Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  It’s a simple enough conclusion at which to arrive, and I don’t take any special credit for having stumbled on it. What amazes me is that the three major networks—with all their trend paraphernalia and pulse takings—didn’t get hip to what was happening long ago. (Radio was on to it fifteen years ago.)

  The core fact is this: people under the age of thirty-one simply don’t watch tv any more.

  Oh, sure, under the age of thirteen kids still groove on The Archies and Land of the Giants, but kids that age have nowhere near the money to spend on gross national product, and the big buying these days is being done by affluent Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. (And speaking of the national product, it gets pretty gross indeed when discussing The Archies. But that is another column, another time.)

  All of which sums up to mean that the largest segment of the purchasing public is ignoring the most widespread, most effective, most expensive advertising medium in the world. The alter kockers who used to be the big consumers of cars, clothes, condiments, and crap—now they hoard their pennies and wait for better times. So we see automobiles slanted toward the “youth market.” We must go—spiked and helmeted—onto streets amuck with Mustangs, Cobras, Barracudas, Cougars, Falcons, Darts, Chargers, Thunderbirds, Road Runners, Gila Monsters, Leviathans, Piranhas, and other symbolically named implements of sudden death and painful disfigurement…all of which are grotesquely over-powered for streets and freeways on which they will never legally be allowed to exercise maximum output.

  We see advertisements in which all the actors are youthful, “beautiful” people, selling everything from Love Blush cosmetics to vaginal deodorant (and one can only sit back and smile in wonder at the implications of that one, fellow sex maniacs). Nowhere do we see those crinkled, spasmed senior citizens this country spent so many decades assuring us were the golden fruits of years of honest toil. Silva-Thins being lipped by a Dirty Old Man? Never! You can take Salems out of the country: shot at Sun City instead of Antibes? Hardly.

  The trend has long been up. We are a youth-oriented, adolescence-crazed nation in which it will surely soon be a felony to be old and withered. Growing old gracefully simply ain’t good business.

  So tv isn’t getting the audience with the money—only laundry detergents, seemingly, are holding their own—the unliberated household drudges still flash on the soapers and dutifully buy the sponsor’s sheet whiteners, also seemingly, so they can one-up their neighbor lady, who has been crapping cookies because her laundry is only dazzlingly white instead of supernova white. And not getting the money makes the sponsors unhappy, which makes them make the networks unhappy, which means pretty jackrabbit quick somebody’s going to have to start rethinking the situation.

  For a moment: why aren’t the movers and shakers and buyers watching tv? Certainly it’s no worse than in years past—though admittedly that’s like saying your cancer hasn’t gotten any more terminal—and in terms of public affairs programming and technical quality, it is startlingly impressive. The answer, like the entire concept, is quite simple. TV is no longer relevant for them. They are out moving, shaking, and occasionally buying. But their moving and shaking is in terms of the whole culture, not the mythical little dream worlds proffered on network television. And when they buy, they go to the boutiques—not Sears or Monkey Ward. The alter kockers go there, and that means that almost 50 per cent of the purchasing public is being bypassed by tv advertising.

  So. When Nixon comes out in favor of the eighteen-year-old vote, it means even that cinderblockhead has gotten hip to the power of the young, and can the dunces of the major networks be far behind? And the only way they can grab you and me and the kids of all ages who reject the pap sloshed out across the tube, is to make it more relevant. Immediatize the medium, as the boys in the ad agencies would phrase it, clever lads that they are.

  Which means, ergo, that very soon we’re going to see some tv fare that will speak to the times, some programming that conceives of young people as something more than receivers for endless pop music and acne commercials.

  To bring 50 per cent of the American people back to the glass teat means dispelling the mist images of what network programmers think we want to see; it means abandoning the refurbishing of old series ideas with new casts and miniskirts; it means getting into things and taking stands and to hell with Spiro.

  (And so you won’t think I’ve forgotten him, here is the latest. I heard him referred to last week as The Great Kiwani. For those of you who’ve attended Kiwanis or Elks or American Legion rallies or parades, you know what loveliness that accolade contains.)

  It won’t happen next season, or maybe even the season after that, because the big advertisers aren’t hurting that badly yet. But when 10 percent of their buying audience croaks in the next two or three years, they’ll begin to understand that young people today have had eighteen years of this drivel and simply ain’t going for the okey-doke. Then the tremors hit.

  Then they start demanding the networks come up with a more immediate product for them to subsidize. Then, in the only way it can happen, through the motivation of naked greed, we take over the mass media. Then the ground swell trends from the Great American Heartland begin to go in the direction of peace symbols rather than crummy phony American flag decals. Then love-it-or-leave-it vanishes and change-it-or-lose-it becomes the modus operandi. Then all the good guys who want to get it together will have their chance to put this sinkhole back in functioning order, and guys like me who cry for blood can go back to our pipes and slippers, rocking back and forth on our back porches in the setting sun.

  Sure we can.

  56: 6 MARCH 70

  “Baby, you been took—your idealism slobbered all over your common sense, and you didn’t even notice. No wonder you are anti-dope—people who get as high on hope as you do don’t need grass.”

  I got that last week in a letter from Pauline Burton in Long Beach.

  “Where do you suppose all the crud from inside those dirty engines goes during the six-tankful treatment with F-310? Into the air, you idiot. I hope you haven’t as many readers with as little sense about this as you.”

  I got that one—sincerely—from Richard K. Koch in Beverly Hills.

  Kitty Vallacher from the Freep called me the day after the column two weeks ago, the column I wrote on Standard’s Chevron F-310 gasoline, and she chewed my ear about how I’d been duped. A man from the People’s Lobby called me the day after and sent me reeling with facts, statistics, data, condemnations, and rhetoric. Most of it sounded valid. He said he’d prepare some information to refute the F-310 claims.

  A friend told me, “Sure, you did it because you thought you were right, but you were had, friend. You’re a good guy, but even good guys can be gullible sometimes.”

  I spoke at UC Irvine and an audience of three hundred students pinned me to a blackboard with what a tout I’d become for Standard, one of the biggest polluters in Southern California.

  Word was passed that the Federal consumer fraud division, the FTC, and the FCC had been turned loose on Standard for their tv commercials and their claims.

  Mark Brenizer in Tarzana sent me The Writer’s Cramp, a newsletter out of Woodland Hills devoted to straightening out our ecology, and its front-page lead story was headlined UNETHICAL AND MISLEADING ADVERTISING BY STANDARD OIL. HOW GOOD IS F-310?

  It has been a hellish two weeks for me, readers.

  I don’t mind Mr. Koch’s gratuitous rudeness. That’s just his way, I suppose. He has to live with it, not me. I don’t even mind the half-dozen unsigned letters I received that insulted me, my beliefs, my genealogy, and my sexual practices. Anyone without the guts to sign his hate mail obviously hasn’t the guts to go find out the truth anyway. What I do mind are the letters from people like Michael Boyles and Ms. P.D.W. (who requested I not use her name if I referred to her letter) who obviously like me, like what I write, and think I’m an honest man. They are fans of this column, and they were disappointed in
my “having been taken in.”

  It is very possible I made a stupid mistake. It is also possible I recommended something out of misguided faith and a desire to do “a good thing” that is detrimental to the very cause I was espousing.

  I don’t know that yet.

  I do know, however, that I put my word behind something that seemed to be what it said it was, and I’ve gotten more feedback and static on it than anything I’ve ever written in these pages. I don’t know that I’m wrong…yet. But I’m damn well going to find out. And when I do, I’ll let you know.

  I urge those of you who have facts, who know, for sure, to write me, care of the Free Press. Though I try to keep this column tied in with television (however flimsily at times), having put myself on the line on this one, I guess I’ll have to follow it through. At this point I need to know, and I need those of you who can help me (and by extension other readers of this column) to send me the various information that can answer the question once and for all. Let’s not fuck around with whether or not Chevron used guy wires to hold up that goddamned balloon in their commercials so it could be seen better, or whether they phonied up the plastic bag with the car inside it. Let’s deal strictly with the bottom line on this caper: does F-310 help stop pollution or does it do other things that make it a pollutant, or is it a straight fraud?

  Because if it does any good at all, without side effects that are worse than what it’s supposed to be cleaning up, then what I said was ethically and morally correct. If it does nothing, or if it increases, say, the nitrogen oxides in the air, then I was stupid and incorrect and I deserve to get my face slapped for commending it to you from a pinnacle of self-righteousness.

  This column isn’t a forum for debate on the merits of consumer items, but in this case I’ve maybe stuck my foot in it, so as the next weeks pass I’ll be coming back to this, and passing along everything I learn. I ask your patience and indulgence and attention till we know.

  Additionally, I would appreciate your writing to Mr. William J. Murphy (Public Relations Counsel, Standard Oil Co. of California, 605 West Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles) and suggesting to him, politely if you can manage it, Mr. Koch, that he spend a little time providing this columnist with irrefutable proof that what I was doing for Chevron was helping people breathe cleaner air, and not touting just another boondoggle.

  Let us reason together, as another potential jerk once said.

  Sunday night I watched The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time in maybe five years. I find it the kind of program totally beneath my notice, like the Jackie Gleason hours (which, happily, will no longer consume an hour of Saturday primetime, Mr. Gleason having been put out to pasture, though I find it amusing that, the moment his cancellation was announced, he was phoned up by Nixon, who wanted him to work for the Administration in some nitwit capacity or other). But I watched Sunday because they were doing an hour tribute to The Beatles.

  I should have known better.

  This seems to be my stage of development wherein I’m easily flummoxed. But then, I believe in the Easter bunny, so what the hell better can you expect?

  It was an hour of bastardization of fine music that I suppose delighted the folks in Cedar Rapids and Buffalo. It made me wanna fwow up.

  They took the completely original and madly compelling music of four damn-near-nonpareils and turned it into second-rate Muzak. They didn’t make love or show affection or decently fuck, they had sexless sex. Faceless fornication. A thoroughly loveless act, because it was performed without soul or gut or understanding.

  One can’t blame Sullivan. He’s an old man who can barely remember his lines, who calls Dionne Warwick Diane Warwick because he just doesn’t know; he goes through his paces like a solemn fire horse; I saw him once out near Palm Desert, in killing heat, filming a segment for the show, with his shirt off, and he’s more scar tissue than healthy flesh. It’s a wonder to me the old guy can still walk, much less do a turn each Sunday. So don’t blame him.

  In fact, don’t blame anyone. But consider this:

  Even the music can be corrupted. They can take even something as pure as the sounds and turn them into shit for the monkeymass. And if they can do that, how much easier it must be to take political theory, revolutionary activity, dissent, all of the paraphernalia of the barricades and corrupt them, turn them against their own people, use them to keep us in line.

  Watching that Sullivan potpourri—with Eydie Gorme and Steve Lawrence generically, systematically, and artistically incapable of even approximating what The Beatles had put down, thereby causing wonder what all the Beatle shouting was about, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything happening there—I was reminded of the Stones concert at Altamont, in a strange way. Like this:

  There is an important new magazine just published, which I recommend to you without reservation (unless my F-310 position has put me in question). It is called Scanlan’s Monthly and the dude behind it is Warren Hinckle III, formerly of Ramparts. It is the complete muckraking journal, and it is so filled with good stuff you’ll gladly tote up the buck to buy it. Anyhow, in the first issue, there is a mightily heavy piece on Altamont and the concert, by Sol Stern. In talking about the horrors that went down at that drag-strip purgatory, he spoke of the Hell’s Angels and the murder of Meredith Hunter and the music in these terms:

  “We hated them, hated them and envied them all at the same time. For all of their brutality and ugliness they had a definition of themselves and their purpose that showed us up. We had all talked about a counter-community for years—and now, with that community massed in one place, we couldn’t relate to anything. In their primitive way, and without talking much about it, the Angels were so together that less than 100 of them were able to take over and intimidate a crowd of close to a half-million people. We had talked about solidarity, but they, not us, were willing to go down for each other in a showdown. We had the music but they had a purpose, and everyone in that atomized, alienated mass in front of the stage knew it, and that was their incredible power over us.”

  The italics in that last sentence are mine. One more quote, from Frank Bardacke, one of the Oakland Seven and a leader of the People’s Park Struggle, then I’ll make my point. “I think the killing of Meredith Hunter was to our community what the Kitty Genovese murder was to the straight community.

  “It showed that if you’re going to have a new nation in which you make up new rules, then you have to have more than shared needs. You need to have shared values. Out there [at Altamont] we didn’t have those shared moral values and so we didn’t have the courage to stop the violence that led to the murder of a black man.”

  Shared needs. The music. A weapon used against us.

  Why didn’t the Woodstock Nation of half a million people rise up against the Visigoths in their midst and stop the Angels? Why did everyone stay on, even after the beating and the stomping grew omnipresent? Answer: to hear the Stones. To get their needs fulfilled by the music.

  Easy enough, I guess, to burn down a Bank of America (and while I dig it, I can’t really say it was the smartest attack maneuver of the dissent generation), but not so easy in company with multitudes of others to put the arm on just one hundred thugs. What does that say about us?

  What does it say about the music being used to lull so many of us, to keep us sated but ineffectual?

  I’ve heard at least half a dozen big rock stars in the past year say they weren’t interested in politics, just in the music; that the music would pull us all together. That, obviously now, is bullshit. The music keeps the kids in a state of happy…but sure as hell isn’t getting the message of solidarity across. It’s one thing to hear some dude singing about loving one another, and really loving a strange black man enough to risk your ass by grabbing the pool cue being used to stave in his head.

  No, the music isn’t enough. It is a tool that can be used to draw us into one nation, but—as the Sullivan show demonstrates—it is a double-edged sword that can be turned to the purpos
e of anyone smart enough to alter it.

  Altamont, the Angels, Meredith Hunter, the Bank of America, the Chicago 7 convictions, repression, solidarity, and Ed Sullivan. Does anyone else out there see the horrifying connections? Or are we so used to holding those little transistor radios up to our ears as we walk the Strip that the noise level has grown too high for us to detect the wail of ourselves, dying along with our dying culture?

  57: 13 MARCH 70

  VIDEO VOYEURISM: PART ONE

  Before your very eyes. Two polarizations:

  He’s casually slumped in a terrace chair, overlooking what seems to be the Riviera. He’s good-looking in that surly cinéma vérité attitude, hair longish and eyes smoldering. His clothes are midway between Errol Flynn and Bobby Sherman, shirt open to midchest. A girl who could not possibly be filmed in anything but soft focus lounges against the railing of the terrace. Her eyes seem misted with adoration, yet faintly discernible in the lovely contours of her face can be seen the mark of the innocent, the victim. She watches him without speaking. (Has he just come from a sex bout with her, an encounter fraught with mild sadism and screams of passion muffled into a pillow? It seems likely.)

  He turns to us languidly. “I know what girls need,” he says. “They don’t need fake eyelashes and brassieres and all that stuff. What girls need is a little love.”

  Who could doubt him? Is he not the epitome of caddish self-assurance? Is he not stylish, indolent, surfeited with the unasked-for treasures of the world? Is he not what each of us with our muzzy morning-breath and razor-nicks would wish to be, had we but a genie’s boon?

  Then—and get this, because it’s the key to getting it on with unattainable women—he hauls the girl across the terrace by the waistband of her slacks. She comes, Jack, she just comes! She don’t linger, she moves it!

  And he touches her alabaster skin with a gentle/rough finger; a touch of possession, of power and authority over this incredible dream-creature you or I could never even share a dimensional plane with. He touches her face with a holy solution, with a mystic ablutive, with a scented magic, and he says, “Love’s a little color…and you can use it to put something on your cheeks, or your chin, or even that little nose of yours. And no one will know you have it