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

by Harlan Ellison

  Peter Brady, 30 years old, with five children; a truck driver who lives in Freeport, Long Island, he works as a part-time bartender, and makes between eight and nine thousand dollars a year.

  Five sensible men. Rational men who might easily and with no denigration be labeled “pillars of the community.” I saw them as epitomizations of the Common Man. The basic fiber of the American way of life. And so I could set down with absolute accuracy what they said, how they felt, I asked KCET to run the show for me at a private screening. There could be no room for error in this column, and I wanted to set it down just right. So on Monday, October 6th, with a cassette recorder to capture their every word, I sat in a darkened viewing room and lived again that most terrifying two hours with five models of what the bulk of our country considers the Common Man ... the “good” man.

  And this is what they said; their words, unedited.

  On the subject of welfare: “The most colossal fraud ever perpetrated on this country.” (Giordano) / “They are nothing but a bunch of thieves who want what I worked for. It is not Christian for me to do for people who won’t do for themselves. Paul’s admonition to the Apostles was, ‘If you do not work, you do not eat.’” (Corbett) / “It’s all going into the pockets of those who don’t deserve it, malingerers, crooked politicians. Someone is lining his pockets.” (De Tanfilis) / “They’re stealing from us legally, and they call it welfare.” (Corbett) / “The hard core unemployed can’t cut it. They all want to start at the top. They don’t want to start at the bottom the way I did, the way my father did. We can’t all be bus drivers; some of us have to be passengers. We can’t all be chiefs; we have to be Indians.” (Giordano)

  On the subject of Viet Nam, the arms race and money spent by the Pentagon on weaponry: “Seventy-seven billion for armaments? I’m in favor of it, because that’s to support our nation, not to destroy it.” (Corbett) /”I find it alarming that the Russians are expanding their forces while we are decreasing ours.” (Corbett) / “I have absolute faith in the Pentagon. I believe they are the only ones qualified to set their budget. I don’t care if it’s a hundred billion or a hundred and ten billion; I don’t care.” (Mrak) / “I’m against the Viet Nam war, but not as a dove. I’m against it because when I was in World War II I learned that you fight a war to win it; and I’m against the way we’ve been fighting the war ... dragging it out.” (Mrak) / “We should drop the atom bomb.” (Corbett) / “You peaceniks have been around for centuries. The guy who yells peace is the guy who always gets war, but the guy who stands up and says you mess with me and I’ll give you war ... he gets peace.” (Giordano) / referring to a young man with long hair who spoke from the audience:) “Withdraw! Withdraw! You people . . . what’s the matter with winning? I know the people in Washington are continuing the war, so they can soak up the tax dollars . . . and the war could have been won seven years ago ... by getting in there and really fighting!” (De Tanfilis) / “The ones that are prolonging this war are the long-haired brats. Because the government listens to ‘em, and the more they scream the more the war gets on the front pages.” (Brady) / (Corbett asked Susskind if he didn’t think we should have won the war long ago. Susskind said no, he didn’t think we should have been there in the first place. Corbett then said, “I suppose you think we shouldn’t have gone to war against the Nazis, huh?” Susskind said they weren’t comparable situations. And Corbett said:) “Oh, I see, you don’t think Communists are as bad as Nazis.” / (Susskind asked if it might not just be barely possible that the United States had been wrong in entering the war. All five shouted, “No!” as one. And then Corbett said:) “No, sir! If they’re against Communism, they can’t be wrong. You can’t make a deal with the devil. J. Edgar Hoover says it’s a conspiracy to destroy America, therefore it’s evil. It must be stamped out at the roots, even if we have to stamp out all of Russia.” / “There’s too much weaponry. We all ought to sit down and say we’re going to get rid of the super-weapons and just go back to safe weapons.” (Giordano) / “It’s the liberal Mafia that keeps this war from being won.” (Corbett)

  It is difficult to proceed, setting down so much jingoism and muddy thinking. On the one hand these men all deplore the high income tax that keeps them working six days a week and leaching all joy from their existences, they deplore the ten per cent surcharge that was instigated by a man they elected, and extended by a second man they elected . . . but on the other hand they find nothing wrong in the bulk of their tax dollar being spent on the Viet Nam war or on military hardware that has been proved either boondoggle or ineffectual before it’s built.

  They were, to a man, paranoid. There were conspiracies everywhere. The Black Militant conspiracy. The White Liberal Conspiracy. The Communist Conspiracy. The Bureaucratic Conspiracy. The Conspiracy of the Judiciary. All their troubles stem from poor people on welfare rolls and from “bleeding heart liberals” who steal from them.

  These were the opinions, the very words, of the average citizens who make up the bulk of this nation’s population. There were more. Many more statements about the law, about the protest movement, about blacks, about relief and welfare to the aged and infirm, about racial prejudice and integration. They are startling and baldly revealing statements.

  They were the thoughts and fears of the Common Man.

  My space this issue has run out. There is considerably more that needs to be said here, and more space needed, so I beg your indulgence, and ask that you return here next week for the second part of this study of Who We Are, Who They Are, and the problem of the Common Man.

  * * * *

  44: 25 OCTOBER 69

  “the common man”: part II

  “Black people just can’t cut it. They don’t have the intellectual ability. Now I know how the Liberal Mafia can discredit somebody who speaks his mind like that. They call him a bigot and a racist, and that makes you no good. It means what you say is no good. But I’m no bigot and I don’t even know what a racist is. What is a racist? Can somebody tell me what a racist is? If you go to the Ivory Coast in Africa, kids of four and five years old are making baskets and learning how to make things. But if you go into North Philadelphia or Bedford-Stuyvesant or Harlem you see the old man sitting around with his bottle of wine, which is paid for by me, the hard-working taxpayer.”

  That quotation is actually two men speaking. Paul Corbett, 40, a traveling salesman . . . and Mike Giordano, 47, a factory mechanic. I’ve fused the two quotes together because during the two hours of the Susskind interview these two men were the most outspokenly racist and bigoted, the most jingoistic and illogical. What each said might easily have come from the other’s mouth, and during the period excerpted above, their comments overlapped as they rushed to get their gut-feelings out. I don’t think either of them could honestly fault me for melding them into one definitive personality.

  Because Messrs. Corbett and Giordano—and their three compatriots—were speaking the words of contemporary middle-class America. They were expressing the secret and frequently not-so-secret beliefs of The Common Man in our country today.

  Giordano also said, a trifle hysterically, “All I want is to be left alone! I’m not asking anyone for anything! I just want to be left alone. Every time I turn on the TV someone is telling me how bad off the blacks are, how the little kids fight off rats in the slums. I don’t want to feel guilty, I just wanna be left alone!”

  It was a pathetic sight. A grown man very nearly on the verge of tears as he expressed his confusion and fear of the world around him. He’s a working-man, an average sort of joe who knows only that thousands of dollars for which he worked brutally hard (he says) are being stolen from him by the aged, the infirm, the destitute, those who have illegitimate babies, who lay up in their ghettos with wine he’s buying ... while four-year-olds on the Ivory Coast are making good living wages at cottage industry.

  These are the men who voted for Wallace. They insist they are not bigots and racists, yet they cannot define the terms and seem to have no awar
eness that it is they to whom we refer when we speak of these types.

  Giordano owns guns. He bought them to protect his property. The way he put it, unedited: “I hope I never have to use the gun I bought, but I would be remiss in my duty if I did not protect my house ... I have to protect myself, I have to protect my house.” Do you see something rather peculiar there? He doesn’t say he has to protect his wife and his nine children ... he says he has to protect his house.

  There is very little point in going on with the comments these five men made. They are hardly startling remarks; we’ve heard them endlessly for the past fourteen years. Yet they were so well capsulized, so concretized in their own slogan rigidity, that the conclusions they indicate—on the part of these five and all the Common Men—give us a primer of the fears and stupidities that will certainly kill us, and our planet, if they are not soon combated.

  Such as:

  “The two or three hundred years of injustice we whites are supposed to’ve perpetrated on blacks is a fraud.” (Giordano)

  “All the federal money for relief is going into the pockets of crooked politicians.” (Vincent de Tanfilis)

  “The Liberal Mafia has coerced the decent colored man. They were happy the way they were till all this noise started.” (Corbett)

  “I live in an integrated community. There are 27,000 whites and seventeen to thirty non-white families.” (Frank Mrak) And non-white could mean Mexican-American, Japanese, anything. But he thinks he lives in an integrated community.

  “Billy Graham says the protest movement on campus is due to the infiltration of dissident elements like Communists. This SDS sucks kids in on LSD and it’s a conspiracy.” (Frank Mrak) Not so incidentally, Mr. Mrak didn’t know the difference between SDS and LSD. He confused them, called one the other, and in general exhibited that most fundamental tip-off that we were dealing with the Common Man: inability to tell fact from fancy, reliance on rumor, gossip and the slogan.

  “Administrators on campuses have no backbone. They outta take a firm line with kids.” (De Tanfilis)

  “The only reason we got permissive sex in this country is that people are making money off it. They only reason the radicals talk so much about the war is because the politicians stand to make money off it” (Peter Brady, 30 years old)

  (Yes, I know the last remark above is totally incomprehensible, unbelievable, makes no sense and is the sort of thing you might expect to hear from a brain damage case, but Peter Brady was the youngest of the bunch. Younger than me, younger than most of you, and ostensibly one of the ones still “trustable” by the under-30 generation. Does this tell us anything?)

  There are ten or twelve more single-spaced pages of remarks, but why pursue it? Two weeks worth of columns is more than enough space to give these men their ups.

  It’s time to make a statement and take a position and try to formulate a generality that isn’t just hot air. And if such can be whomped-up from these crude materials, it is this:

  We have long been a country where nature imitates art. When Evan Hunter wrote The Blackboard Jungle with its wholly inaccurate portrait of what delinquency was like in the New York school system—and when the film was cobbled up from that once-removed fantasy, thereby making it a third-hand unreality image— the kids began imitating what they’d seen in the film and read in the book.

  We have a tendency to let our art-forms exploit us. In the Forties, we were deluged with pro-war movies in which Robert Taylor or John Hodiak or John Garfield gritted his teeth and fired into the endlessly advancing ranks of the Japanazis, thereby proving to us that even though (at first) we were losing the war, we’d pull it out of the fire and save the American Way of Life—if only we’d Buy Bonds.

  So, similarly have we swallowed whole the myth of the Common Man. The Mr. Deeds or the Mr. Smith who, because of his homespun philosophy, common sense and garden variety decency, emerges just at the last moment, just before the town lynches the wrong man or sells its heritage to the international cartel or lets the bully finish off the town weakling—and he saves the day. We believe in the Common Man. The man who works with his hands. The man who makes up the labor unions and the merchant class and the middle-America homeowner. We believe in his good sense, in his perceptions of what is right or wrong.

  No good. It won’t work no more. The “common man” philosophy is based on simple truths, eternal verities, on black and white and right and wrong. But the world is not that kind of Giant Golden Book any longer. The world is an incredibly complex skein of interwoven potencies, of power in too many hands, of power corrupted and people used.

  The Common Man is no longer merely as outdated as the passenger pigeon. He is a living menace.

  He is the man who votes for Wallace because Wallace offers him easy cop-out solutions to the fears he feels. He is the man who thinks everybody can earn a living. He is the man who, because he personally never lynched a nigger, believes there is no such thing as prejudice.

  He is the man who believes only what affects him, what he sees, or what is most consistent with the status quo that will keep him afloat.

  The time for worshipping the Common Man is past. We can no longer tolerate him, or countenance his stupidity. He is the man who keeps our air polluted, our country at war, our schools infested with police state-ism, our lives on the brink of oppression and our futures sold out for oil leases.

  The Common Man—the kind Susskind showed us with such sorry clarity—has to go. If we are to continue living in this doomed world, if we are to save ourselves, we must kill off the Common Man in us and bring forth the Renaissance Man.

  * * * *

  45: 31 OCTOBER 69

  After those last two blood-curdling columns about The Common Man (and the attendant mail that’s been pouring in, both with huzzahs from those of us who are scared shitless by TCM and with death-threats from several Common Men—thus proving every once in a while I hit a truth or two) this time I’d like to do a happyhappy tippy-toe commentary that will leave you with a smile on your lips and a song in your heart. There are two ways to do same: 1) review a show that has something going for it and talk nice about it or 2) blast the crap out of a stinker in Menckenesque terms.

  Either way is fun, so this week I’ll do both.

  (But first a small aside, having nothing to do with TV. Last week’s Freep featured an article by a chopper thug named Mike Brown. Mr. Brown is against a lot of things I think are very nice, but whereas I wouldn’t take up a .30-06 to stop him from hating Jews, Blacks, gays, Communists, Catholics, Free Masons, hippies and all the other species he cannot abide, as long as he didn’t get physical about it ... Mr. Brown—how his own last name must bug him!—has banded together with a number of other over-six-foot proto-beefy bikers to DEFEND AMERICA BY VIOLENCE. Mr. Brown ought to get hip to the simple core truth that his problem is based on his own insecurity about being an adequate male. What you or I would do if we felt uptight like that, is go find us a lady and give her some pleasure. What Mr. Brown does is use Molotov cocktails on trucks. We’d use the penis, he uses the truncheon. Mr. Brown has banded together in the typical homosexual-fear unit and thrust between his legs not a loving woman but a snarling chopper. If he wasn’t so pitiable, he’d be ludicrous. All concerned folk who read Mr. Brown’s shriek of sexual impotency and frustration should send their freeze-dried semen to his lair, in hopes he will either face his emotional problems by making love, not stupidity, or—failing that—drive his air-cooled courage off a cliff in Coldwater at 100 mph.)

  Onward and upward with truth and/or beauty.

  First, the decimation. Second, the praising.

  Up for destruction, one 90 minute movie produced for ABC by Aaron Spelling’s jellybean operation over at Paramount. It was on the network a week ago Tuesday, and it was called The Monk. When—as a potential writer of 90-minute movies for this series of “World Television Premieres”—I was called in several months ago to sit through a screening of this classic cheapie cornball abomination, I
could not really believe ABC would go ahead and put it on the air.

  It was so bad, so completely and thoroughly without redeeming value of any kind, I felt certain the ABC khans would varf, retch, rush for toilets, and then come back and possibly lynch Spelling; the director, George McCowan; the scenarist, Tony Barrett; and even the principal accomplices thespically speaking, George Maharis, Janet Leigh, Carl Betz, William Smithers and even Jack Albertson, who should have known better. But they didn’t, the ding-dongs. They ran it. They even took out ads for it.

  Gawd, now that’s what I call a frenzy for suicide.

  In case you are among the blissful millions who missed this epic of stupidity, allow me to describe what it was about the show that makes it the lowest point thus far in a low season.

  The idea is a fresh one. It’s about this private eye...

  The original idea was conceived (if that is the word ... spawned might be more on-target) by Blake Edwards, who created Peter Gunn some ten years ago. I understand the Monk idea was an earlier one, and was drawered when Peter Gunn took off. Edwards never finished the original version. Spelling bought it (I suppose because it had Edwards’ name on it; surely it had nothing else going for it). He assigned the script-writing chores to Tony Barrett, a very nice man who used to write extensively for the Gunn series and worked for Spelling on Burke’s Law. But Tony Barrett opted for cliche, and what he wrote would have looked pale on the Gunn series itself. It’s the hack detective story about the big-time mob attorney who’s afraid he’s gonna be bumped off unless Gus Monk protects him, and Monk says fuck off you hood, and the attorney gets bumped, naturally, only it wasn’t the attorney in that flaming car it was ... well, you know the rest.