An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  c) That the DIA, like Mr. Asner, might confuse “Lou Grant” with a real person (every time the name Ed Asner was used it was carefully followed by a “Lou Grant”).

  A quick poll of the staff revealed that most watched Lou Grant and all that watched it enjoyed it. They considered the letter as further proof of the media myth that the military are somehow (frighteningly) different from the rest of the populace.

  I myself, did not think that Mr. Asner singled out the DIA. I think that every investigatory (read that as reactionary, of course) arm of the US government received a similar letter, and that every one of them found it as funny as we did.

  I also noted a striking similarity between Mr. Asner’s letter and those we often get from people who accuse us of breaking up their marriage with microwaves.

  So, Mr. Ellison, although it does not really invalidate your thesis, I submit that your case was not well chosen; Ed Asner is, in fact, a paranoid, ego-crazed yahoo.

  —Brian Smith,

  Marshalltown, IA

  So Why Aren’t We Laughing?

  Mr. Smith opens his letter with praise for my column and seems to agree with my conclusions about paralogia. (As a refresher for those who may not recall what paralogia is: “preoccupation with subjective thoughts and fantasies that give answers to questions either wrong or beside the point…interests are narrowed to a point where thinking becomes restricted and unrealistic…the drawing of false inferences…Paralogia may also take the form of distorting reality to conform to personal desires or delusional ideas.”) Unfortunately, Mr. Smith becomes, with his letter, for all of its pleasant support of my work, a self-fulfilling example of paralogical thinking. Go back and re-read Mr. Smith’s letter.

  All he really has to work with is Ed Asner’s perfectly okay request for any DIA files that may exist relating to him. (And as we don’t have Asner’s letter for evidence, we must take Mr. Smith at his word that he represents accurately that letter.) This is not an act of ego or paranoia. It is a right every American citizen has under the Freedom of Information Act. Like Asner, I have made requests for similar files from the FBI, CIA, California CID and any number of other governmental agencies. I am not alone in having done so. Others who have so requested include Leslie Fiedler, Jane Fonda, the family of Martin Luther King, Jr., Saul Alinsky, Tom Hayden, Art Kunkin (ex-publisher of the L.A. Free Press), and thousands of others who have reason to believe that either proper or improper, legal or extra-legal or illegal files have been amassed in their names. History assures us that such files existed, continue to exist, and may continue to be brought into existence by such outfits as the DIA. Through the FOIA, in the last few years, we have seen startling revelations about wholly unjustified invasions of privacy and groundless suspicions of vast numbers of Americans. An entire cache of papers—plus restricted films—concerning Charlie Chaplin was turned up; the silly but dangerous file kept on John Steinbeck simply because he was a liberal made headlines throughout the USA; Albert Einstein, it turns out, was under surveillance because he had the most peripheral flirtation with Hollywood during the Forties.

  No, there’s nothing necessarily paranoid or ego-crazed about wanting to know what snoopers like the FBI, CIA, and DIA had to say about oneself. Anyone who thinks otherwise ought to get hold of a book (one among many) titled LOW PROFILE: How To Avoid the Privacy Invaders by William Petrocelli (McGraw-Hill, 1982, $5.95). Or send away for the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice report titled SURVEILLANCE (2 vols.) (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1975). I’m aware that many people who read only lightly in the available material—those who overload their reading time with fantasy, comic books, science fiction, spy novels, other perfectly acceptable but essentially trivial matter—are not fully cognizant of the amount or degree of information amassed by such apparat as the DIA. But I digress.

  Let me get back to Mr. Smith’s “analysis” of Asner. And I’ll deal strictly with Mr. Smith’s words, and how he uses them, rather than indulging in paralogia by making assumptions. Precisely the opposite of what Mr. Smith has done here.

  a) We all know that files are cross-referenced, we all know that many people file in a weird manner or ineptly (I had an assistant once who filed half the material on The Smithsonian Institution under “The” and the other half under “Institution.”). We also understand that the more referents you provide for a standard computer search, the more likely you are to get what you’re looking for. So asking for files that might have been misentered under the name Lou Grant—the character Asner portrayed in his series, and a name that became so associated with Asner that many people called, and still call, him “Lou”—doesn’t seem at all extraordinary or foolish. In fact, it seems sedulous and reasonable.

  b) “Lost” files are not uncommon. Take a look at any article in any newsmagazine over the past ten years since the FOIA was effected. You will see endless representations by information gathering agencies including the SEC, FTC, ICC, FDA, EEOC, CAB, HEW, HUD, DOD, INS, LEAA—as well as the three biggest snoopers of them all, the CIA, FBI, and the IRS—that files are “restricted,” “out of the office,” “under review,” “for eyes only,” “unavailable due to National Security,” or otherwise “denied” in whole or in part. When the files do come through, after a long while and with many roadblocks having been erected, they are invariably blacked out in vast sections, show gaps in sequence, stop in the middle of a sentence so the preceding phrases make no sense…or are otherwise rendered useless. Asking for “lost” files is standard legalese (hell, it’s a matter of course procedure in any legal action, whether civil or criminal). It means, “we don’t know if you’re dumb enough to shred or conceal evidentiary material, but this puts you on notice not to, and we give you an out to wiggle through, that said material was temporarily ’lost.’” Nothing out of the ordinary here, either.

  c) This is a matter of law, and if Mr. Smith were being cards-on-the-table with us he would have said so. If such files exist, and if such files were illegally obtained or impair Asner’s civil rights (as the Supreme Court has held), then it is “in the public interest” that he request such files and, res ipsa loquitur, it falls to the agency that amassed such files to foot the bill for reproducing and providing said files. This is another perfectly standard legal device, though Mr. Smith makes it seem as if Asner is behaving in a paranoid or egocentric fashion. In fact, from what Mr. Smith has presented to us, I would be willing to bet the request letter didn’t even come from Asner personally, but came through his attorneys. Because what Mr. Smith gives us here is the sort of attorneytalk we’ve all confronted in the real world.

  Now we get to Mr. Smith’s paralogia. As we don’t have Asner’s (or Asner’s attorney’s) letter to hold in evidence as to the “tone” of said letter, what we’re dealing with is Mr. Smith’s perception of that letter. This is called hearsay evidence, and is not permitted in a court of law. But we’re not in a court of law, we’re in the court of public opinion, a letter column of opinions, and Mr. Smith is trying to get us to believe something. He is trying to get us to believe that Asner is “a paranoid, ego-crazed yahoo.”

  I hope I’ve demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs how and why Asner’s request is perfectly rational, particularly when it concerns a man whose political statements were so outspoken and controversial (not to mention embarrassing to the Administration) that his tv series may have been cancelled, in large part, not on ratings grounds, but because of political interference. Many reputable observers of the situation, from Walter Cronkite on down (or up, or sidewise) voiced such concerns. So for the subject of such a controversy to seek as much data as he can get, is merely enlightened self-interest, not paranoia.

  But even if Asner is paranoid, don’t forget—as Dr. Richard Kimble, The Fugitive, proved—even paranoids have enemies. That’s supposed to be levity, folks.

  If you look at the second seri
es of lettered paragraphs in Mr. Smith’s letter, you’ll see that b), c), and in the third set a), b), c) are all paralogical thinking. Smith assumes attitudes and draws conclusions that do not manifest themselves in what he has presented as Asner’s bill of demands. Nowhere did Asner say or imply that the truth wouldn’t be believed (though I hope no one reading this rebuttal is as naive as Mr. Smith wanted Asner to be…or are we to take it from Mr. Smith’s copping of an attitude that no one in government lies to us); nowhere did Asner demonstrate the hubris Mr. Smith implies when he says Asner thinks himself “important enough to warrant our attention.”

  (And let me deal with that arrogance for a second. Mr. Smith may, like many another civil servant, think he and his agency are so importantly engaged that no one is big enough to command his attention. But he is wrong. He works for us. Like cops who see the world in terms of Us-vs.-Them, with “them” being anyone not in police uniform, Mr. Smith gives himself away when he gets on his high horse assuming Asner thinks he’s important enough “to warrant our attention.” Though Asner didn’t seem to suggest any such thing by making a simple request to which he is entitled by law, Mr. Smith and his cronies took umbrage at anyone even asking them to be accountable. This is an example of the institutionalized ingroup thinking of these little petty officials. They have their bailiwick and god help anyone bold enough to suggest they are accountable to the body politic. Mr. Smith gives himself away. Asner isn’t ego-crazed, but perhaps it might be suggested that civil servants who think they’re too important, busy or above reproach to obey the law without getting their noses out of joint are.)

  I won’t even deal with Mr. Smith’s “unwritten assumptions” because if they’re unwritten they are as likely to be Mr. Smith’s assumptions as Asner’s or mine or Eleanor Roosevelt’s or Dr. Crippen’s. This is just pure flummery and need not concern us.

  One last thing. Mr. Smith offers us as validation of his paralogia and “unwritten assumptions” the fact (reported as fact by Mr. Smith, but unverifiable) that others in his office thought all this was “silly” or “paranoid” or “ego-crazed.”

  There is a concept in psychiatry (and in law) known a folie à deux; which is the sharing of a delusional idea by two people who are closely associated. Two members of the Klan who know that blacks are inferior is folie à deux; two members of the same street gang who know that a certain section of their turf is theirs is folie à deux; two believers in an assassination conspiracy theory know the government is covering up. And that’s folie à deux, too.

  And the people who cover each other’s asses in a government agency under attack by a random segment of the body politic who want them to cough up their secrets (if any), can well develop what Mr. Nixon toe-scuffingly still refers to as “the bunker mentality.” And that’s a folie à deux that might result in someone like Mr. Smith seeing Asner’s request—like thousands of others under the FOIA—as threatening. And so it is no validation at all of what Mr. Smith assumes.

  And I suggest Mr. Smith, as well as you readers, look up the meaning of the word “yahoo.” One does not call a well-spoken, well-informed, socially-concerned, literate and talented man a “yahoo.” But I can see how Mr. Smith might think Ed Asner is such a thing. Which says more about Mr. Smith than it does about Mr. Asner.

  I hope I’ve responded satisfactorily.

  P. S. Holdit! A couple more things occur to me. Not that I want to level Mr. Smith—after all, he had the good taste to enjoy my column and say nice things about me—but his letter absolutely refuses to be ignored, it is so perfect in its wild surmises. The statements Mr. Smith makes all go to the point that Asner is paranoid because he thinks there might be files on him, and he’s ego-crazed if he thinks he’s important enough to have such files amassed on his activities. But if the readers will recall, as I’m sure Mr. Smith does, there looms large in recent memory the instance of CIA files being kept on a ten-year-old schoolgirl from the Midwest, who performed the highly suspicious act of writing a letter to Yuri Andropov. I’m not referring to the little girl who actually went to Russia last year, but yet another urchin several years earlier. If the CIA can cobble up a file on a kid like that, I don’t think Asner veers particularly far from an accurate perception of possibilities where his own highly-publicized activities are concerned.

  But more than that, after I’d finished writing this response, I went back yet again and read Mr. Smith’s letter, and what struck me on a third pass, which I’d missed the first two times, is the unconscionable behavior of Mr. Smith in showing Asner’s letter around the office and then talking about it in public print!

  It’s okay for Mr. Smith and his DIA buddies to make fun of a private citizen making a lawful request, to label him paranoid and ego-crazed and a yahoo (careful, Mr. Smith, there are folks out there who sue people for calling them crazed, even in jolly hyperbole), but heaven help the poor yahoo if he asks for some information.

  What, exactly, does “administrative support” mean? Is that governmentese for “Kelly Girl”? Does it mean: “Pull us a schlepper from the typing pool, we’re overloaded with scutwork”? Do we have euphemism here? How does Mr. Smith know there are no files in the DIA on Asner? If he was “administrative support,” that sounds to me as if he was an office flunky. That would mean his clearance isn’t high enough to accord him access to any restricted files. And if he does (or did) have a clearance that high, isn’t he running the risk of being censured or even sued by the agency for writing his letter to [the “magazine”]? (Who do I know in the DIA…hmmm.)

  So we have someone who very likely signed a covenant with the DIA not to reveal what passed his eyes while he worked there, running his mouth in print on a departmental matter, ridiculing a private citizen in what might be conceived libelous terms, thereby opening not only himself but the agency to legal action. And at bottom, how much are we expected to respect, sympathize with, agree with, or love Mr. Smith and his DIA coterie when we perceive that they look on us as “yahoos” infringing on their valuable time? It’s very much the way we feel when we call telephone information for a number and the operator tells us the number is listed in the book. “Yes, I know,” we say, “but I’d like to have you look it up…that is, unless you’re involved in something more momentous, such as discovering radium.” Mr. Smith demonstrates in his wonderful letter an attitude that serves as litmus test for the very belief we, the public, hold that outfits like the DIA are filled with petty tyrants who think they have the right to pry into our lives as they choose, deny us the right to hold them accountable for such infringements of our rights, and make fun of us in print if we are not cowed by the might and rectitude of an office filled with paper pushers who mistakenly believe they have the power to rule us in their picayune fashion.

  Mr. Smith probably did not realize, when he sat down to tell us the truth about Ed Asner, that he was saying so much about himself, his former employer, our government, and ourselves. He probably thought it was all a giggle.

  So why aren’t we laughing?

  AFTERWORD

  The slug-date on the edition of the Los Angeles Weekly in which my final column appeared was 14–20 January 1983. As that column went to press, I was writing installment number fifty-nine. It never saw print. “Irreconcilable differences,” one of those great dissembling phrases, impelled me to advise the publisher of the Weekly, one Jay Levin, that we had come to the parting of the ways.

  In the following edition (21–27 January) the following line appeared under Addenda: “Harlan Ellison is on vacation this week.”

  That was news to me.

  In the Weekly dated 11–17 February (vol. 5, no. 11) a boxed notice appeared on the editorial page stating as follows: “Harlan Ellison has decided to discontinue his column. We’ll miss him. The column was vigorous and fun and unique, if controversial. We wish Harlan the best.”

  As Tennessee Williams’s Big Daddy said in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (excuse my repeating myself from the interim note to Installment 28), “The
re’s a pow’ful stench of mendacity heah!”

  Yes, I suppose if we want to be strictly technical, it was I who decided to discontinue An Edge in My Voice. But it was a decision forced on me by ever-deteriorating relations between the publisher and the columnist. How it all came to an end—with a grace note concluding the mystery of “Jon Douglas West”—is the subject of this afterword, by way of denouement. I know how much you all love a happy ending.

  But to understand the ending, we must go back to the beginning. How these columns come to be written in the first place.

  From 1968–72 I wrote The Glass Teat columns, ostensibly on the subject of television though tv was merely the lens I employed to comment on Life in Our Times. Those columns appeared in The Los Angeles Free Press and Rolling Stone. They have been collected in two volumes, available in paperback. From 1972–73 and from 1976–77 I wrote a more general column of personal essays called The Harlan Ellison Hornbook. Those pieces were published in The Free Press, The L.A. Weekly News and The Saint Louis Literary Supplement. The spirits willing, one year soon Jack Chalker’s Mirage Press will publish that run of forty-six essays.

  Between 1977 and 1980 I was silent. The sigh of relief from the Body Politic was as deep as the wind between the stars.

  In the April 1980 issue of Starlog magazine, I was represented by a long essay-review of Star Trek—The Motion Picture. It drew considerable mail from the readers of Starlog and in February of that year I was approached by telecon (as we say in the world of big business) by Kerry O’Quinn, publisher, and Bob Woods, editor, of Starlog’s companion magazine, Future Life, as to the possibility of my doing a regular column along the lines of the Star Trek piece for that journal.