The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  Last night, on an ABC sitcom called Head of the Class, the character of Charlie Moore, teacher of a group of high-IQ honors students in a New York high school, played by Howard Hesseman, is summed up by one of his smug, computer-linked nerds as a “refugee from the Sixties.” Charlie Moore lives in Greenwich Village, wears his hair with a slave-tail lock hanging over his collar, tries to imbue his charges with the subtleties and personalities behind the cold dates of historical events, is humane and passionate and bemusedly dedicated to the nobility of teaching with excellence.

  He is a refugee from the Sixties…

  As opposed to the prototypical yuppie-in-training we see around us as the paradigm of the Eighties, the icon movies and television proffer as the billboard ideal for us all: the self-serving, essentially hollow, mass-consuming, fad-following, cowardly, afraid to speak up refugee of the Me Decade.

  It has become Accepted Wisdom that those who were “active” in the Sixties (actually the decade roughly beginning with the inauguration of JFK in 1961 and ending with the disgrace of Nixon in 1973) gave us nothing of value. That it was a twelve-year carnival of clowns. A time of folderol and flapping jaws. That it was a cultural aberration, from which the rich and prosperous Eighties, in all its somnambulistic grandeur, derives no noble legacy.

  The phrase horse puckey leaps to mind.

  Strap me in the chair, turn on the juice, and fry my fruit salad: I remember a different Sixties. One the bashers labor mightily to discredit. A Sixties that kids weaned on the drumbox and frozen waffles cannot find in their parents’ scrapbooks among the shots of blissed-out flower children and vegetable-dye tattooed Deadheads at Altamont. The Sixties I remember was a time of life being lived at the edge of the skin, one filled with an entire nation of concerned, active Americans throwing off the restrictions of two hundred years of cultural hypocrisy and repression, challenging authority, refusing to believe the advertising-promoted lies about life and ethics that had been the hallmark of John Wayne’s Fifties.

  There was music in this land during the Sixties. Not just the sound of The Beatles or Dylan or Motown, but a song that spoke of human involvement. A melody of strength and commitment, to responsibility and giving a damn about the condition of life for everyone, not just those who could make the best bottom-line showing on the year-end annual report.

  The horn-tooter pauses.

  I was not a kid during the Sixties. I was born in 1934 (also not a terrific year). I was on the cusp of thirty when it all started, just about at that Never Trust Anyone Over age. But I was a kid in the Forties and I managed to live through the Fifties, if one employs the broadest definition of “living.” And therein lies the core of why the Sixties were, and remain, so important. The Fifties. Anyone who forgets or never knew what this country was like during those years of the military draft, the war in Korea, the resurgence of the Klan, the free and blithe testing of nuclear weapons, the miasma of fear produced by the McCarthy hearings, the blacklists, the Cold War hysteria, the selling of handy backyard atomic bomb shelters…simply does not remember, if they ever knew, just what an uptight, terrified place this place was. A young Hefner knew (said the horn-tooter, knowing which side his essay was buttered on). And he got a jump on the Sixties with this very magazine, that by the Sixties had already become a powerful anti-Fifties-sensibility pry-bar in dislodging a bogus and self-deluding image of The American Way.

  In the Fifties, anyone who did not subscribe to the idea that going to war was nobler than opting out, emptying bedpans in a hospital, and coming on as a Conscientious Objector…was looked on as subversive, suspect, cowardly and unAmerican.

  In the Fifties, schools had dress codes.

  In the Fifties, there were “good” girls; or “tramps” who did it in the back seats of Edsels. Those were the available categories. Women prepared meals, bore babies, fetched the coffee in offices and asserted their interest in serving the commonweal by rolling bandages at the hospital two afternoons a week. Norman Rockwell painted the family unit for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post; and in those paintings Mom was always smiling…no doubt as she looked forward to the load of dirty laundry waiting just offstage.

  In the Fifties the voices of America were Pat Boone, Patti Page and Connie Francis. Perry Como was the voice that resided in the perfection of the egg at the center of the universe.

  In the Fifties the lies that had sustained America through the Thirties and Forties began to crumble from ethical dryrot. We began to understand that we could not continue to delude ourselves that we were a nation formed in the melting-pot like some crazed Hollywood concept of the typical B-17 crew: 1 wop, 1 spic, 1 kike, 1 mick…but never any blacks. The supporting roles were all the same, all loveable in a harmless character-actor way; and save for that one stereotyped ethnic difference, they were interchangeable. In the Fifties, if you wanted to be a star of the first magnitude, you changed your name from Julius Garfinkle to John Garfield, from Margarita Carmen Cansino to Rita Hayworth, from Walter Matasschanskayasky to Walter Matthau; you didn’t even conceive of the possibility of getting a studio to make a picture starring anyone as “unbankable” as someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger, Meryl Streep or Emilio Estevez.

  In the Fifties, if your name was Eddie Murphy, you played an Irish cop.

  (Look at It’s A Wonderful Life, emblematic of all that was good in our view of ourselves—and as subtext, what was bad—the celluloid embodiment of all the attributes of earlier decades. The immigrants were all noble, all eager to lose their funny accents and foreign ways and stinky cooking, to be Just Plain Folks, melded and invisible with Whitebread WASPdom.)

  But by the late Fifties this attitude was seriously mildewed, thanks to McCarthyism, television, juvenile delinquency, an alcoholism rate soaring heavenward, Korea, and the rapid deterioration of the small communities within great cities that were once called “neighborhoods.” We snarled in our chains, and the Sixties waited, poised, to blow it all away.

  But I was no kid as the Sixties came rattling its changes. I do not look back on those times with blinders and sigh for the good old days. Though I was a part of much of it—the civil rights wars, the rise of the feminist movement, the breakouts in Arts and Letters, the anti-nuclear protests, the restructuring of political attitudes—I was in it, but not of it. Though I marched with King and Cesar Chavez, got myself on Governor Reagan’s subversives list, wrote columns for the L.A. FreePress, and lectured in hundreds of universities about the changes a new generation was happily forcing on us, I never accepted the bullshit and mickeymouse, the okeydoke and flummery of much of what individuals were doing; the gaffes and peccadilloes that the bashers now use to dismiss everything of consequence in that twelve-year decade.

  Like them, I snicker at Mellow Yellow banana-smoking as the drug of choice; wince at the self-consciousness of protest folksingers; revile the irresponsibility of Leary turning so many dips onto LSD; question the efficacy of Allen Ginsberg trying to levitate the Pentagon; and am simply reduced to porridge at the memory of a Woodstock audience believing if it chanted in unison it could stop the rain pissing on its holy ceremony. I praised the song of the Sixties, but I haven’t preserved my bell-bottom Levis with the appliquéd butterfly in misty adoration of a halcyon era softened by memory, or in expectation of its return, no matter how big a resurgence paisley is having.

  And who gives a shit that the campaign to eat natural-fiber breakfast cereals was led in the Sixties by Euell Gibbons, with John Denver munching along behind?

  The bashers can correctly ridicule a brainless philosophy like Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, but the song of the Sixties was also No War Toys, and I’d hate to lose that baby with the bathwater of triviality. One truth remains: you judge at your peril an entire decade and its activists by the worst of its adherents. All but those who have a secret agenda for making us ashamed of our past understand that a time and a movement are evaluated on the basis of the best, not the dumbest.

  Nothin’ happened in t
he Sixties? You really think comedians like Sam Kinison and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams and Franklin Ajaye and George Carlin and Bobcat Goldthwaite would be working the material they’re laying down in comedy clubs and on HBO if there hadn’t been shrapnel-catchers like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, The Firesign Theatre, the Smothers Brothers, and Harry Shearer and David Landers with The Credibility Gap? Remember, if you will: the Pythons got going in the Sixties. If it hadn’t been for jokers like Lenny, Elaine Boozler wouldn’t be telling us today that she’s picking up CB messages on her IUD; we’d still be picking bits of old Bob Hope routines out of our teeth and spuds like Buddy Hackett would still be running loose instead of being institutionalized in Vegas lounges.

  In the pre-social-consciousness days of Disneyland, kids with long hair were forbidden entrance to The Magic Kingdom and those who jammed their hair up under caps and slipped through often found themselves patted down for marijuana by the security staff. By the end of the Sixties rock bands had replaced Grinning Young Americans groups in Walt’s domain, and attempts to exclude gay couples from the park were knocked back so fast it made Tinker Bell’s tummy ache.

  In the Sixties there arose a reverence for our artistic past: major studios sold their film catalogues to television, and motion pictures that had been left to fade and decay in vaults were rediscovered. The Wizard of Oz, never a commercial success, became an annual national event. It’s A Wonderful Life suddenly started appearing on Best of All Time lists.

  In 1961 the first real awareness that television was turning us into a nation of functional illiterates, that it wasn’t universally a swell thing, was voiced by FCC Chairman Newton Minow, who told a National Association of Broadcasters convention, “I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air, and stay there. You will see a vast wasteland—a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families…blood and thunder…mayhem, sadism, murder…private eyes, more violence, and cartoons…and, endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending…”

  Did it have an effect for us here in the Eighties?

  The networks didn’t hear the song Minow was singing; and today they’ve lost almost half their audience. As Santayana told us, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The bashers of the Sixties, for their own reasons, want us to forget the Sixties. Perhaps because the strengths that emerged from that time are counterproductive to their ends here in the Eighties.

  Nothin’ happened in the Sixties? The rise of black consciousness, black pride, opening channels for all the black versions of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie and William Faulkner who had been denied to us for two hundred years. The rise of the feminist movement, for all its Bitch Manifestos and bra-burnings, unleashed a tsunami of cultural change by that half of our population previously kept barefoot and pregnant.

  We got:

  Credit cards and credit banking; oral contraceptives that demolished thousands of years of male fiat where who would get screwed and by whom was concerned; space program technology that gave us not only desktop computers and medical lasers and weather & communications satellites, but Teflon coating for pans, and Tang. (Okay, so not everything was laudable.)

  Producer Edward Lewis broke the Hollywood blacklist by defying the conspiracy of silence, and hired Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus…and gave him credit onscreen.

  A fascination for the youth culture that has remained undimmed, prompted by the thorough domination of rock’n’roll, the Beatles and their haircuts, mod fashions, and total cross-country mobility. And all because the baby boomers’ demographic bulge swelled into late adolescence and young adulthood. This does not mean I can listen to the Beastie Boys or Prince. But then, that too shall pass.

  On the plus side, we got Ralph Nader. How many of you out there are alive today because of his kvetching about auto safety that resulted in the redesigning of cars, seat belts, frequent recalls of deathtraps, and consumer protection laws. Truth in packaging. Truth in Lending. Childproof caps on cleansers, drugs, paint thinners. On the minus side, we got terrorism and skyjacking.

  All through the Forties and Fifties we were told that rampant urban development was progress! Pave it over, tear it down, plow it under. In the Sixties we learned that we are all part of the planetary chain—remember The Whole Earth Catalog and Frank Herbert founding Earth Day?—and a magical environmental awareness blossomed. The EPA was created in 1970, the same time America celebrated that first Earth Day.

  But by 1966 the Department of the Interior—operating off a saner philosophy of life than that offered by our recently deposed sweetie James Watt, who told us it didn’t matter if he sold off the forests for McDonald’s packaging because the Apocalypse is coming and we won’t be here to enjoy them anyway—had already gotten the rare and endangered species list to Congress, and in 1967 the Act was passed. Millions of acres of watershed land were purchased by the government for parks and preservation. Tough smog standards were clamped on a heretofore unchecked heavy industry still trying to convince us (as Coolidge had said) that “The business of America…is Business.” Leading the environmental movement was the state of California with higher emissions standards than anywhere else in the nation. From the land of the flower children, the Sixties bashers seem to forget, came the desire to breathe more healthily.

  In the Sixties women got “equal pay for equal work” from the 1963 Congress; the beginnings of success in sexual harassment lawsuits; Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women; the removal of “women’s menus” sans prices; the topless bathing suit introduced by Rudi Gernreich that led to a general abandonment by young women of brassieres staved with metal that produced breast cancer; and by 1969 pantyhose had replaced girdles, garterbelts and nylons save for those who chose to use them in the privacy of the sexual arena. Martina Navratilova would not today be a millionaire several times over, had not Billie Jean King perceived that whipping the crap out of Bobby Riggs was an object lesson for the sons of machismo, and not just a cheap show filled with megabucks.

  Nothin’ happened in the Sixties, oh my bashers?

  Well, howzabout in addition to the Civil Rights Act of 1965, we got the Gideon decision in 1963, providing legal counsel for indigent defendants, or Miranda in 1966, with its right to remain silent, right to have an attorney present during questioning, right to have your brains left unscrambled by cops straight out of a Spillane novel. Don’t say it hasn’t had an effect on the Eighties: in addition to turning arresting officers into crybabies because they can’t use the truncheon as freely as they might wish, it has made the writing of cop shows on tv much harder. They actually have to resemble the real world now. Sure.

  The first community for older citizens, Del Webb’s Sun City, opened outside Phoenix, 1960. LBJ signed the first Medicare bill, 1965. The Gray Panthers were founded, 1970. That’s what the old folks got from the Sixties. And homosexuals fought back in the late Sixties, chiefly as a result of the constant police harassment of the Stonewall, a gay bar in New York; that led directly to the formation of Gay Rights groups, lobbies, newspapers, a forceful movement. Now that may not be a very positive result of the Sixties sensibility, in the view of the bashers; but as one who had a good friend, one of the best men and best editors I’ve ever known, blow his brains out because he’d been driven nuts living in the closet most of his life, I submit the freedom of choice championed in that twelve-year decade has resulted in hundreds of thousands of decent men and women being able to live in the Eighties in a somewhat saner atmosphere, Falwell and his “wrath of God” interpretation of AIDS notwithstanding.

  Now we’re on a roll. Kids became a subject of concern in the Sixties. Not just leaving the tots to the tender mercies of parents who used them as cheap labor and whipping posts, but beginning to consider them as people, with rights. In 1969 they got Sesame Street. Prayer was banned in schools in 1963. Tradition
al restrictive images of “little boys” and “little girls,” and what was acceptable for a boy or girl to aspire to, were thrown up for grabs. Child brutality laws became a prime concern of city and federal courts.

  You want to talk responsibility? Consider something as trivial as celebrity. Apart from those who, in any era, would be frivolous dips even if we were sloughing through a Nuclear Winter, in the Forties and Fifties the “social involvement” of celebrities was largely manifested by their narking on one another in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities or Tail-gunner Joe’s All-Purpose CommieSymp Inquisition. In the Sixties we saw a dawning awareness of the power of celebrity, coupled with a sense of personal worth and responsibility on the part of show biz personalities, sports figures, and even the kind of “names” who appear on Hollywood Squares bearing with them the enigma of precisely why they are famous. Muhammad Ali laid it all on the line rather than serve in a war he felt was wrong, a war he had the nerve, the gall, the chutzpah to point out was dedicated to killing his people, and people like his people. They busted him, jailed him, and stripped him of his title. And some schmucks were so dopey on JohnWayneism that they suggested he was afraid to go. Tell that to Joe Frazier. And the faces we knew from the covers of the National Enquirer and TV Guide were the faces we saw in daily newscasts, marching through Alabama under the gunsights of rednecks and state troopers, being schlepped across the pavement like sacks of millet during antiwar protests, working for Greenpeace and Native American rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Brando, Fonda, Newman, Baez, Lancaster, Cleveland Amory, and even Vanessa Redgrave (like her position or not) demonstrated that merely taking the gravy and giving nothing back was a Fifties aberration.