The Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  None of the above, of course, is intended to imply that the ladies and gentlemen who make up KCET’s board of directors are anything but good guys. What it does speak to, however, is a statistic that showed up in a fairly recent survey done by the University of North Carolina (July 1969) titled Three California Television Stations: A Survey of Public Affairs and Entertainment Content. The survey included programming on KCET and two commercial channels and provides us with a startling, rather dismaying fact about 28’s output. That fact—which ties in with the makeup of KCET’s board of directors, I feel—is that existing educational television facilities provide approximately the same volume of “controversial public affairs programming” during prime- time as is provided by those venal rascals on the commercial channels. About 1 percent of its schedule. (Maybe it’s up to 5 percent since 1969. Big deal.)

  It isn’t NET that’s bidding for 58, it’s KCET. And while they are good guys and do the best they can, they simply don’t strike me as potent enough to fill the abyss created by the lack of controversial programming in Los Angeles. We have this peachykeen situation here in L.A. All the right-wing-oriented stations with their Tom Reddins and George Putnams—bush-league Agnews so blind to the realities of changing times that they persist in inflaming the kickers and hardhats with paranoid nightmares—and KCET, doing as well as it can and occasionally delighting us with goodies like The Andersonville Trial, Johnny Cash’s Trail of Tears, Hospital, The Forsyte Saga, and Sesame Street, but having a hard time keeping people awake the rest of the time, and still not reaching the scuttlefish who opt for The Brady Bunch or Nanny and the Professor. And none of the channels presenting really unpopular or controversial viewpoints.

  And here we are with the last chance up for grabs. Fifty-eight will be awarded to one of three bidders at FCC hearings beginning very soon (maybe as early as mid-July). The choices are slim. First, the Board of Education. As dull a buncha stiffs as ever scraped chalk down a blackboard. Second, KCET, well-intentioned but timid about sticking out its neck in a witch-hunt time when Agnew is just looking for scapegoats, and unable to handle its own channel without recourse to an annual auction of motel art and Beverly Hills gold-leaf dreck.

  And third…

  VSTV.

  (I thought he’d never get around to it!)

  It was necessary to file my objections to the two most apparent contenders, to validate my reasons for urging you to support VSTV, the Viewer Sponsored Television Foundation; because while VSTV isn’t the second coming either, it is quite clearly the best choice of the three, maybe the best bet we’ve had in some time for creative, relevant social programming, and (as usual, dammit) the underdog.

  VSTV is the brainchild of Clayton Stouffer, whose life since 1967, when he formed VSTV as a nonprofit corporation whose intent it is to operate UHF Channel 58, has been something less than fraught with riches. Stouffer’s handout on the intents of VSTV reads, in part, as follows: “The Foundation proposes to operate a UHF television station that: (i) presents primarily in-depth public affairs programming that goes beyond ‘safe’ and popular points of view and (ii) emphasizes close cooperation between socially concerned media professionals, community activists and the viewing public.”

  I think that says it.

  There is much more to be said about VSTV, of course, and if you need to know such salient facts (such as, for instance, that a VSTV requirement for its own board of directors is that at least two-thirds of its members be of the type Professor Scoble said were missing from KCET’s board, paragraph 14, above), drop a line to Viewer Sponsored Television, 1539 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles 90024, and they’ll send you a little brochure that gives you all the hype you’ll need to reassure yourself that we are not slipping into power an alternative batch of scoundrels.

  But right now, what they need is something more vital than merely good wishes and fine words. First, they need office help desperately. The FCC hearings are coming up shortly and VSTV has to raise three hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars—that’s $351,000—almost immediately, so they need people who can type and file and follow up phone solicitations, and help with the mailings…stamping, sticking, stuffing, and sorting. They also need on-campus types to help with leafleting. If VSTV can get students to sign pledges of $12 or more, it will stand in good stead with the FCC. They won’t need the actual bread at sign-up time, just verification that the money is there.

  They also need money, naturally.

  VSTV (in an amazing display of playing the Establishment’s game better than was intended for underdogs) managed to float a Public Loan (Debenture Sales) deal, and with $100 bonds subscribed by viewers, the money can be amassed in a relatively short time, if response is good.

  Pledges, as noted above, also swing. For residents of the barrio and ghetto, pledges are $2.50. For students and the elderly, $12. And for the rest of us well-to-do white motherfuckers it’s $25.

  This is literally “People’s Capitalism,” because it means there will be no funding from uptight or special-interest foundations or groups. No pressures from the forces that castrate all other tv channel programming. It means we will for the first time control one of the outlets of the mass media.

  It has got to be one of the nobler endeavors offered us recently.

  So: money, first. And office help. (Some of you lovely ladies who answered my secretarial ad a couple of weeks ago, if you’re still unattached, why not devote an hour or two a week to helping them out at the office?)

  This is a crusade we can win. KCET more than likely won’t get the nod from the FCC. It, too, is leery about giving two outlets in the same city to one corporation. But the Board of Education has that money to back up its bid, and if you don’t want to spend Friday nights finding out what’s new at the public library, or Monday nights being informed of the dandy opportunities in the military, I strongly urge you to get off your rusty bottoms and help poor old Clayton Stouffer get the job done.

  After all, anything is a viable alternative to the Lawrence Welk Show.

  68: 26 JUNE 70

  This week I would talk of bacon.

  The pigs.

  The poe-lease.

  D’fuzz, dat is.

  Now when I was a lad in Painesville, Ohio, many moons ago, before the white man came to my land and sprayed it evenly with a film of bowling alleys, motels, used-car lots, Tastee-Freez huts, cost-plus Nipponese import shops, and Stuckey Pecan Praline Emporiums, I believed policemen were my friends. I read Dick Tracy and clipped his Crimestopper Clues and pasted them in a scrapbook. I listened to The FBI in Peace and War and was even able to sing many stanzas of the L-A-V-A theme song. “Crime does not pay!” I could be heard muttering at odd moments when I wasn’t muttering, “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit.” I was a law-abiding, violence-eschewing child of six or seven, and I remember a cop once let me wear his cap and gave me a raspberry sherbet cone. (He also had his hand on my thigh, but I tend to put that kind of thought out of my mind.)

  The first worm-nibble I remember at the bright apple of my trust in law officers was when I was eight years old. I had this thing for the comic character pins to be found in boxes of Kellogg’s Pep and, getting hip rather quickly that, with duplications and all, one could wind up resembling Kate Smith if one was to eat all the Pep it took to collect a full set of eighty-six pins (the incidence of duplicates of Felix the Cat was disheartening), I took to the unlawful pursuit of ripping up the boxes in the A & P and ripping off the comic character contents. It was my first encounter with the specifics of trashing; it was also my first encounter with the criminal life.

  Such depredations against what Tom Reddin calls lawn-order could not long go unpunished.

  I was busted and taken to the Painesville pokey, where (with flawless Spockian logic) the cossack-in-charge ran me through a chamber of horrors guaranteed to traumatize a septuagenarian, much less an eight-year-old: I was hustled through the drunk tank and the corridors of cells, staring at local thugs and unfortunates
who had been caged up for unnameable offenses, who leered and jeered and beckoned and puked in my direction. Well, sir, may I tell your face that when I got out of there I was a candidate for a nursery school run by Rimbaud and de Sade. And though I am now aware of the misguided philosophy behind the cop’s actions—scare the little snotnose and he’ll be a law-abiding citizen from this point on—it was my very first understanding of the limited humanity of many minions of the law.

  I say many, rather than all, because I’ve known a few very decent peace officers whose intent and activities were based on respect of the people they served and a sense of themselves as human beings. Steve McQueen, who has had many contretemps with cops, told me once that it was very easy to be anti-cop, and it took a special concentration to view them as merely servants of the society. Well, I wouldn’t quibble with that. As I’ve noted in columns previously, a cop is merely a postman or a dogcatcher, a guy in uniform who exists out on the skin edge of the culture, reflecting physically what the emotional needs of his employers (the people) seem to be. If cops are brutal and unfeeling and panicky and trigger-happy, it’s because the hardhats and scuttlefish are the same, but don’t have the guts or badges to whip some kid’s head with a baton. None of which, naturally, excuses the individual cop when he dances a storm trooper pavane.

  And, all Agnewesque obfuscations aside, it becomes more apparent with every passing day that the very model of a good cop is cast in harsher and harsher tones of cruelty, stupidity, harassment, provincialism, paranoia, self-justification, and fear.

  Put it out of your mind that there is any strength to the backlash effort on the part of the pigs to convince the country that swine is spelled P-ride/I-ntegrity/G-uts. A pig is a pig is a pig. If it oinks, it’s a cop.

  (Ed Bryant, a clever young writer from Wyoming, came up with a dandy alternative to pig, however. He found that the Spanish translation of the word aardvark is “earth pig,” and we have taken to calling the boys in black leather boots ’varks. They know they’re being insulted, but they don’t understand the philological origin, so they can’t use the baton…unless they’re so far gone already that calling them patriots would cause that reflexive chop across the neck. As a science fiction writer the appellation delights me, even as does the word hardhat, for its explicates out of cultural origins and current events a kind of slang that speaks to the moment. I commend the term ’vark to you. Use it in good health.)

  Yet those seedy little pig tie-tacks that so pitifully express the ’varks need to convince themselves they are good guys, members of an elite cadre, beloved by all but Commies and longhair radicals, are but one more weather vane whirling in the wind of public opinion. And it is in the area of public opinion—as viewed through the beady little eyes of a beat cop—that my television note for the week deals:

  •Middle Americans who deplored and reviled the radicals who burned the Bank of America in Isla Vista in the past few weeks of riots have come to understand, at last, what it means to have berserk ’varks amucking through locked doors pursuing a scorched-earth policy. They have become anti-porker and in many cases radicalized.

  •“Tommy the Traveler,” an undercover ’vark working for the Ontario County (N.Y.) sheriff’s office, had his covers pulled on Cronkite’s CBS Evening News, revealing him as something a bit more active than merely an observer. He was, quite plainly, an agent provocateur who, when he could not egg on students at Hobart College to civil disobedience, ran a few such numbers on his own. His instigations very probably caused the fire bombing of the Hobart ROTC building for which students Tommy had hemlocked have been indicted. Most militants involved in the Movement now understand that Tommy has many brothers-under-the-covers, narks and finks and snitches who have been directed to stir up trouble in an all-out effort to discredit dissenters and radicals.

  •Gwen Bagni (half of the excellent tv writing team of Bagni and Dubov), an elegant woman of midyears, mentioned recently that she finally understood at a gut level why her kids hated cops. During the bomb scare that cleared the Writers Guild meeting at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel last Monday night, a ’vark, ostensibly “serving the people” by trying to clear the Grand Trianon room, gave her one helluva good shove and looked as though he wanted to club her for not moving fast enough. Gwen contends the cop was suffering from riot-training shock and was unable to react to masses of people in any other way. Another moderate who now gets the message somehow other than intellectually.

  •A sociologist named Vermeer from one of the Ivy League colleges recently published a study that shows the ghetto-originated attitude of “tell the cops nothing” has spread to over 65 percent of the population. People would rather fail to report rapes, robberies, riots, or random rottenness than have to deal with the servants of the people.

  If we are to take all of these isolated items as indications of the lousy public relations image of the ’vark as a member of our society, one would assume the badge bearers would either try to clean their houses or at least mount a PR campaign to bring back the image of the policeman as a good guy who crosses old ladies at the intersection and offers little lost kids raspberry sherbet cones.

  But they don’t do either. (And, frankly, why should they, when they have the illiterate support of hardhats and scuttlefish? Old men at Naval ROTC ceremonies who beat up pacifistic antiwar demonstrators and misguided football players who won’t let flags be lowered in memory of murdered college students are their accomplices in all the horrors and indignities with which ’varks get away.)

  Instead, they bring to bear the lobby influence and fear motivation for which they have earned the term pig. And it manifests itself on tv as follows:

  You know the Dodge commercials in which the fat-gutted redneck peckerwood Suth’rin sheriff appears? The ones in which that beer-belly, Stetson-accoutered, speed-trap devil begins harassing a passing motorist or a Dodge salesman? Well, there has been outcry against this “inaccurate, insulting, cartoonish” representation of the rural peace officer. Several peace officer organizations have complained loudly and demanded something be done. (In trying to track the specific information from the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department, I got a clutch of different answers to the question what organization was it that objected? I was variously informed it was the Sheriff’s Association of Indiana, the National Sheriff’s Association, the Ohio Highway Patrol, the International Association of Police Chiefs and “some sheriffs’” group down South.” One can only conclude from this that all ’varks get uptight at the representation of themselves as two-bit highway hustlers. One also notes that the pigs have more associations than might be considered normal for any single group. Paranoia, it would seem, huddles these lads together for mutual approbation and succor.)

  So the upshot is that the sheriff in those commercials—who has been selling Dodges like crazy, apparently—will be toned down, made sweet and compliant and lovable. The pressure group has won. The potency of the cop lobby in this low-level tv censorship should not be underestimated. It is a very real example of the gap between what cops want us to believe they are (as represented by Jack Webb’s Dragnet and Adam-12) and what they really are.

  I got a letter from a kid in San Luis Obispo who asked me to warn my long-haired readers if they were heading toward San Luis O. to keep right on driving; the cops up there are raising mayhem with freaks and “hippies.”

  It’s only one more in a seemingly endless stream of warnings from stringers and readers and correspondents all over the country, warning those of us who don’t wear our hair cut up to the occipital ridge that the cops have declared war on anyone out of the ordinary.

  So we know the truth in the streets. Anyone who has ever faced a ’vark across his visor or been formally introduced to the hard-rubber batons that bust you up inside but leave no marks on the outside knows that that Dodge sheriff is closer to reality than Marty Milner of Adam-12.

  Ever been stopped in a speed trap in the South, friend?

  Sure they’re lovable. />
  And so was Gaiseric, king of all the Vandals.

  But tv knuckles under. (Well, what the hell. What can you expect from an advertising agency that sells cars that soup up for highway patrols and sheriffs’ departments all over the country? Expect nobility from pimps, go ahead, dream your dreams, Ellison.) And so we have more representations every year of the ’varks as the guys in the white hats. We have Dragnet and Adam-12 and The FBI and The Mod Squad, and those of you (of us) who’ve seen the psychotic glaze in the eyes of a ’vark just trembling to pepperfog us, we wonder how many Isla Vista deputy district attorneys arrested it will take, how many Middle American scuttlefish falsely busted it will take, how many innocent students cut down it will take, before the Good Folk will realize that their simplistic image of the cop as a benevolent Sergeant Friday is as out of date and incorrect as believing Mussolini was a good man because he made the trains run on time.

  The time has come, and long gone, to accept the truth that the ’varks no longer serve and protect. They work their will in fear and Fascism, reflecting the paranoia of our society, reflecting the fear-baiting of monsters like Agnew, reflecting their own individual needs for power and sadism. And the ultimate horror of it is…we pay them to do it to us.

  69: 3 JULY 70