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

by Harlan Ellison

  The fourth segment had hold of a marvelous idea, but once more opted for the obvious, cliche treatment, thereby emasculating the basic concept. Take a Suth’rin kid whose big love is automobiles, and stick him on an island where there are no cars, and how does he go about getting himself wheels; and further, once he has them, what does he do with them? It was a nice idea, synched-in with the theme of how much individual responsibility does a man have in a society where you can’t really be made to pay for your acts? It was enough to hold one’s attention, but it was hardly the heavyweight drama this series promised.

  Fifth week, turn off again. Dulls the senses. Bludgeons the spirit. Twitches the fingers toward knob-turn. Laugh-In got my business. Again.

  Sixth week, Brenda Scott played a hysteric to Peter Ratray’s strong, semi-silent type. The kids get a little stir-crazy and some of them decide to build a raft to float off the island. Plotted as tightly as one of those see-through knit dresses, it was pedestrian, predictable, fiddled with improbabilities and coincidences, and resembled for logic the attempt of Shipwreck Kelly to go over Niagara Falls in a Dixie Cup.

  I’ve reappraised at such length a series that is obviously a bummer, for the sole reason of trying to save it. The basic idea, I repeat for the fourth time, is a solid one. There is something of consequence inherent in the plight of forty kids trying to create a workable society on an island unaffected by the world their elders made—save in the corruptions passed on to them by their elders.

  But the producers of The New People are traveling down the road to cancellation tread by so many other series: the road that is paved with the hack scripts of old men and/or weary writers. There are young writers in town who know how to mirror the attitudes of the young, who know how to present problems that concern all of us now, who have a sense and a feel and a compassion for what’s going down today. These are the writers who should be employed on The New People. They should be given their head, should have the reins let out on them, should be allowed to run with their ideas. Not hobbled and held in by arbitrary ideas of “what is so” by producers and networkers whose closest approach to the minds of the young is when they ride down the Strip of a Saturday night with their windows and their minds closed.

  It should not fall to a television critic to point out to a show’s creative personnel the insanity of having a show about the minds and hearts of young people— being written by old people. If I want an authority on how to chop-and-channel a Mercury, I don’t hire the lady who won second place in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

  And as for viewing-with-alarm, I am alarmed that the wonderful Music Scene show (which, unfortunately, comes on not only directly opposite My World—And Welcome To It but just before The New People, thereby laying two heavy strikes on it for openers) is down near the bottom in ABC ratings. This is a program that deserves to continue. It is wryly cynical, has sparkle and dash and originality, and even manages to make some scalpel slashes at the current scene.

  David Steinberg and his compatriots are the most ebullient and compelling hosts we have been offered in many moons, and to see them back on the bread lines would be a shame.

  Regularly, they showcase talent we don’t see nearly enough of: Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, Three Dog Night, Isaac Hayes, Richie Havens and Buffy Sainte-Marie. And they do it with innovation and sincerity.

  I urge those of you who have not yet caught on to Music Scene to do so at once. It’s so good the scythe-wielder of TV attrition will certainly mow it down forthwith. Or perhaps, having sounded the alarum, we can do something to prevent this winner going the way of the Smothers Bros.

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  48: 28 NOVEMBER 69

  Television and its occult machinations have finally produced their first genuinely tragic figure. How odd: we might have thought Senator Joseph McCarthy the proper one to be so recognized. TV stripped him raw—aided by the US Army and old Joe Welch—and in the last days of the now-famous McCarthy-Army hearings we saw that paragon of despotism bludgeoned from his position as a destroyer of lives, from his position as a disseminator of fear and hatred, from his position as the antichrist of Democracy ... to a sobbing, hysterical mass of ruined flesh. Soon after, he died. Destroyed by television. Surely McCarthy was the front-runner for the title. Then came William Talman, whose career was thrown up for grabs on the Perry Mason series because of bad publicity attendant on some minor dope-&-sex peccadillo; cancer added to his tragic stature. But his friends stood by him, to their everlasting credit, and he remained with the show. Yet he was a candidate. And then we saw Lyndon Johnson creamed by TV. By dissent and the rising gorge of American disgust at the way he manhandled the highest office in the land. If not McCarthy or Talman, then certainly weary old LBJ.

  But no. None of them hold a candle to the man who emerges as the sorriest creature ever to flash across the land in phosphor-dot reality.

  Art Linkletter is the most tragic figure.

  It is difficult to bring myself to club a man when he’s down, and make no mistake (as that incipiently tragic wager of war, Mr. Nixon, would say), Art Linkletter is down. So what you read here is carefully considered and even more carefully written.

  Because the deadly irony of what has happened to Art Linkletter forces one to pause and consider just how uncaring the universe really is. For here is a man who helped build a multi-million dollar show business career in large part from the cute sayings of children, who never managed to glean from all those years kneeling beside tots with their directness and simple truth, enough perceptivity or perspective to help his own daughter as she crawled inexorably toward her own death. It is a universe that allows stupidity to exist, and so we must conclude the universe simply doesn’t give a damn.

  Diane Linkletter, twenty years old and quite pretty, threw herself from a sixth floor window in West Hollywood on Saturday, October 4th of this year. She was on a bad trip with acid. (Dear God, how silly and futile resound the hip terminology of the in-group: “bad trip.” What must she have been seeing, thinking, feeling as the LSD drove her down six floors to end the worst possible, short trip anyone can imagine?)

  And she left behind Art Linkletter, who comes, too late, to a concern for young people.

  Remorse, guilt, sorrow. He has no corner on the market, and saying other parents have experienced similar tragedies makes no mark. Life is not a comparison of other people’s chamber of horrors. Yet Art Linkletter’s purgatory is a very special one, for it was fashioned on network television and furnished by his persistent refusal to understand.

  As the story is told, immediately after he learned of his daughter’s death, Linkletter tried to quash the item. It would have been ugly for the world to know the daughter of such a man—a man so immediately identified with children—had been so alienated that she had taken her life in such a hideous fashion. But for whatever reasons, he verified the report that, yes, it had been acid. And weeks later he appeared on television (TV again), having appeared before Nixon’s committee on drug use. Now he was cast in the tragic role of grieving father, and emerged as a fighter in the war against drugs.

  Well, fine. Not being a doper, I can’t get very worked up about marijuana, but I’ve had enough friends and friends of friends blacked-out by heavier staff to welcome anybody as an ally. But Art Linkletter seems still to fail to understand.

  He fails to recognize the simple truth that when drugs were confined solely to the black ghetto, and hundreds of thousands of minority kids were getting their lives fucked-up, no one cared. Oh, the “authorities” made their token raids and arrests, but the great white world didn’t care, didn’t really think it mattered. But now that a Jesse Unruh’s son gets busted for pot, now that an Art Linkletter’s daughter dies behind drug use ... now, now the white community in the person of Art Linkletter cries out in anguish.

  Too late, Mr. Linkletter! Too goddamed little and too goddamned late! Because you still don’t know that your Diane’s death was only symptomatically caused by LSD. It was caused by the wo
rld you, in great part, helped create for all the Dianes. It was caused by you and all the righteous “good folk” who continue to believe the hoary clichés of your own youth. That anyone can make it in America if he has the will and determination. That authority is always right, that children should respect their parents whether they’ve earned the respect or not, that hard work brings its just reward, that nice girls don’t do this or that, that good little boys don’t do that or the other. It was caused by all the people like yourself who’ve allowed the police to turn loose the hoses and the dogs and the tear gas and the cattle prods on “the enemy” in our streets.

  Who is the enemy, Mr. Linkletter?

  Is it the dreaded Communist Menace?

  Is it the anarchist rabble?

  Is it the drug-crazed dissenters?

  No, Mr. Linkletter, it’s your own kids.

  How many parents will end their days sorrowing for their kids like you, because they fail to recognize the insanity of turning hate and prison and death against an “enemy” who is simply your kids?

  Do you yet understand the nature of your tragedy, Linkletter, all of you? Do you understand that your tragedy is in what happened to the college dissenters convicted last week, in police photographing twelve and sixteen year old kids in the Valley as “subversives” because they wanted to join the Moratorium Day marching, in the trial of the Chicago Conspiracy 8, in the gagging of Bobby Seale. Can you dig it, Mr. Linkletter—Bobby Seale is your son!

  Diane’s death grew logically out of her disillusionment. I never knew her, I don’t know you, but I know what was in her gut, because it comes from the guts of hundreds of other Dianes and Bobby Seales with whom I’ve come in contact. Disillusionment at Art Linkletter for helping to preserve a hypocritical and repressive laissez-faire society in which Diane and her contemporaries were lied-to every day of their lives. Lied to by TV (and that’s you, Art), lied to by authority, lied to by the dichotomy between what you told her the world was like and what she found it to be for herself.

  Jingo-ism! Dammit, jingo-ism. “Generation gap,” “silent majority,” “the American way,” “the menace of Communism,” “student radicals,” “the drug culture.” All of it is bullshit! It’s death, Mr. Linkletter. Death and blood and suicide and stupidity.

  I bought your record, Mr. Linkletter. The one made with Diane before she died. We Love You, Call Collect it’s called, and there’re photos of you and Diane on the cover. I’m not going to be gross and suggest you take any delight in this 45 rpm item. I suppose you’ve continued to let it sell in hopes some kid or parent may learn a lesson from it. I hear your voice break and tears in your words on this record, and I hope I’m not being hustled; I hope that was something more than theatrical histrionics. It would be too horrible to consider it anything else.

  But the record is another part of your on-camera guilt, Mr. Linkletter. Because it proffers the same weary clichés to the young people that your generation has always proffered. It resounds with the helpless confusion and sorrow of people who have found the world in which they grew up totally different from the world of today. Well, what did you expect? You’ve allowed that world to poison itself with war for fifty years, you’ve permitted corruption and racism to flourish, you’ve sacrificed everything beautiful and meaningful to the building of bigger and better military establishments, political machines, television careers ...

  I understand also that Art Linkletter is going down to Synanon, to find out about drug use. It’s a step in the right direction. But it’s only a tool to be used in finally prying open that locked skull-box of set ideas and rigid beliefs. I’m not exactly sure how I came to be addressing Mr. Linkletter directly in this column, but I’ve switched back to the impersonal to prevent any of you who might pass it off as one man’s anguish, from wriggling free.

  For Art Linkletter has made his bed and now he’ll have to sleep in it. What happened to him can happen to all of us. Unless we act now to stop the senseless stupidity and hatred that seem destined to rule this country. I can summon very little pity for Art Linkletter; for Diane, yes, quite a lot. Because I know how lost and helpless she must have felt. How lost and helpless all those kids in their real or mental prisons now feel.

  You are TV, Mr. Linkletter. You have the power to go to school again, to understand all the reasons why Diane died. And once having learned, to speak up. To go to the council chambers of Nixons and Agnews and cry to them as you cry to us on your record.

  Because you’re only the first. The first major figure in the TV pantheon to discover that what you shot across the tube for so many years was waste and frippery and lies. In the council chambers of the networks, several weeks ago, the heads of the big three joined to establish a “youth” liaison with the younger generation, to find out what they are thinking, what they are about, what they want. They picked a kid named Waxman, I believe, to be the voice of youth.

  You might speak to them about that, Mr. Linkletter. And tell them you’d like to spend some time going to school, and then assisting in forging that link between the generations. And the first step is not to lie, and the second is to try to understand.

  There’s no help for Art Linkletter. He’s lost his, and I would certainly find it impossible to pack the guilt he’ll have to pack. But guilt and sorrow can be softened by making sure what has happened to oneself happens to no one else.

  It will take a strong and intelligent and very probably selfless man to carry such a load. Only time will tell if Art Linkletter packs the gear. Until then, he is merely the most tragic figure produced by the TV Generation.

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  49: 5 DECEMBER 69

  I swear to Christ, sometimes I feel as though I’ve tumbled assoverteakettle down a rabbit hole. What I mean, maybe you aren’t getting the same stuff over your TV set I’m getting on mine. Because the stuff on mine is crazy as a neon doughnut and I refuse to believe I’m seeing straight. Maybe all those Zonk-rays from the color set are turning my brains to cottage cheese. With chives.

  On the Frank Reynolds ABC news I see where a US Marine has copped to the rumors of a Vietnamese massacre being true. And I see photographs that were taken on the spot, genuinely horrendous photographs. They look like replays of Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald. Piles of emaciated bodies. Children with their faces blown off by riflefire. Mothers with bullet holes through their heads, stilled in the act of trying to hurl their babies from them. And the babies, lying twisted as Raggedy Ann dolls, as dead as their mothers. Somewhere between 170 and 700 people. Civilians. The total has not yet been agreed upon. Maybe VC-supporters, maybe not. But civilians, either way. Dead; all of them dead.

  It happened 20 months ago, at My Lai, and we’re just now finding out about it. When the first photos appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, there was instant snarling from the Pentagon. It wasn’t true. It didn’t happen. The first Marine to talk about it was a psychopathic liar. And every day the Tom Reddin News on Channel 5 began with a map of Southeast Asia behind The Man, and he smiled and said triumphantly, “Today, further proof that the ‘alleged’ massacre of Viet Namese civilians never happened! Pinkville is a calloused lie!”

  And then the dam broke. And one after another the men who had participated in the crime came forward and extended their hands like Lady Macbeth and said they were finding it difficult to wash away the damned spot.

  So now the Army has “taken steps” to set things to rights. They’ve initiated court-martial proceedings against the Lieutenant who ordered the massacre. And some twenty-odd others. (I won’t even comment on the military position of letting the mass-murderers wander around on their own recognizance. All I’ll say is that Sirhan Sirhan only bumped one man, and he was indicted without bail.. But then, he killed an Amurrican, not them little slant-eyed devils.)

  Now I don’t know how you feel about this whole thing, there’s an entire range of emotions one can experience, I suppose, but I’d suspect they have to weigh heavily on the side of revulsion, shame and horr
or. Yet my TV set showed me a gentleman in the House of Representatives who got up and deplored the military’s preferring charges, on the grounds that it would make any soldier who committed (what he called) an “error in judgment” liable to prosecution as a “common criminal.” Well, I’ll agree with the rep; that Lieutenant is hardly a “common” criminal. I cannot conceive of the sort of mind that can butcher a hundred and seventy unarmed men, women and children—but it is unquestionably not “common.”

  So, you see what I mean about nutsy things coming in on my tube? Here is this shameful disgrace blotched on the escutcheon of the United States, and some ding-dong asshole in the House of Representatives is uptight because it might force other potential slaughterers to pause and consider abiding by the terms of the Geneva Convention.