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

by Harlan Ellison

  What a delight it was, just a little later, to catch Cronkite and Severeid. What a return to sanity.

  Rather than editorializing about Nixon’s instant reaction to the shooting down of our spy plane with retaliation ... rather than commenting on the systematic building of a Nixon Dynasty with daughter Trish dating Barry Goldwater, Jr. and daughter Julie married to David Eisenhower ... rather than trying to examine how and why our educational system is in the state it is . . . Reddin chose to indicate the thrust of his interests by further alarming the crazies who suspect every kid who wants a better education or voice in his own future, of Communist activity.

  Well, we can take some small consolation in KTLA’s scheduling Capt. Charisma at five, when most people are en route from one place to another . . . and at ten, while the network prime shows are still on. It will cut down the audience he reaches.

  Though I suspect the bottom line on Reddin is that he will genuinely speak only to those who heard his deadly message of mace in the streets and parks of Los Angeles. For a few days he will be a fad, like Shipwreck Kelly, like mah jongg, like hula hoops and Dagmar and the Twist. And like them, the boredom of repetition will drive him from public attention.

  Because, again bottom line, Reddin is a dreadful bore. His manner of newscasting is stiff, undramatic, amateurish. His pronunciation is typified by an inability to call the city that employed him anything but “Luss Ann-uh-luss.” His gift for cliché is Promethean. (At one point he actually demonstrated his grasp of the nature of education by referring to universities as “think factories” and went on to insist that dissenters who keep throwing “monkey wrenches” into the factory machinery ... but, you know what I mean.)

  When Reddin began the telecast with his introductory comments, he asked the audience to bear with him as he adjusts to his new role. Why should we? Intellectually, he affronts us with second-hand, non-viable red-baiting and hate. Artistically, we expect professionalism in our TV viewing fare, and should be impatient with anything less. Why should we bear with a stiff amateur, mouthing the same platitudes and nonsense we’ve heard from other more articulate charlatans? Merely so KTLA, in an obvious bid for some weatherworn publicity, can reap the dubious benefits accruing to the metamorphosis of a toad into a toad prince? Zero chance.

  Good night, Chet. Good night. David. Sleep easy; you have nothing to fear from Capt. Charisma. Who can worry about a super-hero who vanishes when you change channels?

  * * * *

  29: 9 MAY 69

  TEXAS: PART I

  Hand-over-hand, head still whirling, I’ve returned from a week of lecturing at Texas A&M with some hell-visions to impart about TV-time, thoughts, frights, and passing scenes.

  This will be the first of a two-part column about Texas. About living death in the Great American Heartland. About a week so inextricably intertwined with the reality of college life and preparing to enter the adult world ... and the unreality of television, the GOD TV, the great glowing glistening glass teat ... that it will take two columns merely to report what went down, and hope some sense and/or sensible conclusions emerge. Pay attention.

  Under the guise of being a science fiction writer (working in a horde of genres has its advantages: totally divergent groups know my work in a compartmentalized way: one group knows me as a film and TV writer, another knows me as a speculative fiction writer, another knows me as a film or music critic, yet another knows only this column: and that’s cool... I get to cut across artificial barriers into allkinda other scenes), I was booked to give two one-hour lectures on succeeding nights. And to speak to an English class or two.

  But Texas A&M is not UCLA. It is not Berkeley. It is not U. of Chicago. It is a grass roots school where, until a few years ago, there were no co-eds. (Until, oddly enough for this writer, the mother of the girl who heads up the A&M science fiction club sued the school, and won women the right to attend.) Now there are a few females walking the campus.

  And until a few years ago, everyone at the school was in ROTC, better known as “the Corps” by the fish (freshmen), the pissheads (sophomores) and zips (seniors). Now, out of a 13,000-student community, only 3,000 wear the khaki. Yet they, and their little newspaper The Battalion, are a force on the campus.

  I knew none of this when I was asked to speak to a class on science-and-literature. Nor did I know that the President of the university—a gentleman named “General” Rudder—and his Trustees had decreed there would be no political speakers at A&M. Not merely no Cleaver or Rap Brown, but Ronald Reagan (our very own wunderkind) and George Wallace had been denied speaking privileges on the campus. I had no way of knowing I was walking into a crazy-quilt hodge-podge of Fundamentalist religiosos, mock army troopers, underground “liberals” and people who believe everything they see on the television screen.

  I knew none of this as I stood before that 8:00 ayem class, and instead of boring them to death with talk of science fiction, suddenly starting rapping on student dissent, the military, Viet Nam, political activism, racial unrest, the evils of religion, the new morality, life in the big cities, the fucked-up educational system, and other topics of a similarly hilarious nature.

  Within three hours, the word got out. The classes to which I spoke swelled, the students cut their classes to come listen. My lectures grew from an hour to two and then almost three. They drank at me. They looked out of their eyes and begged to know all the things we take for granted in the pages of the Free Press.

  There I stood in my striped bells, my floral double-barreled cuff shirts, my silk scarves, before these students in their pima cotton shirts and goat-roper boots, a creature from out there, from a place none of them seemed able to grasp as being real. They stared at me like a thing that had fallen off the moon.

  And I rapped. For endless hours, day after day. Not merely one or two classes, but almost thirty classes in four days. Their hunger to hear was unbelievable. Their lack of awareness was staggering. Their willingness to accept whatever they were told by the mass media, even when patently false, was disheartening. But as the days went by, I began to see a change: in them, and in me.

  In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God. I replied, “I don’t think so.” And then I proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs-Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone. I said I felt if “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them,” (Genesis 2:27, King James’s italics, not mine) then we were God. And when Man (my cap, not King James’s) in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most Godlike.

  The student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God. I thanked him politely and told him I’d gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas.

  He then accused me of being one of those heathens who had been in favor of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I agreed that I was, indeed, one of those heathens. And I asked for a show of hands (which I repeated in many classes) of how many had felt the Smothers Brothers had been in bad taste, had been seditious, had felt delighted when they’d been canceled. He was not alone in raising his hand.

  In all conscience I must report that the majority of the students I asked had been saddened to see SmoBro go, but the tiny minority that raised hands were the vocal ones. They were not Nixon’s fabled Silent Majority, they were the Committed Few who knew there was a Heaven, there was a Hell, that God was a jealous people, and that the SmoBroShow was intended as a devious Communist plot to pollute the minds and precious bodily fluids of the Great American Viewing Public, which was not nearly mature enough to watch and make its own decisions.

  I pointed out that if I—or any other viewer—did not dig the brand of pap being proffered by, say, The Good Guys or Green Acres or Mayberry RFD,
we expressed our displeasure by turning that special knob. But we never mounted campaigns of outraged indignation to have those shows canceled. We were perfectly happy to let everyone watch or not watch as they chose. Yet he, and his ilk, not only wouldn’t watch the shows themselves, but they wanted no one to watch. I asked him what he was afraid we might find out. He had no answer. Yet he knew he was on the side of the angels.

  That led us to censorship.

  Taking off from a local Texas news item, reported on TV during my stay there, I presented them with a situation: it seems a 63-year-old man in the Land Office in the Texas state capitol, Austin, had decided women’s skirts were too short, and men’s sideburns were too long. He decreed, unilaterally, that 188 employees of the Land Office had to conform with women’s skirts to (or below) the knee, and men’s sideburns to the middle of the ear lobe, and no longer. (I, in my madness, instantly pictured a man with twelve-foot-long earlobes and flowing sideburns, but that’s another vision.) I asked the True Believer if he thought there was any parallel that could be drawn between the cancelation of SmoBro and that TV news item. He said yes, that the director of the Land Office had the right to do it, because the employees worked for him. He then said something that sounded suspiciously like, “America: Love It or Leave It.” In other words, that pregnant woman who was beaten at Century City deserved what she got, because she shouldn’t have been there. If the employees wanted to defy the decree, they could go work somewhere else.

  And I suddenly began to realize that I was now in direct confrontation, vis-a-vis, with the very people to whom I have referred as “scuttlefish” in these columns.

  This was the TV viewing audience.

  And I began to probe at all the places they ached.

  I discovered some obvious but disheartening things.

  This was not the arteriosclerotic generation, the heavy-lidded drinkers and haters who lay bloated before their television sets like wheezing whales in shoal ... these were the Hope of Tomorrow. These were the younger generation, the ones who couldn’t trust me because I was on the verge of thirty-five. And they were content to allow themselves to be lock-stepped in khaki uniforms toward all the insane battlefields a misplaced patriotism would devise for them between now and age forty. They were content to be punched, stapled and cross-filed in readiness for the giant corporations. At A&M there would be no upset that Dow was recruiting. There would be no dissent that what they were getting in their classrooms—via the TV box visual aid— would be outdated and useless by the time they graduated. There would be no anger that they were being prepared not to lead outgoing lives of joy and grandeur, but were rather being processed like live meat to fit into the computer coding of great faceless business empires. I suggested this to them, and in one class a young girl justified the loss of her life by saying, “Well, somebody has to keep the wheels turning.” And silently I felt a leap of smugness: yeah, baby, you do it; you and all the others like you. Because as long as you’re willing to die through every day of your life, it leaves the world free for jokers like me. As long as you’ll till the fields, I can sing my songs and run loose.

  But then it followed in the next thought that I was no better than the line-trooper who is momentarily relieved that the next man caught the bullet, rather than himself. And I started saying things like, “There has to be a better life for you. There has to be a way to taste all the pleasures and freedoms they tell you are yours, without consigning yourselves for half your waking hours to gray little boxes, doing the work of manufacturing death.”

  They did not understand.

  They were the older generation.

  Trapped in the Great American Heartland, cut off from knowledge—truly!—and cut off from flexibility. They were the next generation to support a Viet Nam. And they could not understand how an obvious Commie fink revolutionary such as myself could be allowed to write for television.

  I assured them it was hardly easy.

  For TV, the one all-seeing-eye of our time that could have hipped them, could have liberated them, had lied to them. Had systematically lulled them into bovine complacency, into tacit acceptance of all the hideous wrongnesses that leprously fester on the soul of our country.

  Perhaps crossing the line from here, from this place where kids lay their lives and their college careers and their beliefs on the line, to free them, there in Texas ... into that other country, had made me paranoid.

  But with a sickening lurch I realized that I was perhaps the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

  * * * *

  30: 23 MAY 69

  texas part ii

  In which your humble columnist, himself a man of peace, was pressed into unwitting service during a lecture tour at Texas A&M University as a spokesman for dissent, moral and intellectual freedom, awareness, and equality. You may recall some of this from part one of this two-part triptych through the Country of the TV Blinded.

  After discussing the growing role of the black man in television—and noting Julia was only Julie Andrews with Man-Tan—I discussed some of the more blatant ways in which television had misrepresented the realities of the race/class struggle in America today. After I had done riffs all-too-familiar to readers of this newspaper, a young lady in the class raised her hand. All through the class lecture, this young woman had sat quietly, staring at me with that expressionless immobility night club comics fear. It means not only are you not hipping them, amusing them, stimulating them ... you are not even penetrating through the bone and flesh walls of their prejudices. When, earlier in the class, I’d asked her if she wanted to ask me anything, she informed me that she would listen, and then at the end of the period she would “make her comment.” I somehow felt I was going to be asked to take a test, but I didn’t know what notes to make.

  So now, as I finished, she raised her hand, to make her summing-up comment. We all waited breathlessly. And this, approximately, is what she said:

  “I live in Marion County, where there’s a lot of niger-ahs; I ride my horse in the woods there. We had a white girl raped by a nig-er-ah out there. And the other nig-er-ahs came to our house and told my mother and father I shouldn’t ride my horse there any more. I believe, that most nig-er-ahs are happy the way they are, that it’s only a trouble-making few who are causing all this trouble.”

  I waited. Surely she would not fail to add that if the “nig-er-ahs” were given sufficient quantities of watermelon, were allowed to dance with their natural rhythm on “de lebee,” and were not whipped by “massa,” they would settle back into a pre-Confederacy happiness of idyllic cotton-plucking and baby-birthing.

  There was no response possible to this gross theory. But I was overjoyed to hear the groans of disbelief from other members of the class, among whom this new-generation blind one had been sitting, without ever having previously revealed herself.

  Yet how many others in that class, in that University, in that state, in this country, thought as she did? Were there still so many of them? Had we lulled ourselves, we who take black-as-noble as a matter of course? Or was the poison still being passed on by the dying old ones? As the dirt was being shoveled in over their faces, did they still reach up from the grave, in one final ghoulish act, and say, “Heah, mah child, take this heah wisdom with y’all... it’s mah legacy ...”?

  Knowing this, as I sit here writing of that encounter, two weeks later, I am listening to Sly and the Family Stone singing Stand and Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey, and I know as sure as God made black’n’white that if the black man ceases pushing, young girls like that one will slip back into control. And rather would I see a thousand Watts’s than a return to that quiet, sinister evil. Can the inevitability of it be that unclear to the white power structure? Can it truly be beyond the grasp of a Reagan? Prayers won’t help. Someone needs to inform the ones on top. Why hasn’t television accepted this responsibility?

  The why remains unanswered, but the manifestation of regional avoidance of the problem was demonstrated on a t
alk show I did from Bryan, Texas that same day. It was a “women’s show” called Town Talk, hosted by a rather pleasant but uninformed woman named Fern Hammond.

  It was the traditional, chit-chat format every small town TV station offers. Miss Hammond began her program with an interminable reading of local flower shows, revival meetings, Kiwanis raffles and sodality picnics. Then she introduced me as a writer of scientific fiction, or fiction science, or somesuch. And within moments of that starting gambit, the troublemaker I had become since arriving in Texas asserted himself, and I was rapping about the lack of perceptivity of the people I’d met in Texas. The song was one of trust in the young, with a theme of being kind to one another, laced with melodies about not believing all the lies told nature of evil, and put forth the Pope’s encyclical as a concrete example of same in a world rapidly strangling on the waste products of its overpopulation. We got into the subject of allowing people to (forgive the phrase) do their own thing, as long as they stayed off other people’s toes. Fern opined that might not be such a hot idea.