An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  But two Sundays ago Norman Lear’s two-hour special on ABC, I Love Liberty, billed by the network against Lear’s objections as “a star-studded entertainment salute to the freedoms that make our country great!” manifested itself as a horrifying example of the well of good intentions being poisoned by television’s First Commandment: “Blandness in the defense of offending no one to preserve ratings is no vice” (paraphrasing a famous quotation we will deliver in its original form later in this column).

  In the name of “looking good,” this massive outlay of talent, effort, megabucks and primetime succeeded only in demonstrating that it serves no worthwhile end to slip a Trojan Horse into the enemy camp if the strategist in charge fails to unlock the trapdoor so the warriors hidden within can descend on their adversaries.

  At Chavez Ravine they call that losing sight of the ball.

  I Love Liberty was, for two hours, nothing but a panegyric of tub-thumping, self-deluding, flag-waving self-congratulation in the time-honored tradition of America’s bad taste bad habit of hollow posturing that we are “the last best hope of the Earth.”

  This columnist’s ambivalence while writing these words is nothing less than Olympian. I have written elsewhere of my unbridled adoration of Norman Lear for his having set on-line the anti-Falwell organization called People For The American Way. To find myself now trashing the first major public demonstration of that group’s credo, gives me what Delia Salvi called “your basic agita.” Had my expectations for I Love Liberty not been so high, I might not have had them so crushed.

  And in what I perceive as the total failure of the tv special to do what it set out to do, what so desperately needs doing, I think we may glean several important realities about television, about bucking the system, and about the nature of compromise.

  Near the burning core of what I Love Liberty was conceived to do, lies the reality that Lear has become one of the most prominent targets of the Reverend Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. Lear has been the specific subject of virulent attacks that parallel in tone and intensity the White House-backed attacks on Ed Asner by (among other mouthpieces) Charlton Heston. If you recall, I did a piece on that running-dog imbroglio several weeks ago.

  Both campaigns have less to do with the actuality of Lear or Asner than that they have spoken out. Neither Reagan nor Falwell can take much heat, and so they set their demon legions on whoever dares challenge their brainwashing programs of the American people. When Lear was instrumental in creating People For The American Way, Falwell stepped up his outrages. Though I Love Liberty as a concept was planned far in advance of the major Falwell assault, on October 3rd, 1981, the good Reverend signed and sent out a mass mailing headed WHO IS THE #1 ENEMY OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY IN OUR GENERATION?

  The letter read, in part, “Dear Friend, This man has been slandering and discrediting me and the Moral Majority for several months now. And if he has his way, I will tell you what will happen…everything you and I have fought so hard for—will go right down the drain! Here’s the man’s name: NORMAN LEAR! Many people believe he is the man who has successfully brought filth and sexual perversion into our living rooms and led the way to today’s gutter programming.”

  The letter then went on to pillory Lear for story lines used in the long-defunct Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman series, extolling the virtues of the Moral Majority and Wildmon’s ill-named Coalition For Better Television, and begging for contributions to fight this snake called Lear, in exchange for which contributions Falwell promised to send a “Confidential Report” on Lear “so you can decide for yourself what his motives might really be.”

  If one were foolish enough to be gulled by this meretricious appeal to narrowmindedness and paranoia, and to respond to the ominous tone of what Lear’s “motives might really be,” and one parted with money better spent on buying a book or milk for a child endangered by “gutter programming” (none of which seems to come in on my set, dammit), by return mail one received a single undocumented sheet marked CONFIDENTIAL. This eyes only revelation was, how shall I put it, somewhat underwhelming.

  The heavyweight indictments include such awfulness as the alleged fact that People For The American Way “is nothing more than a stalking horse for Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy,” that PAW’s offices were in a building adjacent to the offices of Parker / Dodd and Associates, national fund raisers for Kennedy, and that Richard Parker, a principal in the firm, was the national fund raiser for that other evil snake, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Wow! Imagine my surprise! That’s enough, right there, to lynch the motherfucker.

  But there was more. (Never let it be said Jerry-Boy gives less than value for his tithes.) It seems that the PAW office in Washington is under the direction of one Anthony Podesta, whose terrorist credentials are laid out in the “Confidential Report” as follows: “a young, liberal attorney and staunch union activist.” I’m not sure if the objection to Podesta, that which is supposed to fill us with trepidation at the thought of his paws at the helm of PAW, is that he is young, liberal, an attorney, staunch, or a union activist. But taken on sum the charges are enough to have Podesta schlepped out of his office and remanded instantly to the thumbscrew-and-iron-maiden authorities. Cardinal Fang, the comfy chair and the soft pillow!

  But the two best sections of the report are these:

  “PAW’s supporters include militant homosexuals, labor factions, TV and film producers, feminists, environmentalists, anti-nuclear groups and radical activists.” I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but I score only three out of seven. Take this little test and see if you can survive the JERRY’S WATCHING OVER US QUIZ.

  “Not surprisingly,” the report concludes, “nearly all of Parker / Dodd’s clients are organizations which represent the above groups. They include Ted Kennedy, Greenpeace, Alliance for Survival, the Kennedy Fund, Congressman Ronald Dellums (a liberal black from Oakland who did everything in his power to legalize sodomy, bestiality, etc., in our nation’s capitol), Western Sun, International Food and Development Policy and, at one time, George McGovern.”

  For a final fillip, the report came stapled to an advertisement for RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY, a collection of speeches by Ronald Reagan, with a “tribute” by (surprise!) Moses hisself, Charlton Heston. All for only fifteen dollars tendered as a “gift” to the Moral Majority.

  So here is Norman Lear in October, planning I Love Liberty, finding himself an even bigger bullseye, with Unca’ Jerry coming on like Gerald L. K. Smith. (Understand: where you or I would find this “Confidential Report” boondoggle so transparently lamebrained that we would round file it with the other junk mail, for a Georgia farmer with limited access to the rest of the world, to an uptight Mormon in Utah, to a soured and cynical racist in North Carolina who believes the rest of America is sinking in sin and degradation, this kind of flapdoodle is scary as hell. I do not think Norman Lear was insensitive to all of the foregoing.)

  And so, in an effort to look upstanding and clean-cut, to cut off at the pass the Moral Midgets who see Norman Lear as the AntiChrist, I Love Liberty was bent over backward and inside-out to be rigorously American. But hardly pragmatically American. Not the America that continues to lie to itself that it has never lost a war, though we’ve lost the last two and a half. Not the America that continues to delude itself that equal opportunity exists when it treats its senior citizens, its minorities, its women as if they are useless fodder fit for nothing better than to be consumers. Not the America where we must take arms daily against the messiahs of obscurantism and illogic, whether they be called Father Coughlin, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Jerry Falwell, Wildmon or Schlafly. But the America of manifest destiny, of John Wayne phony patriotism, of the Moral Majority dream-image from sea to shining sea, without passion, without warts, without a clear view.

  It was a sanitized show.

  While the intent of the message passim the script may be 180° from Falwell’s, the presentation, what was on the screen, could as easily have been gen
erated by the Reverend as by Lear. (What the hell all that pre-screening hollering by the Moral Majority was about, I have no idea. There couldn’t have been much in the finally-aired show that upset God’s Own Pillsbury Doughboy.)

  Norman Lear tells me the show did exactly what he wanted it to do. He says I should not lay the blame for what I see as an empty exercise on the burdened shoulders of such ABC executives as Tony Thomopoulos, president of ABC Entertainment. He advises me that this was the best network experience he has ever had, in terms of getting what he wanted.

  But in conversations with my highly-placed sources at ABC (and bamboo slivers under the fingernails could not drag from me their names), I am given to understand that the script went through an “upbeating process.” Anything that seemed dark or downbeat, anything that said we are something less than the last, best hope of the Earth, was “suggested” as material for revision.

  And so we had Senator Barry Goldwater, good old “Nuke ’Em Till They Glow” Goldwater, who in 1964 said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” up there with endless high school bands playing The Stars and Stripes Forever.

  Which is not to say that Goldwater doesn’t look scrumptious to us today, in the light of Nixon and Reagan. His act is much cleaned up, his ameliorations and mellowings seem honestly motivated, and I wish to God he were in the Oval Office instead of Pruneface. (Which goes to show what a sad pass we’ve come to, I suppose; but that’s another topic for another sleepless night.) Notwithstanding the more humanist image of the new Barry, his presence up there was purely to disarm the Far Right critics. I would have been more impressed had he worked the spot arm-in-arm with Lear’s secret master, Teddy Kennedy, about whom I’m not that wild, either, but he’s the best we’ve got from that spectrum of political thought. (Which goes to show what a sad pass, etcetera, etcetera, another sleepless night.)

  Virtually everything in the show was safe. From the “angry minorities” sketch to Streisand singing America, the Beautiful. (I find it interesting that in a show trumpeting freedom and equality, the producers could not find a big name who would play the role of the homosexual minority.) The angry minorities sketch and the presence of the handicapped Geri Jewell, Judd Hirsch as a Jewish immigrant (with the lousiest Yiddish accent this side of John Davidson’s) and Mary Tyler Moore representing the beleaguered WASP constituency, all brought me in mind of Lenny Bruce’s old takeoff routine on the 1940s war films in which the dogface squad pinned down by enemy fire was always composed of one (1) Italian, one (1) Jew, one (1) guy from Brooklyn and one (1) person of a mocha-skinned Negro persuasion. As Lenny put it, “Rosenthal over there’s a Jew; and DiGrazie here’s an Eye-talian; and Washington over there’s a black dude, but we’re all Americans! And we gotta stick together…to beat up the Puerto Ricans!”

  It was safe. It was above reproach.

  So how could it have been done to placate cockeyed critics like me, if anybody gives a damn?

  The angry minorities could have had their say about how they are sinned against, with perhaps a bit more passion than Michael Horse or Rod Steiger wrested from their lines, and with decent, white, middle-class Dick Van Patten getting a lot more exercised at them, to mirror the real feelings of the group he was supposed to represent…and as they finish their rondelay have a KKK wizard in white sheet, an American Nazi with swastika armband, and a book-banning Baptist cut directly from Torquemada cloth come onstage holding aloft an American flag. And have all the minorities stand as one, and say “That belongs to us, too!” and have them take it back. And have Van Patten slowly rise and join them.

  If the intent, as the producers told us before the fact, was to “take back the American flag” for all of us…that would have said it.

  But the show didn’t say that. Not to me, at any rate; and I was ready to hear it loud and clear.

  Which brings me to the bottom line. I have given up on the conceit that structures like television can be changed “from the inside.” Such monoliths have an inexorable way of co-opting even the most dedicated. Hell, I’m a deserter from that war, myself. When you get into a position where you can do something for the mass audience you begin to lie to yourself and say, “Well, I’ll soften it and candy-coat it and they’ll get the message subtly. People don’t like to be lectured to.” And that’s dead on. The problem was that the thirty million people who saw I Love Liberty are currently watching six and three quarters hours of television per household every day of the year, and their ability to perceive nuances may well have been bludgeoned out of existence by The Dukes of Hazzard and reruns of Family Feud. So what they see up there on the screen is precisely and exactly what was offered: mindless self-adulation for patriotism without any danger or specifics about what to do to take back the flag from Falwell.

  The good intentions were there. But in an effort to get it on television, the message got lost. We must not offend anyone. We must look good.

  Sadly, the opposition doesn’t play as politely.

  The only way to defang fools who say the Holocaust never happened is not to tell them quietly and sadly of how you lost half your family in the ovens of Auschwitz; show them Nazi newsreel footage of the bone-piles!

  Jerry Falwell is on the air damned near 24 hours a day. And if it isn’t him, it’s one of his clones in an ice cream suit taking the Lord’s name in vain. Falwell doesn’t tippy-toe. He calls Norman Lear the #1 enemy of the American family. He raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for propaganda. He sells creationism and book-banning and mindless fear to the millions every hour of the day. Maybe he doesn’t get thirty million in one shot, but his message is a helluva lot clearer; and like all good lies, if told over and over again, soon it becomes reality.

  Norman Lear is, in the truest sense of the word, a good man. He cares deeply about this country and its people. But his failing is that of most humanists. He cares too deeply ever to make a fist. He believes, with James Madison, that if you give people the facts, they will make the right choices.

  I am torn. I believe that, too. I also believe that those same people supported the war in Vietnam for a deadly stretch of time, that they have stood by as men and women were lynched, that they have turned their backs as SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE was pulled from library shelves and tossed on the pyre.

  Like Norman Lear, I believe that being an American can be an important thing. But Falwell understands better than Lear that subtleties are wasted on those whose limited perception of the universe leads them to accept the platitudes and bugaboos of Moral Majority philosophy.

  I believe to my shoe-tops that being an American means struggling on a day-to-day basis against the demon legions, the ones who would send us back to the Scopes Monkey Trial and the Palmer Raids and HUAC and ignorance. They are ever with us; they reach up out of their graves with moldering claws to infect each new generation. And by preferring drum-beating, flag-waving patriotism devoid of any rueful representation of the dark side of the American character, we only buttress their belief that “doing something” to change America means, quite simply, let’s join Falwell in his fight to return America to decency and godliness.

  I’m told I Love Liberty has people talking, and hundreds of letters have poured in to Tandem saying the correspondents have been awakened to fight for their rights.

  It is my fervent hope that’s the reality. Because men like Norman Lear are too precious to be allowed to be be dragged down by adversaries who value winning at any cost over looking good and being polite. But looking good and being polite is what television is all about, so I suppose the compromise was in at the git-go and I was foolish to think I Love Liberty might slam a door on the Moral Majority.

  Which is why Norman Lear is a far better, and a far more significant, Force for Good in our time than your columnist. Somehow, miraculously, he has not grown bitter in the face of battlefront opposition to the demon legions.

  I wish I could say the same for myself; and I wish I cou
ld have loved I Love Liberty.

  Interim memo

  Long after this column appeared, a young man came up to me at a college lecture appearance and told me he was Bill Starr’s long-lost son. They made reconnection because the kid had read this column. And you thought I was just Another Pretty Face.

  INSTALLMENT 24: 1 APRIL 82

  The Saga of Bill Starr, Part I

  Because we all understand the invidiousness of believing the myth that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, let me this week hold the strands of barbed wire down and assist you in stepping over into a seemingly greener pasture, where we will meet a man named Bill Starr, a novelist who recently took a very innovative and courageous action in aid of demonstrating just how weed-choked is the terrain where contemporary writers live and try to earn a living.

  One supposes it is in large part due to the huge successes of—at best—a dozen works of fiction each publishing season, that the conceit persists among the laity that writers all live existences of grandeur, glamour and freedom from such fiscal angst as that shared by plumbers, farm workers, cab drivers and secretaries. Would that it were so. Sadly, it ain’t.

  As one who has earned his living behind a typewriter for going on twenty-seven years, I can assure you that with very few exceptions most writers eke out barely a subsistence living. It is, to apply a remark by Bogart in a different context, a mug’s game. Even the best writers still struggle like crazy to make a decent income. We will, of course, exclude from these comments people like Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon and Rosemary Rogers who, in my view, are not writers: they are creative typists.