The Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  I walked onto the campus of the University of Kansas and the first thing I saw was the chalked word STRIKE on the sidewalk outside Strong Hall. I was with James E. Gunn, the science fiction writer, who is in charge of PR at KU, the man who had invited me out to speak to film and writing classes.

  I asked Jim Gunn—who is a very good and honest man—what it was all about. He looked troubled. And he explained.

  The chancellor of KU had submitted, as a matter of form (as has been the case for decades), the list of faculty promotions in all departments to the KU Board of Regents. It was standard operating procedure for the regents to okay the list in toto, as the promotions were always rigorously overseen by the department heads and the KU administration. People on the list were deserving; it was an accepted fact.

  Yet last month, when the current promotions came before the regents, two archconservatives on the board decided—for the first time in the history of the school—to defer decision on two names, to temporarily pass over two men.

  The two men were Litto and Velvel. What they had done to incur the ill favor of the regents was as follows: Litto, a dramatics professor, was instrumental in assembling a production titled Kaleidoscope of the American Dream—part of a project that the State Department has traditionally sent overseas as PR for the United States. Included in this production were snippets of musicals and drama ranging from Awake and Sing! to contemporary theater. (Observers of the production report it was not a terribly distinguished production, but then—as Jim Gunn noted—all free speech cases can’t be perfectly formed. All obscenity cases, for instance, can’t be judgments of Ulysses. Sometimes you have to defend the not so good. But that isn’t important here, just a side comment.)

  Several of these later scenes caused raised eyebrows. Apparently while they weren’t Oh, Calcutta! they were a bit more earthy than some of the Jayhawkers thought was consistent with decorum. (Though why the theater, any more than any other art form, should give a shit about decorum is beyond me.) Some of the voices in Kansas officialdom began bleating about filth overseas,” which is a familiar yahooism. And they blamed Litto.

  But compared to the “sins” of Velvel, Litto was the Late George Apley.

  Velvel is in the law school at KU. He is a remarkable man. Among his many virtues are the following: his suit against the United States attempting to have the Vietnam war declared unconstitutional went as far as the Supreme Court before it was thrown out; he was brought in as consultant and was instrumental in the success of the Massachusetts bill recently signed into law permitting Massachusetts men to refuse to fight in an undeclared war; he defended the sixty or seventy KU students who were busted last year for interfering with campus ROTC. He is a soft-spoken, rational man whose work in the law school has been above reproach and even, by all reasonable standards, brilliant. He was obviously and certainly deserving of upgrading.

  But the regents who singled him out didn’t even need his previous liberal activities to skewer him. For during a campus gathering in sympathy with the Chicago 7, Velvel emerged from the law school and said a few words about Judge Julius Hoffman (the Mattel windup jurist…pull his string and watch him enter second childhood). Reports conflict as to precisely what Velvel said, but everyone who was uncommitted said it wasn’t terribly inflammatory. Yet once again the voice of the Silent Majority was heard, deriding Velvel and saying a man like that shouldn’t be permitted to teach law at the university.

  So…

  Litto and Velvel were to be passed over. But the chancellor, horrified by their intended actions, suggested that the regents were acting on hearsay, and should wait for factual information. The regents reluctantly agreed.

  Approbations and verifications of the two professors’ worthiness began coming in. The regents were to make their decision at a meeting the third Friday of this month. (Everyone but the regents seems agreed that they really don’t have the right to drop names from that list, by the rules of their own formation, stated many years ago. Yet in these perilous, anti-intellectual times, everyone was willing to cool it and hope common sense and the facts would set the gentlemen to rights.)

  But the students got wind of the news.

  A strike was called.

  And lurking in the background is a minor-league Joe McCarthy named Reynolds Schultz, a Senator from the Lawrence district. Mr. Schultz, whose position is somewhat abaft that of Ronald Reagan, our own unbearable cross, is bucking for the governorship of Kansas. (Although it is said he needs another seventy-five grand for campaign expenses and, like most political impotents, he can’t get it up.) Schultz, an ex-marine, an ex-farmer, likes to refer to himself as an uneducated but canny man of the people…a self-made man. (Thereby, once again, demonstrating the horrors of unskilled labor.) His appeal is a know-nothing appeal and, as stated above, in these anti-intellectual times just such a clown might well become a governor. We have enough Claude Kirks, Reagans, Maddoxes, and their ilk as it is, without considering another cripple fit to rule.

  Schultz, apparently, is slavering for a political plum like a riot on campus to drop into his lap. He’s just sitting there praying the kids will strike.

  Now don’t for a moment even suggest that I’m about to say the kids should have backed off, on the theory that two good men getting zapped is a lesser evil than having a repressive dunderhead in the governor’s mansion. The lesser of two evils is a dumb alternative theory.

  What I am about to say is that on Tuesday night, Oscar-cast night, it was pretty much common knowledge that the regents were calling an emergency meeting and were going to okay the promotions. Battle won.

  Yet on that same Tuesday night, a strike meeting was called—the strike was scheduled for today as I write this, Wednesday the eighth—and when students began asking, “Why are we striking?” none of the militants of SDSers could agree on the reason. The shouting began, and it went on for some time, till someone yelled, “To hell with this—let’s STRIKE!” and he got the usual jingo response, “RIGHT ON!”

  (A radical student who was in attendance at the meeting, with whom I rapped later that night at a party, sounded like a man who has just found out his puppy dog has rabies. He said the meeting included about fifty out-of-town radicals, all of whom were pounding the floors and climbing the walls for a strike. It is not coincidental, I think, that on that Wednesday Abbie Hoffman was scheduled to speak at the university. “They kept saying, what’ll Abbie think of us if we don’t strike,” the student said, bewildered and frightened. He was getting his first taste of the stupidity and evil that lie not merely at the far right of the activist spectrum, but at the far left as well.)

  Did I make the point? The battle had been won, but the hysteria of STRIKE was carrying the entire University of Kansas into the waiting jaws of Reynolds Schultz.

  That’s Part 1 of this out-of-town journal. Now here’s Part 2.

  The State University of New York at Buffalo is having a science fiction festival. Lectures and films. Gordon Dickson, Anne McCaffrey, Arthur C. Clarke, me, 2001. They’d been running the film for three or four days when one night last weekend (as I write this), several black female students appeared at the door and sought admittance without tickets. Everyone had to have a ticket for the 2001 showings, because there was only limited seating. The young women said they’d left their tickets in the dorm. Bullshit. A dodge. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, everyone’s done it. But even if it were true, so the hell what? Tickets is the name of the game, so either play by the rules or find another game.

  The chicks weren’t satisfied with that. One of them pushed through past the student at the door, who grabbed her arm. He didn’t punch her or kick her or debase her in any way. He merely grabbed a gate-crasher to stop her. The student started screaming. She and her friends went off and hyped a bunch of black students (mostly guys…and we understand what motivates guys, black or white, who leap to the defense of damsels fair…or foul; one of these days we guys will cop to the gonadal urgings that send us off with
lance and shield, and all that chivalry bullshit will be revealed for just what it is—the need to look good for the ladies), and they descended on the festival and kidnapped the film.

  All of a sudden it wasn’t a case of some stupid girl who got stopped trying to pull a hype, it was a deeply significant race relations test of strength, with the honor of black womanhood at stake.

  Now understand: the audience was full of black and white students. The only difference between them and the gate-crasher is that they had tickets, and she didn’t. But the BSU Lancelots had swiped the film, all in defense of Bloody Mama. The ransom: a letter of apology, doing a rap on how sorry the festival kids were about having denied a black woman her rights because she was black and accepting a load of ersatz guilt the BSU unofficially felt needed to be dumped.

  Now the kids putting on the festival were no more bigoted and involved with denial of rights than an elm tree is with urban blight. But they were petrified MGM would sue them for the loss of the film, they were petrified their festival would fall apart, they were petrified they were getting mired in a scam they barely understood and certainly didn’t want.

  So they wrote the note and got the film back.

  The blacks weren’t satisfied. The note wasn’t “acceptable.” So they moved in again, roughed some kids, damaged a speaker, slashed the screen, and copped the film again.

  As I write this, the festival is tottering. Films that were scheduled haven’t been shown; no one knows which speakers are on, which off. There is an implied position by the BSU that, while they’re not in this thing officially, if they have to take a public stand, they’ll back the blacks…wrong or right.

  Now what the fuck is going on around here!?!

  This is a war we’re fighting, troops. A war against real bigotry and real repression, and what the hell is all this mickeymouse crap in the way of getting it done?

  There are enough real killers out there who are looking for us night and day, waiting for us to open our mouths when we call them by their real names, waiting to run us in front of all the Judge Julius Hoffmans of the world, waiting to use our blood and bones to make their political hay. So why are the personal ax-grinders allowed to throw sludge in the Movement? Why are the idiots and the professional trip-takers and the paranoids and the Molotov psychopaths allowed to fuck it all up for all of us?

  There are some very basic core problems involved here, and you know precisely what I’m talking about; I don’t have to sermonize. There are creeps and pigs who are using the Movement and the fears on both sides of the scene for their own ends. They are the spoilers. And they aren’t merely making a buck or getting a little juice for it (though that’s bad enough when you’re asking people to risk their heads for principles and ethics and morality), they are risking other troops’ lives.

  In Kansas, Tuesday night the seventh, three people managed to escape apprehension by KU campus cops after they’d set a fire in old Howard Hall, a half-demolished old building in the middle of the campus; on the same night three Molotov cocktails were thrown at an old biology lab building; and the same night a bomb went off, blowing out a window, in the Anchor Savings & Loan (hey, fire bombers, big men, big deals with the revolution in your guts but not your heads, the Anchor isn’t the one you wanted…it’s the Capitol Federal Savings & Loan that’s owned by one of the regents, you assholes!).

  Who did it? Certainly not the students of KU who are aware that this particular situation is one in which backing the regents into a hard place where they have to defend their honor and their position won’t get the job done. Certainly not the KU faculty or students or chancellor who are all united in their stand for free speech…because everyone at KU knows that.

  Who did it? The coo-coos. The itinerant clowns who see themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods, cavorting around the country screwing up the work being done by the Movement to stop repression, to stop the war on dissent, to stop the stupidities and the brutalities (or at least hold them to a minimum till this country regains its humanity and throws the pigs out on the street). They are the spoilers.

  And the worst, the very worst part of it, is that the kids who should have banded together to stop it, to cut away the stupes and get the Movement back on its feet…folded.

  In Kansas the kids never tried to stop the out-of-town activists. In Buffalo the film kids bowed to the demands of the black students—who were dead wrong from the start. (Their demands, incidentally, were greater than just a letter of apology. They subsequently demanded that the chick, the liar who started the whole hassle in the first place, be admitted to all films free, all year; they demanded the student usher be fired [ironically, the kid was only making a big $1.55 an hour and he didn’t like being a cop of the aisles]; and, spiraling hysterically into absurdity, they demanded that three blacks be hired to set up a film program relevant to black issues. This last is genuinely ludicrous when one learns that the film society had, all year, been pleading with black and Puerto Rican students to come and get into the film operation…and had no takers. Suddenly, with irrelevant and demogogical demands, they turn their own lack of interest into a political and racial question.)

  I see in the inability of the KU and Buffalo kids to stop this nonsense the same inactivity and spinelessness of the more than a quarter-million people at Altamont who permitted a handful of Hell’s Angel thugs to wreak havoc…and did not move, in love and solidarity, to protect their own.

  How does all this relate to tv?

  Well, it appeared in a tv column, didn’t it?

  62: 1 MAY 70

  Now, listen, people, this ridiculous paranoia has got to come to an ass-grinding halt! I’m spending more time balming the subterranean fears of you readers than I am causing heartburn among The All-Potent Them.

  First was that F-310 thing (the answer to which I now think I have, and in about three weeks I’ll do the wrap-up column: I’m waiting for just a few last reports). Then I got a letter from some lady who thought it was evil for the Freep to be running advertisements for the record album of Charlie Manson singing his songs, badly. (I wrote her a letter reminding her that Manson might well be guilty but he hadn’t even been brought to trial yet, and either way the poor bastard was entitled to advertise, which was sorta kinda what free speech was all about.) Now come two communiqués that tie together nicely and lead me to the subject of verisimilitude in tv scripts.

  Now if you don’t know what verisimilitude is, you go right in to your mommy and ask her.

  At least I can get back on to tv, thank god.

  The first letter is from someone who signs himself or herself “Concerned Viewer.” His or her concern is pretty silly, what with all the heavyweight aggravations running amuck, and it all stemmed from my column of two weeks ago in which I was castigating a certain Guerdon Trueblood—a tv scenarist who is coming to represent more and more to me (and to Cleveland Amory, if we are to believe his TV Guide column of 28 March) the epitome of no talent in the craft of writing screenplays, the ultimate in hackmanship, the ne plus ultra of what Bernard Wolfe calls “creative typing”—and I was castigating him for writing The Love War, a half-assed mini-movie that bastardized its science fiction content shamefully. In the column I said: “It always amazes me, the effrontery of writers ignorant of the most basic rules of sf writing, who have no conception of the almost fifty years of writing in the genre, whose temerity permits them to cobble up some pseudo-sf bullshit; they would never try to do a political teleplay without doing the research; they would never do a historical script without checking out the background…”

  The italics, in red pencil, were Concerned Viewer’s. To which statement C.V. responded, somewhat paranoiacally, I feel, “Balls! Harlan baby—the lack of research on most tv scripts boggles the mind—and you know it—Where’s the old Harlan who said most of his colleagues couldn’t write their way out of a pay toilet? Don’t sell out. For a small example, most professional ‘Western’ writers don’t know the difference between a Sheriff and a to
wn or Federal Marshal.”

  Now if any of you except C.V. see a “sellout” in my remarks, I’d appreciate your rationale for same. Let us understand something, troops. The phrase “sellout” is bandied around like a forty-dollar hooker at a fraternity stag party. It’s easy to accuse almost anybody of selling out if they try to see the other guy’s side of a problem. So let’s define it here and now, for purposes of future accusation in this column: to sell out means to desert your ethics or morality or honesty when the pressure is on, when you have something to lose, when the shit comes down; to stick it to your friends or sell out your beliefs for personal gain or aggrandizement; to do or say something opposed to your previous postures or statements because your skin or your rep or your pocketbook is in jeopardy. Now that’s what I think of as a sellout. Elia Kazan informing on fellow show-biz folk to HUAC and McCarthy in 1952 so he wouldn’t be tagged a Communist and could keep working—at their expense—is a sellout to me. The thirty-six motherfuckers who stood by and watched Kitty Genovese get knifed to death in a New York street without doing anything is by me a sellout. The members of The Lovin’ Spoonful who themselves were dopers (and that wasn’t all of them, remember), who narked on the hangers-on accompanying them on their road trip, to keep themselves from getting busted—that was a sellout. Turncoats and quislings of all stripes (mostly yellow) who desert their buddies when the nightsticks start to fall—those are sellouts.

  Now. If you spot even the vaguest hint of a sellout in my remarks about tv writers, fuck you, you’re dense.

  Which brings me back to C.V.’s hurling of my own words at me. Yes, I once said many of my tv writing colleagues couldn’t write their way out of a pay toilet and I don’t retract it…. Mr. Trueblood is one such, a man whose abominable scribblings condemn him forever to some isolated potty. But the operative word there is many. I know dozens of extraordinarily talented writers working regularly in the medium—men like Mike Zagor, John Bloch, John D. F. Black, Richard Alan Simmons, Edward Amhalt, Tracy Keenan Wynn, Howard Rodman, Dorothy Fontana, Bob Specht, William Wood, Bobby Kauffman, Lorenzo Semple, and innumerable others—who anguish over their scripts, who take yeoman pride in their craft, who research the ass off their scripts. It is not writers such as these whom C.V. and I revile. It is the hack, the slapdasher, the whore-writer who takes nose from here and foot from there (but somehow always misses adding genitalia) and whomps up a Frankenstein monster of clichés and ridiculosities who gives all tv writers a bad name, and who contributes most of the dreck filling primetime.