“Dear Harlan:
“Quite literally, these quotes scare the shit out of me. The rage, the fear, the willingness of people to kill merely because someone rejects their values; one sits stunned and says, ‘How? How could people be like that?’ And the sad part of a…book like ‘The Glass Teat’ is that the people quoted here, the people who really need to read it will never see it. You may not convert any of the Silent Majority of Common Men but I’d like you to know that at a time when events were conspiring to make some of us feel that there was just no hope, no use in going on in a nation where Cambodia and Kent and New York construction workers can occur, that your book was dug, that it gave at least a ray of hope that we do have a spokesman who may be heard and that as long as one voice remains unsilenced there is a chance. So tonight we’ll go on the demonstration no matter how futile it may seem and at the very least we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that our countries did not go to Hell unlamented. Thanks for your book, Harlan. We needed it.”
Signed, Mike Glicksohn, Ottawa, Ontario.
And, oh god, the other letters. The one from the sixty-year-old man in Moline: terrified, concerned, lost, asking for personal words beyond the book or the column, suggesting what he can do. The letter from the GI in Vietnam that ended with inarticulate grief for not only any strangers he may have killed while firing into a village, but for those four kids at Kent State. A letter of shame and remorse and hopelessness at his own inability to flee the battlefield and suffer the prison to which they would certainly send him. The letters, the many letters, so many voices from both sides…
And TV Guide gives us Spiro, by Norman. God, how can such blindness, such terrible cruelty exist?
Mr. Conrad says I am a good man, and Mike Glicksohn says I am a spokesman for him and the others who demonstrated. No.
No!
I can’t be trusted, either. None of us can. Over thirty isn’t the gauge. Pollution of the morals is. Don’t trust me…trust only yourselves. I didn’t die at Kent State…you did. Your brothers and your sisters. Shot down by the editors of TV Guide and the prime rib and pork diners at the Lions Club, and Spiro, of course, and all of us who got past your age and learned nothing. Our morals and our ethics have been hopelessly polluted by decades of killing and lying and rationalizing and seeking vindication in the wholly untrustworthy approbation of that killer animal, “the majority.”
How can people be like that, Mike Glicksohn? I’ll tell you. McLuhan was right. We’ve watched the deaths of thousands on the glass teat for almost twenty years, and now we are systemically ready to witness the deaths of tens of thousands, of millions, if necessary. They are no longer human beings going to meet their various Makers with blind eyes staring at dreams that will never be. They are statistics.
“280 Viet Cong were killed in the human wave at Bunker City, Cambodia. One American dead.”
Bullshit! Do you believe that!?! Every day the tv news dons its Howard K. Smith serious face and tells us nine million VC were planted, and three Americans stubbed their toes. Yet at week’s end, the legitimate (?) totals are released, and last week, a week in which the daily newsvideo reports totaled 13 American deaths, the final tally was 168, highest in four months. They are lying to us. Even as I lie to you. I lie, and they lie, because we are weak, and we have been lying so long we don’t know what it means to be honest and upfront.
So don’t trust us, any of us. None of us who live good and dine at the Lions Club and say tsk-tsk what a terrible shame, and stuff more prime rib in our mouths.
Trust only yourselves.
Work to change it, if you can. But it may even be too late by years for that.
If we were truly to work for something, we should work to have all guns banned in this country. Take the guns and the gas from the cops. Turn them out on foot with batons if necessary, but let them work in the community the way London bobbies work, sans firearms. Then they would have to deal with the kids vis-à-vis, face to face, and maybe, just maybe, they would have to start acting like human beings, not killing automatons.
Talk about tv? Maybe next week. But this week my thoughts—and yours, for god’s sake—are on the other choices.
Choices like the bomb, like the fire, like the swift knife in the dark.
They are terrible choices, because they are no choices at all. They are hideous extremities to which we are being pushed.
TV this week? No…my thoughts are somewhere else. They are with small groups of guerrilla fighters in Ohio and Kansas and Georgia, ex-students who have renounced their names, their homes, all ties. Who, packing plastique in haversacks, roam the countryside blowing up the Lions clubs, shooting down Ohioans like Dick Richards and Don Ruble and Tom Bohlander and Harry Miller and Dale Miller where they stand on the corner of Water and Main, discussing how they will protect their fucking property. My thoughts are of an America seeded with killer-skirmishers who have been driven mad as mudflies by the death clutch on outdated values and phony patriotism of their parents, the government, and vested interests.
Four died in Kent and the world mourned. That is because we have been so morally polluted by McLuhanesque imagery that it takes a new kind of death to move us. Six blacks were gunned down in the streets of Augusta, Georgia, just a few days later, and no one mourns. But we mourn those four white middle-class kids. That is the final extreme to which we have been brought by lies and unilateral brutality and the holy informant, God-Mother tv. We have become a nation melded into one Roman arena surfeiting on various kinds of murder. Kill blacks and we yawn…we’ve seen that…lions and Christians are old stuff…but move on to a fresh thrill…kill the white middle class
…and we sparkle.
How can people be like that, Mike? If a man sits and sips his beer placidly at the sight of thousands writhing in the love grip of jellied gasoline, how can he be terribly concerned about four more?
And you expect truth from them? You expect to be able to reach them? Dear god, I hope so. I hope all of you who have cut your hair and are moving through the communities speaking softly, all of you know what you’re up against. And from even those of us who lie and know we lie, there is a desperate hope that you can penetrate to us; because if you don’t, the next time we’ll see you, you’ll be part of some smash&grab kill force moving through the Great American Heartland, and you’ll have been reduced to the level of bestiality on which the Lions Club diners exist.
Television comment? Not hardly. These are days of blood and sorrow. If only there were some light.
66: 29 MAY 70
Repression, like politics, makes strange bedfellows. Consider CBS. A monolith whose sins against public sensibilities crawl the trough from silencing the Smothers Brothers to hiring Edward “Ned” Hamlin as News Coordinator of Broadcast Research “in a position in which he will have ready access to the CBS News film library, including outtakes.” (Mr. Hamlin was, until recently, an employee of the CIA since 1965, climbing high enough in the ranks to direct research projects on Latin America, and—for the last year—was on assignment from the CIA’s Office of National Estimates to the National Security Council. No conclusions are to be drawn from this tiny item secreted at the bottom of a column in Variety, of course. The inferences, however, are painfully, ominously obvious.)
How strange it is, then, to find ourselves allied with CBS in the battle of the mouth gag. For since Spiro the Mad began his rabid frothings against anti-Administration comment on the networks, the only one of the three major nets to not only refuse to bow in the direction of the White Pentagon, but also to step up its criticism of Nixon and his saber-rattlers, has been CBS.
And this past week Americans were treated to a display of battling-back-at-the-bully that leads me to some effusive praise of an otherwise chicken-shit organization. Last week, CBS defied the Pentagon. And they won. And it was a nice thing to see.
For those of you who may have missed the brouhaha, I’ll fill in the details.
On November 3, 1969, CBS News aired a
film clip narrated by correspondent Don Webster, in which a South Vietnamese soldier brutally stabbed a wounded, captured Viet Cong prisoner. It didn’t make much of a splash, Silent Majority-wise…just one more fish-eyed gook type sliced open…fuck’m. But the Pentagon went straight up the wall, did a fingernail hang and promptly fielded an accusing finger: CBS was guilty of falsifying the film.
Spiro-primed, the Pentagon (drunk with a seemingly unstoppable inertia which, had it a voice, would say if you can’t store nerve gas in Oregon, send it to Alaska…tell the American people the Minutemen missiles won’t be fielded till late in July, and plant them in April…and break your ass to get that damnable Cooper-Church bill subverted and weakened and defanged and clobbered and killed) leaked to such soul-purchased columnists as Jack Anderson and Richard Wilson that the CBS news department had (a) faked horror scenes from Vietnam on at least three occasions, (b) planned a “staged invasion” of Haiti so they could film it as a special, (c) “staged incidents of police brutality” during the 1968 Democratic Convention, and (d) arranged to film an illegal pot party in Chicago. But more than these charges, the White House and the Pentagon were pissed off at CBS because, unlike ABC and NBC, they have refused to cooperate with witch-hunting, whitewashing Army investigators in revealing their news sources. The White House doesn’t like that. It smacks of freedom of the press; and as one of those “secret” White House memos (that always seem to get leaked, in the style of hypocrisy pioneered by American Presidents as far back as Rutherford B. Hayes, but brought to its fullest flower by LBJ and Nixuleh…mickeymouse politics, cynicism-weaned younger folk call it) puts it: CBS shouldn’t be allowed to use “freedom of the press” to get away with “fraud by the press.”
Well, hell, friends. On Thursday night, May 21, on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the youth protest and antiwar and up-against-the-wall-with-Spiro factions all climbed into the same big king-size bed with CBS for a mutual gang bang using the Pentagon as trollop. Whoooopee!
The Pentagon charged the film shown was not of American helicopters, they were Australian. Or if they were Yankee, they were Medevacs. They charged the film was not of a fire fight, it was a South Vietnamese grenade practice maneuver. And they charged the VC was already dead. (And since we saw that South Vietnamese soldier pull out the knife and jam it in again, this must mean mutilation of bodies is okay. But then, after all, those Orientals “think differently” and who are we to condemn their inscrutable manner? We are only to intrude in their inscrutable wars, apparently.)
CBS refuted every point. Handily. The choppers were quite clearly attached to the 187th Assault Helicopter Squadron based out of Tay Ninh. They proved it wasn’t a training maneuver by pinpointing the date and location of the filming—October 1969, near the village of Bau Me, four miles north of the district town of Trang Bang in Hau Nguia Province. And CBS fielded the accusation that there were no American advisers standing by and watching the atrocity by rerunning the film clip, stop-action, see that man there? Well, he’s wearing a patch on his right shoulder of the U.S. First Air Cavalry Division.
And when it got right down to the core of the presentation, CBS flipped the Pentagon its own screaming bird by not only naming the soldier, but his rank, serial number, and…an on-the-spot interview with the slob in which he admitted having done it. He spoke with some pride.
His name is Nguyen Van Mot, a sergeant first class, HQ Company, Group 21, South Vietnamese Regional Forces, serial number 178-704. As CBS put it, through the mouth of the much-maligned Webster, who was narrating: “Not only is Sergeant Mot still on duty, but he was named soldier of the year for 1969 for all regional forces in three corps.”
It figures.
And when Webster questioned a first lieutenant who has been with
Mot’s unit since February, CBS viewers were treated to the following delicious interchange:
WEBSTER: What kind of a soldier is Sergeant Mot?
FIRST LIEUTENANT RICHARD SHOWALTER: Sergeant Mot typifies, I think, the hard-nosed, hard-core…what you might say, Vietnamese soldier. If I had a company of Sergeant Mots, I think everybody could go home over here in…within the next year…without a doubt.
WEBSTER: Among his own troops he has a reputation of being very tough…a killer. Is he really tough?
SHOWALTER: Ah, definitely so. Ah, if he finds a prisoner or anything in a bunker or anything…ah, if we can get some firsthand information from him, Sergeant Mot’s the man to find him and the man to get the information.
WEBSTER: What does Sergeant Mot do when you do take a prisoner?
SHOWALTER: Well, Sergeant Mot, as you know, is a short, kind of a husky character in comparison to his Vietnamese counterparts and ah, he is forceful to a degree, but this is necessary since the information we can gain out here firsthand is most important to us, and ah…he…ah…can definitely get his point across to the prisoner.
Tasty, eh? To be sure, Sergeant Mot can get his point across; but it’s doubtful how much information he can get from prisoners (unless he receives spirit messages), because CBS then ran a bit of the film they’d excerpted…the prisoner shortly after Sergeant Mot had left the scene: the poor sonof abitch had been sliced open and gutted, from neck to sternum.
Well, why go on. The Pentagon got caught with its mouth gag showing. It tried to intimidate one of the three largest disseminators of mass information in America, and it didn’t pull off the job. CBS fought back and whipped the piss out of the Secret Masters of the Universe.
All of which goes to make two very obvious points.
The first is that for anyone who cares to examine what is coming down de facto, it is apparent that all of Spiro’s protestations notwithstanding, the Administration is trying (and probably succeeding more often than we know) to regulate the news, exercise police state repression, and keep the mindless mass convinced everyone is lying save them.
The second, and more encompassing, is that the forces being brought to bear on us to keep us in line will not stop with far lefters, with militants, with Black Panthers, with hippies, with dissidents, or even liberals. Those forces will continue sweeping straight across the boundaries and begin trying to silence the moderates, the middle-of-the-roaders, the conservatives, and finally be left with none but the most slavishly devoted of the right-wing lunatics.
This kind of hammering of our rights into a shape more acceptable to a President who throws a fit of pique when someone catches him with his paws in the cookie jar…this kind of censorship and flummery…this kind of brutalizing intimidation cannot be allowed to continue. It is to be hoped that CBS’s example will serve to toughen the moral fiber of its two rivals, and the battle won will be taken as a signal to the more humane elements in our government that now, right now, this moment, is the time to bring to an ass-grinding halt the onrush of totalitarianism being used to steamroller freedom in this country. Greased by the military-industrial whatever, this forward plunge of lunacy and intimidation can end only with all power in the hands of a cabal whose members will all wear the faces of Spiro Nixon and sport screaming eagles on their epaulets.
Well done, CBS, you otherwise crummy bastards.
67: 19 JUNE 70
The letters to remember are V and S, T and V. The last two you may recognize; they stand for Terrible Viewing. To change their meaning, we must add the first two letters, whose meaning is Viewer Sponsored. Put them all together they spell VSTV, which is hardly mother, but then it isn’t garbage television either. But before we get to the good guys, there are villains to make their appearance. Here comes the first one.
How’s this for a smash evening lineup on a Los Angeles channel:
6:00 - Monday night—Parent Education, Preschool
7:00 - Monday night—Careers in city and state government
7:30 - Monday night—Opportunities in the military service
8:00 - Wednesday night—Adult Education, Gerontology
8:30 - Wednesday night—Showcase Theater (Student productions
from local colleges and universities)
(And here’s a heavyweight guaranteed to keep you rooted in front of your set):
7:00 Friday night—What’s new at the Public Library?
But don’t think these are only the high points of the schedule. There are others, equally as mind-boggling and scintillant. And lest you think I’m making this up, this brilliant viewing fare (perhaps as an ideal week’s tv for inmates of a Beverly Boulevard convalescent home), let me hip you that what I’ve noted above is the parital content of a proposed weekly schedule of programs for Channel 58…should the Los Angeles Unified School District be awarded the license to operate 58…the last unused channel in a major American city.
That ghastly feeling you have in the pit of your stomach is nausea. You may recall it from the most recent Spiro Agnew film clip.
Yes, there is one remaining license to be granted for a television outlet in Los Angeles. Fifty-eight is up for grabs, and one of the three contenders for ownership is the Board of Education. The chains you hear rattling in the background are a ghoulie named Reagan and a ghostie named Rafferty.
But don’t panic, the B of E isn’t the only outfit making a bid for that license. There are two alternate choices.
The first is the cadre at KCET, Channel 28, the ones who employ the good offices of National Educational Television, that NET all you wondrous highbrows are constantly writing me to promote. Well, they’re good folks at 28 (hell, I went and auctioned for them last week, didn’t I?), but I fear they have trouble even keeping KCET on the air. And I don’t see much sense in giving two television outlets in the same city to a group whose thirty-five-member board of directors represent the moneyed classes heavily but which do not represent Blacks, Chicanos, Orientals: in short, any ethnic or racial minorities or groups of low socioeconomic standing. (To be specific, a study of KCET’s board membership, by Professor Harry M. Scoble of UCLA, turned up a number of interesting aspects of interlocking proprietorship, not the least of which is that something over 53 per cent of the board membership is made up of bankers, business corporation executives and directors, members of the commercial media, and dudes involved inextricably with real estate, advertising, investments, and random CPAing. “Furthermore,” as Professor Scoble summarizes one section of the survey, “there is no known producer of documentaries, no producer, no director, no critic [academic or otherwise], and no academic who…has concentrated upon the socializing effects of the mass media.”)
The Other Glass Teat Page 9