interests lie in the Fine Arts—creative writing, dance, drama, music and the visual arts.” The participating students number from eight to twelve hundred, in grades 5 to 12, who show up at the Center after school and on weekends. The programs are varied and the faculty is top level. I lay all of this in, in front, in an effort to establish that the Center itself, and the faculty, are dynamite. Whatever horrors came down, they were by no means the fault of the Center and its instructors. Administration is another matter, and we’ll get to that shortly. But if you see parallels between the Center and what has happened at colleges all across America, you will understand that it is not necessarily the faculty or the institution itself that is repressive, it is almost always the politicians, the “educators” in their little suits and ties, the Administration that takes its stand for censorship, control, rules®s, guidelines, and a brutal maintaining of the no-waves status quo…usually at the expense of the very kids they prattle about “serving.”)

  Through Barbara Benham, negotiations for my three days attendance (December 15, 16 and 17) were completed on the 22nd of October, and contracts were signed by myself and the Administrative Director, Jack A. DeVelbiss. His is not the name most properly to bear in mind. The name with which we will deal is Glenn Ray, a dude I will not soon forget. Nor, if I have my way, will he soon forget me.

  Now understand something: Dayton was my 152nd speaking appearance in the last five years. I’ve spoken to all levels of audience, from junior high school crowds through college level groups to adult audiences. With the exception of a horrendous situation that arose last Labor Day at the World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis, I’ve never had any trouble. In fact, I’ve been asked back to speak second and even third times at some of the universities. I did not anticipate any trouble in Dayton, though my encounters in the Great American Heartland these last two years have hipped me to the growing tensions and tendencies to shy away from anyone bearing news of unrest from the outside world.

  In a letter dated September 25th, Miss Benham tried—in a delicate way—to forewarn me of the tenor of Dayton thinking. She wrote, in part:

  “As the Center depends on public support for its continuation, deliberate provocation is dangerous for us. I hope that, without being untrue to yourself, you can focus mainly on literature (from any angle, including its role in revolution) as opposed to politics.”

 
; I replied, on September 29th, “It is my intention to win them, not alienate them. I will not, repeat NOT provoke anyone. If you want a rabble-rouser, get someone else. I try to tell some truth in the course of my discussions of writing and the place of the committed writer in our society, and that occasionally upsets a few people who are locked into socio-economic or religious boxes, but in the main it is my intention to bring light, not darkness.

  “As to my subject matter—you seem concerned I’ll deliver a Julian Bond/Rap Brown diatribe—being literature rather than politics, yes, of course. I’m a writer. That’s what I do, and it’s what I know. But since I conceive of the role of the creator in our Times as inextricably involved with the world through which he moves, it is inevitable that my discourses will slop over into human behavior, the state of the world, the effect of committed writing on the tenor of the Times, honesty and ethic in writing, et cetera.

  “If any or all of these unnerve you, or lead you to believe I’ll be doing your program more harm than good, I suggest again that you reconsider hiring me. The only guarantees I can offer are predicated on my past experiences with groups similar to the one for which I presume I’ll be speaking (straight, middle-class, white mid-America folk who seem disturbed at the changes happening around them): they seem to relate to me, seem to appreciate someone telling them things straight out, and the leavening of humor I include inclines them to hang in there for the entire set. I’ve never had a riot or an insurrection.”

  Not till Dayton, that is.

  We pause at this point to refresh your memories about the philosophical line all this history is taking: Spiro Agnew, the first vice-president of the United States to suffer from terminal foot-in-mouth disease; the power of tv in mass communicating instantly to an entire nation a gagging fear and horror of change; the use of the mass media to convince a middle-class white population that too much knowledge in the hands of longhaired freaks and natural-haired niggers is a deadly thing; the reassurances of dangerous slayers like Spiro that the final grasp for repressive power by the old order is, in reality, a rallying around the flag by a mythical “silent majority” of God-Fearing Good Solid Americans. And outside, peace on earth…