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

by Harlan Ellison

  In company with Leonard Nimoy, most recently of Star Trek fame, Antoinette Bower, Richard Forbes, Linda Marsh and Mario Alcalde, actors and actresses, Joel Kane, TV writer and producer, Joyce Miller and Robert Angus of KPFK, and led by the exquisite Leslie Parrish, Mr. & Mrs. Stan Bohrman and I, and another dozen show biz and political types, made the trek down south in an air conditioned bus, laughin’ and scratchin’ all the way. We didn’t suffer the slightest deprivation (unless you could call a bus toilet that didn’t work and smelled like something from Belsen a deprivating consideration), and when we finally hit that road, the discomfort we felt—if any—was due to having lived too soft, for too long.

  All around us, in front and behind us, stoical, resigned farmworkers and their families marched. And when they passed us—in our gaily patterned clothes, our bell-bottoms and white cowboy suits—their faces split in grins, they flung up the peace sign with two-fingers, and shouted, “Viva huelga!” Yeah, they were pleased to see us. We had come from Cloud-CooCoo-Land to participate in their struggle; and that was cool.

  (I’m sure each of us felt so fucking noble, had we died and come up for eternity assignment, right then and there, we’d have made book we were going to that special Heaven reserved for The Good Guys.)

  Now this is by no means intended to demean any of us who went down to Calexico. I’m sure Len Nimoy and Leslie Parrish would have much rather sat home that Sunday, feet up, with a cold drink. But they couldn’t. They had to go, and that puts them so many brownie points ahead of all you fat assholes sitting in your split-levels mouthing liberal doctrine. I don’t even want to get into it. But the attention we drew, the emphasis put on us was—to use the word of one of the actresses in the line—obscene.

  And it comes down to the silly reality of what incredible power showfolk have, in the eyes of the rest of society. Even in the eyes of those who should know better.

  Sure, certainly, of course, it’s groovy to have Burt Lancaster plumping for Tom Bradley on TV spots. But what about all those John Wayne spots we’ve heard for Los Angeles’s own Toad Prince, Sam Yorty? What about all the simpering, sillyass political philosophizing of Jack Paar?

  The question is certainly being asked, somewhere out there: what would I have ... showfolk abstaining from political action and commitment? The answer is, obviously, no. Whether actor or plumber, if a man feels he must speak/act, then he should.

  What I’m going toward is an examination of the kind and degree of power and value put into the mouths of people no more experienced (and frequently less) than the politicians who are allegedly running things. Because a man commits to coaxial cable an exemplary Hamlet does not mean he knows which of those gimlet-eyed politicos is worth voting for. Bertrand Russell is a groovy man, with his head and his heart in the right place, but let’s face it, the old man is a political illiterate.

  So instead of shoving those interview mikes under the noses of deprived and yet courageous farmworkers who have spoken from their hearts with the eloquent simplicity of those who have felt the boot and the tongue-lash, we were asked how we felt about the march, and the causa. And what could we say? We could say all the phony, party line nonsense we’d heard from others, and never, never get anywhere near the core of sincerity or heartbreak I heard in the words of Joe Serda, a little Mexican cat who is head of the LA boycott on Safeway.

  Here’s where it’s at, I think. Mind you, I said: I think. One never really knows. (I’ve been bashed at Century City, threatened in Selma, clubbed in Chicago, tossed in jail in New Orleans and been shot at in North Carolina, and still—feeling in my gut that I’ve paid dues—I have these qualms.)

  Ours is a society so immersed in the sea of video reactions that there are little old ladies out there who know Hoss Cartwright is more real than their next door neighbors. Everyone of value to them is an image. A totem. A phosphor-dot wraith whose hurts and triumphs are created from the magic of a scenarist’s need to make the next payment on his Porsche. (I recommend a book titled Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, for a more complete, and horrifying analysis of this phenomenon. It’s an Avon paperback, so it shouldn’t trouble you too much to pick it up.)

  But because of this acceptance of the strangers who appear on the home screen, ours has become a society where shadow and reality intermix to the final elimination of any degree of rational selectivity on the part of those whose lives are manipulated: by the carnivores who flummox them, and the idols they choose to worship.

  I don’t know that there’s any answer to this. If we luck out and we get a John Kennedy or a Leonard Nimoy (who, strangely enough, tie in to one another by the common denominator of being humane), then we can’t call it a bad thing. But if we wind up with a public image that governs us as Ronald Reagan and Joe Pyne govern us, then we are in such deep trouble the mind turns to aluminum thinking of it.

  The abrogation of reality by the scuttlefish is now so complete that a silver-tongued George Lincoln Rockwell could easily arise from the slime-pits of necessity and run away with this country. And then, all the blind and self-serving politicians would find themselves helpless. Right now, they can put down the forces striving for a change to the better, because those forces are random, disorganized, in the main ludicrous. But let a determined and TV-primed hero step forward whose compulsions drive him toward oppression and repression ... and we would have about as much of a chance for survival as a snail in a bucket of salt.

  For the news media covering that march to Calexico, in great part it was Hollywood folk surrounded by insubstantial shadow-masses, trembling toward a social goal no more significant than a Trendex rating. And for those interviewers we were the reality; the ones who truly mattered, who genuinely lived that march ... they were no more important than Central Casting extras.

  Certainly, our being there drew a trifle more attention for the march than would have obtained had it only been hordes of sweating, non-English-speaking peons hiking for ten days in killing heat. Yeah, sure, we did our bit, we contributed to the commonweal ...

  But who the hell were we? What made us more noble than them? Why should we have been spotlighted?

  Why?

  Because America needs its idols. It needs its gloss and its glamour. Because it denies the sweat and stink of what is really happening, and if it can have just a touch of pink garbage cans in West Side Story, just a whisper of Alan Arkin as the deprived Puerto Rican in the film Popi, if it can have some suitable TV-oriented lie that says, “None of this is really happening, it’s only an extension of Peyton Place,” then America can continue to rock back and forward complacently as entropy settles it further and further into the slag-heaps of all dead cultures.

  As a party to this genuinely evil contract, I feel my gut heave, even as it heaved from too many salt tablets on the march. But being ill at the understanding of what it is we’ve done to ourselves, what we continue to do to ourselves, does not eliminate the dichotomous nature of the evil.

  We do good by being there and by allowing the teat-suckers in their living rooms to see us there; but we kill them a little bit by allowing it. We kill us, too.

  But worst of all... so hideously much worse ... we kill Joe Serda and his grape pickers, marching endlessly down a road that has no destination, save in oblivion.

  * * * *

  33: 6 JUNE 69

  A clean-up column, this week. Some new shows, some old facts, a few wrap-ups, some mail answered publicly, and even a sizeable retraction. Ah, stay tuned in, gentle readers. New horrors! New horrors!

  First order of business is tying-off the bloody artery that was my Name Of The Game script. It has been many weeks now since George Eckstein, a lovely man, but an unfortunate prisoner of the gargoyles who run the networks, first hired me to write a segment for Robert Stack. We tired to do our thing, we gave it a fairly competent shot, and either through my own bull-headedness or a failure to accept the rigors of The System (which I consider a noble act), we got shot down in embers, if not flames. It ain’t tha
t big a thing, friends. The Name Of The Game will sail on, proffering 90 minutes of pseudo-marmalade; Universal’s king of the black tower, Mr. Wasserman, will continue to make eighty million grupniks a year; George Eckstein will do the best he can to get some blood into the segments he has to produce, and your friendly scribe will write something else.

  So that ends the journal of a script. It began nowhere, it went nowhere, and it ended nowhere. But that is, as I said, no big thing. It is in fact, the name of the game.

  Next, we come to a little mail.

  To the lady in the Valley, who wrote me after my anti-religion column several months ago, informing me that she agreed totally, that I was a clear-thinker because I’d bumrapped organized religion, and knew that I was hip to the International Zionist Conspiracy that was bent on taking over the world ... lady, you’re a bigot. (Can you dig that, friends: when you pointedly describe what a bigot looks like, do an entire column on what evils are born out of hatred-for other religious beliefs, and condemn them in the bluntest terms ... the very ones of whom you’re speaking don’t recognize themselves. The asses always think you’re talking about somebody else. Can it be possible that people really are that blind to self? I suppose so. I don’t imagine Eichmann really thought of himself as a mass murderer, and Capone probably never referred to himself as a “gangster.” Jeezus, group, when will we stop shucking ourselves? A garbage collector is a garbage collector, not a Sanitation Disposal and Facilitation Executive.)

  To the people who’ve asked me to review NET, the Channel 28 items particularly: okay. But not right now. Look, it’s like this: KCET programs some of the finest hours television has to offer ... Fritz Weaver and Uta Hagen doing Sandburg’s poetry, Lotte Lenya in an hour of Kurt Weill cabaret music, Dustin Hoffman in a brilliant production of Journey of the Fifth Horse, Black Journal...but National Educational Television is not what is having an effect on this country today. Nine out of ten dial-twiddlers, given the option of three national channels and half a dozen locals, will opt for a re-re-run of Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet before they’ll tune in for a little smarts on Channel 28. Anyone not picking up on the joys NET is offering is a shmuck. No help for them. But it’s not the intellectual fare on NET that is shaping and twisting and warping this country...and so right now, with the smell of fire and destruction in the air, I’ve pretty much committed myself to examining mass programming. This does not mean your steadfast columnist will not, from time to time, do a fancy number on some item of NET grandeur. It just means the times are perilous, and there isn’t a moment to be spared belaboring those who are already on the side of the angels.

  To the lady who hit me with the fluoridation problem: I’ve done some research on your claims, and I’m forced to the conclusion that you’re on to something. No, it isn’t a heinous Communist Conspiracy, but there is some rational doubt about how good fluoridation can be for human beings. Unfortunately, as I said in my earlier response, this is a television column, and while I go pretty far afield each week—we got into this via the chemical/bacteriological warfare column I did a while back—I choose not to lift the banner on every cause. I mean, really, I hit 35 years of age on May 27th, darlin’, and that makes me five years past being trustable, so who’d listen anyhow?

  On the matter of new shows, I caught the debut of the nighttime Dick Cavett Show (Monday, Tuesday & Friday nights, 10:00, ABC), and I’ve got to report it is a ball. Cavett, who got bounced off daytime programming (I suspect because his brand of humor and simple honesty was too tough for the soaper-oriented yentas to handle with the sun shining), is genuinely inveigling, urbane, puckish, adroit at listening, and manages by dint of his gallows humor to work himself into syntactical cul-de-sacs that are rather more charming than the studiedly sniggering dead ends up which Carson and Joey Bishop usually thrash themselves. The show I caught had James Coburn, Candy Bergen, Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote as guests. It was the first time I was able to take Capote, a writer whose talents, to be christian about it, are vastly overpraised. There was a strangely honest interchange between the Misses Bergen/Minnelli about being rich little kids in Beverly Hills and—again, in a strange way—Cavett silkily played interlocutor, drawing ease in repartee from them. What it is Cavett possesses, that makes him a runaway winner as a talk-show host, is something that seems pure and fresh; something that is sickly sour when exuded by Joey Bishop or Merv Griffin or Johnny Carson. It appears to be a depth of character that goes beyond the mere manipulation of charisma employed by these others. In any case, I suggest you catch Cavett. He may not be a replacement for the Smothers Brothers, but there is something happening there...and I have this theory that (as with Lenny Bruce and SmoBro) the commitment of dissent is forced on certain men, because of the time and the place. Cavett may well be the next prophet in this regard.

  Of course, if he’s smart, he’ll reject the mantle. Our society (and that includes us, fellow assassins) has a nasty tendency to kill its poets and prophets, or drive them inexorably to their personal madhouses (as I said in a literary essay somewhere). Whether Muhammad Ali or Lenny, Malcolm X or what was left of Dylan Thomas by the time the U.S. got to use him—genius affronts us. We chivvy and harass it, and slaughter it. So if Cavett doesn’t want to wind up like Stan Bohrman or Les Crane or the Smothers Brothers, he’d better opt for the wise man’s position—the show must go on, and leave the dissent to those who dig slashing their wrists.

  And for my final item this week, I have to make a retraction. Thus proving flexibility is the watchword of this column, and if you can show me the error of my ways...I’ll get very uptight.

  I bummed Mod Squad many months ago.

  On the basis of only a few shows.

  Those were shows produced in execrable taste with a minimum of articulation or inventiveness.

  Last week I was dragooned into attending a special screening of two Mod Squad episodes produced by Harve Bennett. Mr. Bennett wrote one of them, and William Wood (who is about as golden a writer as this town has seen in many moons, WGAw please note) wrote the other. The first was about a draft resister whose father was a brigadier general in Viet Nam and how his refusal to not only not register, but to use violence of any kind, finally ends in triumph and tragedy. The other show was about a militant black priest who is drummed out of the Church for his activities. Neither show copped-out. The three undercover kids who work for the Laws were used eminently well in context; the acting was, in the main, superlative; the scripts were authentic and honest; and the series has developed into one of the heavier items in mainstream programming.

  So I have to retract what I said earlier (though what I said about those early shows in particular still stands) when I recommended you avoid Mod Squad like the Dutch Elm Blight. Catch the shows produced by Mr. Bennett. I do not think you will be too upset by my urging.

  Because it seems that Mr. Bennett and his new story editor, Rita Lakin, are keeping their promises to their writers: say what you want to say. And if this is the case, which it seems to be (because ABC backs off and lets the kids play when the ratings develop a thyroid condition), then Mod Squad is the place to watch for the good writing.

  In this respect, Mr. Bennett and Miss Lakin have discussed script with your demon columnist. At the moment I’m still a bit gunshy from my Name Of The Game experience. But we shall see ... we shall see----

  As you read this, the mayoral election will, by a week, be dead history. But as I write it, the thing has just happened. I spent my birthday surrounded by friends, watching the results come in, interspersed with snatches of A Hard Day’s Night. It was a surrealist nightmare. One of the rare video experiences of my life, on a par for impact with the McCarthy-Army hearings and the JFK funeral. It was that unbelievable commingling of reality and fantasy that ends with the dragon devouring St. George. And now, as I sit here, woebegone, sunk in my flesh like a tired old man, I feel the anger rising out of my gut, and all I can say to that 53% of Los Angeles who sold themselves and their brothers out is, dam
n you. Damn you!

  * * * *

  34: 13 JUNE 69

  A few days ago, when I trotted my week’s murmurings in to the offices of managing editor Jack Burgess, he put his cast-clad leg up on the desk, fixed me with an editorial stare of singular penetration, and said, “Say, Ellison, why don’t you talk about some of the good things on television instead of always bitching?” Well, he didn’t say it quite like that (he usually calls me “jerko” instead of “Ellison”), but he did precisely say, “We’re trying to alter the thrust of the paper, make it a little more constructive, and well, why don’t you talk about some of the good things on Channel 28, for instance?”

  I could not be more delighted that at long last the volcanic powers of the Free Press, long used to disrupt our community and spread commiesymp pornographic dissension, will be employed to heal the running sores and knit up the raveled sleeve of our fractured city. Huzzah, I say.