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

by Harlan Ellison

  What he said and what he meant were studies in the art of lying rationally, justifying evil in the name of good, and otherwise burning down the Reichstag himself so Spiro Hitler could acquire the reins of power.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked him.

  “I’m canceling the balance of your contract here.”

  “Oh, really? How come?”

  “I’ve decided you don’t have the best interests of the Center at heart,” is what he said. I’ve decided you are making waves, saying things that will get the parents looking at us more closely, is what he thought.

  “You aren’t relating to the children,” is what he said. You’re getting through to them and they’re going back home and asking questions and I’m getting phone calls, is what he thought.

  “You’re turning a lot of them off,” is what he said. You’re turning me off, is what he thought.

  “You’re not fulfilling the role of a guest artist here,” is what he said. You weren’t supposed to talk politics or start trouble, is what he thought.

  “I can’t take a chance on your delivering a talk tonight that will cause the Center trouble. Our position is very uncertain right now,” is what he said. I’m scared shitless you’ll offend the Middle Americans and I’ll lose my job, is what he thought.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Yes; frankly, you have a foul mouth. It doesn’t offend me, you understand, but it has turned off some of the children.”

  I quote to you now from an article in the Dayton Journal Herald dated 17 December 69, headlined ARTS CENTER CANCELS WRITER (pars. 8 & 9). “Students who were with Ellison at the center yesterday said his blunt language might have been interpreted by Ray as offensive.

  “ ‘He used a couple of beauties,’” a student said regarding Ellison’s speech, “but it didn’t bother anyone.’”

  What Ray said to me, and what he meant, were light-years apart.

  “We’ll pay you the balance of your fee,” Ray said. He had to. We had a contract. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll accept it,” I answered. “Just my expenses will do.”

  “Great,” grinned Ray. “We can use the money.”

  I suddenly had the feeling my ethics had made me a patsy. Even so, I suggested to him that he was being hasty, and that if he felt the night’s lecture was going to be a debacle, I’d show him the material I’d prepared: an essay on creativity, a short story in the form of a fantasy about returning to one’s childhood, and some anecdotes. “My mind is made up,” he said.

  “You don’t want any facts to get in the way, is that it?” I asked.

  “You’re turning the children off,” he said.

  It was the one thing that could stop me cold. I bit on it, despite that photo in the Dayton Daily News of the session at which the kids were rocking with laughter. What I didn’t know was that in the Evaluation Sheets that had been given out to the black students from Dunbar High School and their teacher, I’d been lauded as having delivered a wild, groovy hour talk, and they wanted to come back again. Had I known that, I would not have acquiesced so quietly.

  But after all, he was the Director, wasn’t he? He knew what went down with the kids. Didn’t he? Sure he did.

  So I went back to John Baskin’s class, and told him and the kids what had happened.

  The next thing I knew, there was a children’s crusade.

  (Bear in mind, these are not seasoned dissenters of whom I write. They are kids from twelve years old on up to maybe sixteen, middle-class mid-American, never been in a protest scene, never been beaten on by police clubs.)

  They stormed Glenn Ray’s office.

  “You can’t talk like a liberal and then cop out!” one girl shrieked.

  “If this is the way you’re gonna live up to what you tell us, you can take your Center and shove it up your ass!” howled a boy of fifteen, then he turned so we wouldn’t see him crying, and stormed out of the building.

  Little Nancy Henry, not yet in her teens, daughter of a Dayton policeman, began weeping, trying to get her voice high enough to yell, “You can’t do this! You can’t! We won’t let you!”

  One black kid summed it up, to Ray. “Man, you talk the talk, but you don’t walk the walk.”

  I didn’t want a bad scene, and I heard Barbara Benham urging them to go back to the classroom, to wait for their protest. Some did, some didn’t. Many hung around outside Glenn Ray’s office. At this point my mind went away, and so did my lust for reportorial accuracy.

  Did they throw Glenn Ray out of his office and take it over? Did Ray call the police on the little kids? I’ve got three different stories, all of them culminating in a riot. I went back to Benham’s apartment and later that night a mass of people who had come in from Antioch and Columbus and other cities came and sat around on the floor and looked woebegone. They all kept telling me, “This isn’t what Dayton’s like ... honest!”

  But it is, friends. It is also what College Station, Texas’s like and Altoona, Pennsylvania and Madeira Beach, Florida and Seattle, Washington and Wheatland, Wyoming. It is the time of the Middle Americans, friends. It is the day of the Silent Majority.

  And we are moving into a period of repression that will make the McCarthy era seem like the Age of Enlightenment. I said that was the theme of this three-parter way back at the beginning of this outpouring, and as soon as I give you a few more loose ends on Dayton I’ll deal with Spiro, TV, the wave of fear that’s backlashing us, and try to pry some sense out of the rubble.

  That night, after the mourners left, John Baskin, Barbara Benham and I sat and talked. We talked about John’s fury at what had happened, and how he had used the riotous scene to make some strong points with the kids about liberalism meaning nothing if you fold when the pressure’s on. We talked about Ray’s intentions of getting Barbara fired, and how it had been that, more than anything, that had kept me from putting Ray against the wall. We talked about the sudden appearance at the evening’s wake of Hugh McDiarmid, City Editor of the Journal Herald, and his amazing remark: “I wanted to meet you, Ellison. My God, you’re awfully small to have caused all this trouble.” We talked about my speaking to the final session of the science fiction workshop the next day ... in the Benham apartment.

  The next day there was even more talk. But it all went on at the Center, with DeVelbiss and Ray talking to the faculty, talking to Barbara Benham, talking to the newspapers (the headline reads LIVING ARTS GUEST ‘DIDN’T FULFILL ROLE’), talking to each other and very probably talking to themselves.

  Finally, I got a delayed case of being pissed-off. Here were these two “administrators,” down there at the Center, bumrapping me and telling the world their idiotic position was justified because I was a moral leper. I decided to really make waves. But when I finally confronted Ray and DeVelbiss in the Center, it was apparent if I pursued my plan—to insist they pay me the full fourteen hundred dollar fee, and use it to hire Asher Bogen, Dayton’s best attorney, and sue them for defamation of character and anything else I could think of—they would fire Barbara Benham out of serendipitous vengefulness. I backed off. In fact, I offered to stay on, at my own expense, and provide them with an opportunity to get off the hook by doing the evening lecture two days later, from material I would submit for their scrutiny.

  But their position was so inflexible, they were unable to back off; thereby demonstrating the most debilitating aspect of educational confrontations: inability to mediate, refusal to deal, concretization of posture because of a need to preserve ego and authority.

  So we made a deal, of sorts, after the following conversation:

  ELLISON: I’ll take my money.

  DeVELBISS: You turned it down when it was offered.

  ELLISON: I changed my mind. I have a use for it now.

  DeVELBISS: I don’t have to pay someone fourteen hundred dollars to come in here and curse and cause trouble. If I want to do that, I can do it myself, for free.

  ELLISON: Yeah, but you were dumb e
nough to hire me to do it.

  There was quite a lot more, and some threats, and some Raymond Chandler hardnosing, in which Mr. Ray understood that after I broke every bone in his body (though on reappraisal I realize if I’d broken him open, all I’d have gotten would have been jelly on my hands) I would sue him. Not the Center, but him, personally, so he’d have no Board of Education money behind him. And after that I’d speak to a friend of mine quite high in the Health, Education and Welfare Department, and I’d make sure that they cut back the funds of the Center just enough to have to dispense with him...nothing else, just him. So they paid me.

  And they promised they wouldn’t fire Barbara Benham.

  And, of course, they are honorable men. “So are they all, all honourable men—”

  And so, I left Dayton.

  * * * *

  Neither as significant as the mass of current attempts to stifle dissent ... nor as permanent as the crimes committed against those who have spoken out, my Dayton foray was one with the terrors of these new times. What came out of those three days in mid-December? Only this:

  John Baskin, who taught the sf class, who stood up and told the administration they were wrong, who tried to pursue the matter in articles for his newspaper, the Dayton Daily News, who inspired his class kids with discussions of just what freedom of expression means— John Baskin was fired from the newspaper. Perhaps there’s no connection. But . . .

  Barbara Benham, who taught classes on revolution and the joys of being a “free spirit”—Barbara Benham has been cowed. Something has been stolen from her, at the precise moment it fell to her (as it falls to each of us) to discover whether she had enough courage to lose everything for that in which she believed ... she found she did not.

  The kids no longer trust Glenn Ray or the administration of the Center. They have been blunted once again with the knowledge that those who prattle about serving them, opening them, helping them—are merely exploiting them for their own personal aggrandizement. Those kids will be a trifle more cynical and bitter now.

  What came out of those three days was ugliness, cupidity, irrationality and, in microcosm, provide a key to the days into which we are moving.

  * * * *

  Time picked the Middle Americans as their man and woman of the year. It picked them because Spiro Agnew and television have forged out of the fears are prejudices and know-nothing provincialism of the mass of middle-class Americans an army of dupes, to be used to destroy the very freedoms those people say they most respect. Repression, in the name of platitudes, is what destroyed half of Europe in the Thirties and Forties. It is what gave Joseph McCarthy his power. It is what has kept us fighting a senseless war for half a decade. It is the systematic terrorization of those who—like Barbara Benham—have found it is easier to be a little bit frightened all the time, to acquiesce, to survive, than to ask the right questions, take the right chances, and discover for themselves that they are stronger than their puppet masters.

  I watched William Buckley last Sunday, talking to three bright young men concerned with Our Times. He was glib, he was clever, and he made them look silly. But he dealt only with words. To hear him tell it, everything they chose to worry about—pollution, prejudice, repression, duplicity on the part of governments, censorship—all these were in their minds. It was merely a matter of using the right words. Even as Glenn Ray and Jack DeVelbiss and the man who fired John Baskin use words. They say we are “not doing the job,” or we are “foul-mouthed,” or we “don’t have the best interests of the Center at heart,” but these are just syntax. They are obfuscations. They are the eyewash used by men of weak will and frightened demeanor to keep the status quo free of waves.

  And through the use of the greatest propaganda medium the world has ever known, television, the puppet masters are duping an entire nation. The thousands of letters in support of Spiro Agnew and his denunciation of newscasters who report any news but that which the Administration finds balming to its ego is eloquent testimony to the success of the hoodwinking.

  It is significant, I think, that on December 3rd the Writers Guild took a gutsy stand against Agnew and his pronouncements. Their press release said, in part:

  “The Writers Guild of America, West, viewed with abhorrence the attacks of Vice President Agnew on the right of news and editorial media freely to analyze and criticize statements and policies of the administration.

  “We found it shocking that the second officer of the nation dared to suggest that the Constitutional guarantee of the First Amendment, embodying the fundamental right of free speech, may not apply to TV commentators and should perhaps be abridged in the press as well.

  “We are concerned that the President himself has not repudiated this assault on spoken and written opinion.

  “We are aware of the curiously coordinated chorus of support for these attacks by three cabinet officers, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and other office-holders. This kind of concerted pressure by Government on organs of public expression, and against individuals singled out by name, is exactly what we have condemned in our enemies.

  “As writers who have faced censorship in many forms, we are not lulled by disclaimers that no censorship was implied, and condemn as repugnant and sinister any attack on the basic right of free expression. That right was meant to be exercised by Americans at any and all times, for or against any administration, policy or issue. That right was not meant to be altered or suspended following a particular speech, nor is it subject to any delays or qualifications imposed from above.”

  I find the above curiously parallel to my situation in Dayton. And I find it significant that it was the writers who said it.

  When I began writing this column, little over a year ago, my first column dealt with what I called “the illiterate conspiracy against dissent.” The war on counter-opinion. At that time I conceded that the attack was an unarticulated one, that no cabal of men actually sat down in a room and said this week we silence this one, and next week we get that one.

  But even in one year the times have changed drastically. Faster than I’d thought possible. The conspiracy is open now. It comes down from the top. And because of its blatancy, men who were middle-of-the-road have been pushed to their left, have become Liberals. Liberals have been jammed over into being Activists. The Activists have, against their will, become Militants ... and the Militants, who saw what this year would become, have now hideously, horribly, without their wanting it... been crammed all the way over into the Revolutionary Blood and Death position.

  Television has given Agnew and his ilk the platform from which to martial the fear and stupidity of the masses. And those of us who began the year with sanity and hope for change, now see the Middle Americans totemized as the epitome of rationality and patriotism. Now we find ourselves on the edge of a darkling plain, looking out across a time in this country when weak men like Glenn Ray and Jack DeVelbiss will conscience any degradation of their ethics and morality in the name of not being singled-out as The Enemy.

  And the strong men will be picked off, one by one.

  They will be gagged and tried and salted away. And the darkness will creep across this land.

  Friends, you may not know it, but the war is on. The big war, and possibly the last war. It had a tiny skirmish in Dayton, and we lost it.

  The puppet masters in Dayton are not evil men, they are merely weak men. And it is that weakness that will kill us. The fangs of Spiro bite deep.

  * * * *

  AFTERWORD: 30 JANUARY 70

  ADDENDUM TO DAYTON

  I was wrong. At least in one very important matter. After almost 10,000 words of copy relating what went on down in Dayton, Ohio during my two-day lecture/lynching, I’d thought I’d said it all.

  But there is one more final fillip to be added to the confection. One that humbles me. Because, if you recall, I began part two of “Poisoned By The Fangs of “Spiro” with the comment that even the kids might not be able to save thi
s country, because the poison of repression had seeped down into them, too. Whew! That’s what happens, friends. It gets so damned depressing, coming up against the cultural hari-kiri we keep committing, that cynicism becomes the only supportable attitude. And then the kids prove they’ve got it. Even I, anxious to give them every possible point, begin to suspect the rot goes from top to bottom, young and old alike. And then the kids do me in. They come up with solid gold, and make me feel like the idiot I certainly am, on occasion.

  What I’m talking about is this: you recall I spoke to two high school groups in Dayton. One was a class of kids from Dunbar High. All black. They were hip, into it, really exciting kids to rap with. The other group was all white, middle to lower-middle class Appalachian kids. I reported they were deadheads, were offended by my manner and my language and my choice of lecture material. I reported they were responsible for inflaming their parents sufficiently at the “freak” who’d talked to them, to get those parents on the muscle against the Dayton Living Arts Center, which resulted in my being canceled.