The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television

by Harlan Ellison

  And if the people refuse to face up to what they’ve done, where is the responsibility of our video conscience? Which network will take the initiative?

  I hurl a challenge.

  History has now proved the years of dissenting anent Viet Nam were intelligently-directed. History has now shown that those who suffered, suffered for all of us, carrying a banner that only the bravest could carry. As Thoreau has put it: “He serves the state best who opposes it most.” Those who chose to go to jail rather than cop-out on their morality and their country, they are patriots. And so I hurl the challenge to the major networks:

  Which of you will take a stand on this truth? Which of you will prepare a special in which you set forth this obviousness? Which of you will serve us, the people ... and us, the country ... as you say you do?

  Which of you will point out what the dissenters have done for America, and the world?

  Specials on traffic safety and Stonehenge and Miss America and the mating habits of the Great Arctic Tern are marvelous. But they cannot compare in importance to a special in which the value of the dissenters is finally acknowledged.

  A country that needs to know the depth of its guilt unconsciously awaits this special.

  Which of you will perform this service? At this stage it isn’t even an act of bravery, so that ought to make it well within the reach of your talents.

  * * * *

  8: 22 NOVEMBER 68

  Having just emerged from the Valley of the Shadow, I’ve got to admit it, gang. I blew it. I had my chance, and I blew it.

  Watched myself on the Joe Pyne Show last Saturday night. There I was, called on to defend my belief that we are getting managed, slanted, corrupted right-wing news as a matter of course, called on as a spokesman for all of you, and even for The Free Press, and I blew it.

  I even tried to play it cagey. Came the day that Steve Kane, Pyne’s coordinater, called, my secretary Crazy June came into my office and said, “It’s the Pyne Show. Should I tell them Excuse A or Excuse B?” Excuse A is the one in which Crazy June returns to the phone weeping, and advises the pain-in-the-ass on the other end that Harlan is dying of cancer of the lymph glands and can’t come to the phone. Excuse B is the one where she tells them I’ve just left to conduct a guided tour through the heart of Mt. Vesuvius. It usually works. They usually get the idea. Go away.

  But I’d done the Pyne Show once before, and had had a ball destroying Pyne’s replacement, Tom Duggan, by threatening him during the commercial break that if he didn’t act like a pussycat and talk nice to me and stop the jerko remarks about the length of my hair, I would hip the video audience to the fact that there was a fugitive warrant out for him in the city of Chicago. Needless to say, Mr. Duggan purred for the rest of the hour.

  So I figured the Pyne People were gluttons for punishment and why the hell not. I took the call and Kane said he’d been reading my columns in these pages and why didn’t I come on and espouse Truth and Beauty and Wisdom to all the snake pit freaks who watch Joe.

  (Now we all know that is a hype. Those people are sado-masochists of the purest stripe. They watch Pyne only because the Roman Arena was shut down, and they have nowhere else to go where they can turn thumbsdown and see some poor slob get a trident through his chest. The redneck schlepps who dig Pyne’s brand of hypocrisy and brutishness are the ones who can be convinced only by demagogues and rabble-rousers.)

  But he said that Joe wasn’t feeling too well (I’d heard Pyne was about to cash in his chips via the carcinoma route ... and in fact, when I’d done the show previously, and a woman in the audience had asked Duggan how Joe was doing, Duggan had replied that Joe had been discharged from the hospital; to which my friend Brian Kirby, in the audience, had replied, “Yeah, dishonorably.”) and he would probably just moderate while I debated with someone from some video network news staff, like Jerry Dunphy. Well, the thought of being able to ask Dunphy when the last time was that he’d actually been out on the firing line covering a story appealed to me so much, I accepted. I was told to be at the studio on Monday night, the 11th, at 6:00, to tape the show for the following Saturday’s airing.

  Came a week ago Monday, I was cagey, as I said. I wore clothes that were just square enough so the boobs who view the show wouldn’t discount what I had to say even before I said it on the grounds that I was obviously one of those long-haired, unreliable, dope-drenched, crummy hippies. But clothes that were just groovy enough so The People would know I was an agent provocateur gadflying the Establishment. (It was so successful a disguise that a goodlooking chick waiting backstage, out of her jug on somethingorother, told someone that I looked much straighter than my columns would indicate. Sorry about that, baby, I’m just one of those damned souls with a foot in either world.)

  To my sadness, I wasn’t matched with Dunphy, but with a very nice, ultra-straight cat named David Crane, head of the news department at KLAC; in effect, though Pyne makes many times what he makes, Crane is Pyne’s boss.

  And we went on the air—in case you missed it, I hope—and Pyne opened up with, “Well, Harlan Ellison, you say we aren’t getting honest news. Tell us about it?”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  “No, I can prompt you,” Pyne came back.

  “That’s okay,” I recovered. “I think I can tough it out.” And I launched into a recap of my column four or five weeks ago in which I said the cameras always focus on the barefooted members of every dissenting rally, but never the Doctors or Teachers or Squares in suits.

  Crane came back reasonably by saying that what I was asking for was bias. That Daley in Chicago was upset because all the newsmen had shown was kids getting beat, but not cops ... and what I wanted was the complete other view. He said what newsmen had to do was be impartial.

  Well, that seemed sensible to me, so I didn’t argue. Here I was, sitting there with my best indicting Synanon Games technique, ready to rip these two guys up the middle, and they outfoxed me. They both came on so gentle, so sweet, so honest, so sensible, that I was forced to agree with them.

  When Pyne asked me what way I would have it, I responded, “I’d like to see a few more TV newsmen on the firing line.” And Crane then tossed back the old analogy about a soldier learning more about the war from headquarters than from his little piece of the battle. I had to agree with that, too.

  It went that way for a long time.

  Crane asked if I thought a newsman would get a better story if he’d been clobbered on the head by a cop’s baton. I said no, but it might give him a helluva insight.

  One woman clapped.

  I suggested that, for instance, the reportage of the Selma-Montgomery march had been slanted because there were 450,000 people marching but no network coverage I’d ever seen indicated there’d been more than 100,000. Crane jumped back that I was obviously deluded merely because I’d been on the march and so had not seen all the coverage he’d seen, which had showed just oodles and oodles of people.

  The audience clapped for Crane.

  I sat there like a good little boy and tried to work up enough of a mad through the fifteen-minute segment to call both of them lackeys of the Wall Street Imperialist Conspiracy, but Crane was more often right than not, Pyne laid back and let Crane do the work, and I found myself sounding like a cranky tot.

  So I blew it, gang.

  They convinced me. It’s a great world we’re living in. The news isn’t managed. We’re getting the straight scoop on everything. When idiot Bob Wright does a “documentary” on hippies and stands on the Strip with his cameras ordering kids to walk up and down so he can shoot dirty feet, when newscasters report only that “rioting” students at San Fernando State used “dirty words associated with the Free Speech Movement,” when Nixon spots are inserted in prime time before and after the most popular shows as opposed to Humphrey spots that bracket such heavyweight programs as Land of the Giants and re-runs of the Roller Derby... they are oversights that can be discounted.

  Crane is a
good man. I don’t doubt it. He very probably considers himself a liberal. He probably is, which tells you all you need to know about liberalism in Our Times. Pyne is a good man. No, let me retract that. The milk of human kindness isn’t running that syruply in my veins. Pyne is sharp. He is by no means the lout he appears to be on-camera. He is, without even knowing it, a major mouth in the illiterate, silent conspiracy against dissent in this country. He is a reactionary—by avocation; there are those who remember him when he was a poor liberal—and the election has proved that we are a reactionary nation. So be it. I’m willing to go along with it.

  Fuck’m. It’s like Jefferson said: “People get pretty much the kind of government they deserve,” and this state deserves Reagan, and this country deserves Nixon. I’m convinced. It’s a good life. It is, it really really is. I was wrong. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s amiss.

  It’s as Joe, good sweet dear golden Joe, said to me, as his closing shot. Crane had just ended with the line that the American People ought to thank God for their Freedom of the Press, and wonderful twinkling Joe looked at me and said, “I think you ought to remember that, Harlan Ellison ... now go ... and sin no more.”

  Yes, Daddy.

  * * * *

  9: 29 NOVEMBER 68

  Two years ago I was asked by Esquire to do a lead article on the new kind of woman emerging from Los Angeles and environs. After extensive research and interviews of several hundred women from all stratas of Clown Town society, ranging from teeny-boppers and goo-goo girls to stewardesses, high school teachers, housewives, secretaries, starlets and post-debs, I amassed a longish piece which I titled “Kiss Me And You’ll Live Forever—You’ll Be A Frog, But You’ll Live Forever.” Esquire called it “The New American Woman,” butchered it mercilessly, used a bad taste cover, and compelled me to remove my name from the piece. But the word leaked out that I’d done the article, and very soon I was being inundated with assignments from magazines to “write opinions about women.” I was even forced (a peculiar word for a writer, but perfectly appropriate in this case) to do a series of columns on women for Confidential. Then, last year, Cosmopolitan rigged some phony number about the most eligible bachelors in Hollywood, and threw me into the list, I presume as a sop to the working classes. All of this is pre-stated as sorta credentials for what is to follow in this column, with the staunchly-made declaration that I happen to dig girls very much. I am by no means a misogynist.

  Which brings me to the subject of this week’s revelation of Truth in Our Times: a little blonde cupcake named Kam Nelson, who disports herself weekdays 5:30 to 6:00 on KHJ Channel 9’s The Groovy Show. In case any of you reading this are over the age of seventeen and don’t catch The Groovy Show, let me hip you that it is a high school-oriented tribal ritual in which an aging elf named Sam Riddle hosts Top Thirty records for dancing.

  But it is not Mr. Riddle—a gentleman who manifests all the paranoia about growing old that terrors those who make their living off the young—with whom I’ll deal here. It is Miss Nelson.

  Describing her is like cataloguing mist. She is more vacuity than substance. Her appearance is what my secretary Crazy June calls “the Chinese waiter look”: they all look alike, and it’s difficult to figure out which one stiffed you for the Moo Goo Gai Pan. Miss Nelson has that look; the look of no-look at all. Her face is one of those pretty little girl shots that, having vanished from your sight, vanishes from your mind. The reference point being that there is no character in the face. At 17, Miss Nelson has long blonde hair, nice legs and a baby-fat face with cheeks like a hamster storing nuts for Winter. But it is not her appearance, truly, that comes under attention here. I mention it only to establish her as a visual, physical role-model for all the girls presumably watching The Groovy Show.

  Now, the question asks itself unbidden, why devote a column of discussion to a seventeen-year-old co-host of a rock-dance program? It certainly isn’t the kind of subject with which this column has dealt in the past— topics of political import, subcutaneous slanting of news, violence and its effect on the mass, or any of the other relatively “heavy” material the television medium offers for comment. Why?

  The answer is tied up in a news item released over television last week. The National Scholastic Reading Aptitude scores were published, and for the third straight year California’s school children placed not only in the lowest fifty percentile, as they had for several years previously, but in the lowest eighteen percentile. The school children of the state of California are emerging from our much-vaunted school system little better than illiterates. Young people, as we all know, obtain their images of themselves from what is commonly called “role-models,” those from whom they derive their manners, their morals, people they look up to. We have seen how these role-models have broken down in terms of parents and clergy and teachers, and so where do teens and pre-teens go to find their role-models? One can only assume, since we are in fact dealing with the TV Generation, that they get at least a substantial part of their self-image from television. From all areas of the television educational spectrum. From, among other sources, The Groovy Show.

  Which brings us back to Miss Kam Nelson.

  (In preparing this column, I spoke to Miss Judy Price, producer of the show, and Mr. Milt Hoffman, the executive producer for KHJ. They informed me that Miss Nelson is “a good, clean kid that other kids like a great deal,” that she is deeply involved in charitable good works because she digs it, that she is a straight-A student, that she is an accomplished horsewoman with many trophies, has raced dragsters at 112 mph, that she flies her own plane, and that she is a track star—having competed in the AAU track & field competitions—and could have gone to the Olympics, had she so desired. Mr. Hoffman referred to her as a very honest, extremely complex girl. I am much impressed by all of this—data I would never have expected to be in Miss Nelson’s background, from her manner on-camera—and I take all of it as gospel, while chalking up such virtues in her favor. Yet if this all be true, it only makes stronger the point of this column, and reinforces my conclusions about Miss Nelson’s stated—as opposed to actual—impact for viewers.)

  Let’s take her stint on last Thursday’s show. Mr. Riddle called her out and she emerged suitably micro-mini’d. He asked her what she’d been doing lately. She stared at him for several beats with wide, innocent eyes and then mumbled something about having gone to “the liberry” (sic) for research on marriage in Scandinavia. Riddle seemed to think that was pretty exciting, and asked her what she’d found out. Then emerged from Miss Nelson’s mouth a syntactical jumble of half-sentences drenched with “yeahs,” “uh-huhs” and ending lamely with “I don’t really know.” (Everything she comments on ends with “I don’t really know.”) Riddle looked bewildered and segued into the first record.

  Later, in an effort to get her to haul her own weight, he cleverly tried to introduce the second record by asking her something about French, I believe it was the word for bicycle. Once again there were mumblings and mouthings and Riddle, now floundering, went to the record. Yet just before it cut in, he could be heard asking her with something akin to bemused impatience, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  Still later, the audience was treated to a daily feature of the show, “Kam’s Korner,” in which the accomplished horsewoman and drag racer answered lovelorn questions from other (we must assume) “typical” teenagers. The first question was from a girl who sucked her thumb, wondering how she could stop. Miss Nelson suggested a baby’s pacifier. I can see that correspondent in her chemistry class now, sucking on a rubber nipple.

  The second problem came from a girl who was dating two guys at the same time and wanted to know how to put one of them down. I cannot even relate with any degree of coherence Miss Nelson’s answer. It was non sequitur from first “yeah” to last “uh-huh.” The third problem was read from a school newspaper by Mr. Riddle. It concerned whether or not sideburns and mustaches should be allowed in school, if they were kept neat and clean�
�one of the burning topics of our generation. Miss Nelson’s answer provided an insight into another aspect of her TV manner that I think significant She said she “rillee” liked sideburns “cuz” they were groovy and “jist” because some people had messy sideburns “an”‘ mustaches she didn’t see why they shouldn’t be “‘lowed” in school.

  Now perhaps it is because I make my living from the English language that I have a certain reverence for it; even so, I am very big on the People’s English as opposed to the King’s English. What people speak should be what is right, even if it ain’t so pretty. But Miss Nelson’s constant and flagrant disembowelment of the spoken word seems to me to tie in with the alarming lowest eighteen percentile of which I spoke a moment ago.