Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  First on the agenda is the final word on F-310. Those of you who refuse to listen to me when I tell you not to tell me how honest and trustworthy I am should take this column as proof that I’m as fucked as the rest of you.

  F-310, from all the evidence I’ve now amassed, is a hype. It is virtually worthless. Stop using it, if you were going on my recommendation.

  I’m sorry. My unquenchable naïveté got in the way of my constantly resurgent cynicism. I forgot just how corrupt the Big Corporations can be. I stupidly decided that even though the government had indicted Standard Oil on something like seven hundred charges of polluting the Gulf Stream with oil blowout, they had a worthwhile product in F-310—and we shouldn’t cut off our noses to spite our respiration. Proof positive your columnist is a boob. Of course it was a hype. Mrs. William Hughes of Write for Your Life told me it was a shuck, and Sandy Cartt ran her own tests and came up with the same conclusion, and at the end of April the California State Air Resources Board released its much-delayed report on F-310 affirming the same conclusion. And Ed Koupal of the People’s Lobby spent hours beating me over the head telling me I was being had. You were right, Ed. Even Bill Murphy of Standard Oil, who tried to walk that fine line between keeping his boss happy by supplying me with the latest refutations of F-310 put-downs, and telling me the truth, could do nothing but sadly comment that “Chevron was not entirely happy with the Air Resources Board report.” He is a good man who does his job well, but even he could not drum up a PR rationale for all the evidence that has piled up against F-310. Jerome Kirk of Laguna Beach wrote me and said, “You’ve gone crazy again. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay a nickel/gallon tithe to the consumer shuck of one of the two companies which refuses to participate in the drilling moratorium off Santa Barbara.” He was right. He was smarter than I.

  And so, I don’t know what to tell you by way of an alternative. I’ve tried the Texaco Lead-Free gasoline and it fucks up my car so badly I sound like a funnycar blowing off when I cut the ignition. So I switched over to the Union 76 Low-Lead product, and the car runs, but not well. What they tell me now is that I’ll have to buy a 1971 model that’s equipped to handle these low-lead fuels. All of which smells unpleasantly like a locked-hands policy between the oil companies and those swine who make the tin cans we drive. I swear, if they allowed horses in the city of Los Angeles, I’d go and buy a hay-burner to trot down the bloody freeways. But they don’t, and I’m stymied as, I suspect, most of you are. If anyone out there has an answer, please dear god send it in! We need to know!

  But one way or the other, boycott Chevron!

  Second item: somehow I gave you the wrong phone number for Viewer Sponsored Television Foundation, two weeks ago. A good many of you tried to call it, to pledge money or offer yourself as office help, and you got some poor dude who was crying with desperation he’d never even heard of VSTV. So the number you want is 478-0589. (The explanation for that allegedly incorrect 272-1072 number is that it is the number telephone information gives you if you ask for VSTV. Clayton Stouffer, head of VSTV, swears he doesn’t know what that number is, but I suggest he contact one of his friendly phone reps and ask her why they give it out. And he might clarify the discrepancy between 478-0580, which appears in the VSTV brochure, and 478-0589, which the telephone operator will grudgingly dredge up if you tell her 272-1072 doesn’t sound right. It’s all very confusing, and all I can tell you for certain is that VSTV needs your help desperately, and it’s a worthy cause. Try smoke signals.)

  Third item: yesterday, as you read this, Channel 13 started reruns of Burke’s Law, every night at 10:00. For those of you who wonder what I write like when I’m writing tv fare, I commend to your attention the following “Who Killed—” segments: Purity Mather, Andy Zygmunt, one-half of Glory Lee and Alex Debbs. They are four shows I rather pride myself on having written, although it was a few years ago. They help sustain me in moments when the knowledge that I wrote The Oscar gets too much for me.

  Or if you don’t want Ellisonian reruns, I do not think you will revile me too much if I recommend the Friday night CBS reruns of He & She, a superlative adult sitcom of several seasons ago, starring Paula Prentiss and Dick Benjamin and Jack Cassidy and Hamilton Camp and Kenneth Mars, five of the surest comedic talents spawned by the sixties. The shows are always intelligent—never gibber down at you—and always funny. Frequently they are brilliant and unforgettable. Note, particularly, Cassidy, who is rapidly emerging as one of the finest actors in America.

  Fourth item: KCET (Channel 28) is starting a sort of visual Credibility Gap with Lew Irwin and Len Chandler, who created that ill-fated satire news format for a rock radio station that will henceforth be nameless and consigned to Coventry. The shows on the education network begin July 8, at 9:30 p.m., and will run for thirteen weeks. The series is called The Newsical Muse, and I’ll be doing a full-length takeout on it as soon as it debuts. But I didn’t want you to miss their opening night. It promises to be a gut wrencher, and as an answer to Spiro it may be just what we’ve been waiting for.

  Fifth item: Chuck Barris Productions (they who bring us such charmers as The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and other airwave-polluting innovations in modern American viewing) have sent me a press release about a one-hour rock musical special titled Do It Now! Their puff says, in part, it “will be a nonprofit venture and all parties concerned with the project are donating their services or working for the minimum union fees…As in the Do It Now Foundation’s ‘First Vibration’ LP the emphasis of the television special will be a low-key drug pitch, stressing the fact that hard drugs can hurt. Participation of an entertainer will indicate endorsement of an anti-hard-drug stand. Pot and psychedelics will be regarded as a controversy and will not be put down or advocated in the content of the show or in the follow up. Among the heavies who donated their talents for the ‘First Vibration’ LP and public service radio tapes are The Beatles, Donovan, Hendrix, The Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, Buffalo Springfield, Eric Burdon, Frank Zappa…many of these artists will also participate in this unique television special, plus the good possibility of performers such as Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, John Sebastian, Cass Elliot, Crosby/Stills/Nash & Young, Sly & The Family Stone, Sha Na Na, Dion and others.”

  Now, aside from the hypocrisy of some of the doper-performers listed above “indicating endorsement of an anti-hard-drug stand” by their inclusion (one of whom may still be the biggest pusher of hard stuff on this coast), it sounds like a good effort, and I’ll keep you apprised of its progress as Chuck Barris Productions proceeds. (And someday remind me to tell you about the time I was asked on The Dating Game and they wound up burning the tape.)

  Sixth item: we’ve seen a great many manifestations recently on the part of the Middle Americans of a longing for the good old days of yore, before hippies and dissent and revolution…a yearning for a return to the periods of American history during which values like patriotism, civil obedience, cleanliness, Protestant morality, and hard work were constants. Essentially, the fear of the hardhats and Good Folk is based on a lack of understanding of the breakdown of these “trusted eternals.” I attribute the lashing out of the scuttlefish at protesters to this fear and this yearning. And last week one of the networks went considerably further than Hee Haw toward succoring that yearning. A week ago today, CBS premiered one of the scariest shows I’ve ever watched. Eight o’clock every Thursday you can watch Happy Days and get the ass scared off you.

  Even for someone (like me) who digs nostalgia, Happy Days is a frightener. And it is hardly the entertainment content of the show that so terrifies, because having Bob and Ray, Helen O’Connell, Louis Nye, and a pair of brilliant madmen like Jack Burns and Chuck McCann at their best can hardly be called ugly. Yet there is a creeping fear as one watches the music and comedy of the thirties and forties re-created on this show. A strange miasma of the past, of an unsealed grave. One senses it as one watches the elderly, balding, paunchy couples dance the jitterbug (note one token
black couple in the crowd—they’re re-creating the period 100 percent). One senses it as one listens to the prerecorded voice of Bob Eberle straining in vain to reach the notes of “Tangerine” that once belonged to him alone, and one senses it in the sad shoe-polish blacking of Eberle’s hair. One senses it in the grotesque imitations of W. C. Fields and Laurel & Hardy. One begins to realize that our national middleclass hunger to return to two decades of Depression, world war, Prohibition, Racism Unadmitted, Covert Fascination with Sex, Deadly Innocence, Isolationism, Provincialism, and Deprivation Remembered as Good Old Days has become a cultural sickness.

  The past has always been a rich source for fun and profit. Nostalgia is a good thing. It keeps us from forgetting our roots. Readers of this column know I trip down Memory Lane myself frequently. But it is clearly evident that when an entire nation refuses to accept the responsibilities of its own future, when it seeks release in a morbid fascination with its past, and when it elevates the dusty dead days of the past to a pinnacle position of Olympian grandeur…we are in serious trouble.

  It is not merely that our over-thirty and over-forty citizens want to recapture the Happy Days of their youth (no matter how wretched they actually were in reality), it is an attempt, stemming from fear and paranoia, to hold back change, to harness the future to the decaying corpse of the past. We see it all around us every day, and it evinces itself in Happy Days. If you cannot cope with today, ignore tomorrow and revel in yesterday.

  It is a saddening thing to see. Particularly when it has to leach all the joy out of the past for the rest of us who need to know whence we came.

  It is a dead end. As you will understand, with a chill, when, in the episode’s Tag, they reprise that flashy Aragon-style ballroom in which the Happy Days acts perform, featuring Louis Nye. Spangled and scintillant throughout the one hour of nostalgia, at the end Nye (as emcee) stands in the ballroom festooned with cobwebs, rotted and falling around him. He slowly shambles through the debris, sad and lonely, and goes out through the darkness, closing the door, leaving the past in dust and emptiness.

  It is an eloquent message.

  70: 10 JULY 70

  It has nothing to do with anything directly, but it makes a strong parallel, so I’ll lay it on you. I’ve got this sister, see, her name is Beverly. She is eight years older than me, and a dreadful person. I don’t hate her, I despise her. There’s a big difference. Hate means you have affection somewhere in you; despising someone means they are so contemptible they are beneath rational notice.

  The historical antecedents for my feelings about Beverly have their roots in my youth, and I won’t bore you with them; it’s only the recent past that matters, as a parallel to my coming—these past two months—to despise my fellow members in the Writers Guild of America, west.

  I didn’t even speak to my sister for almost five years. Oh, occasionally, when my mother had a heart attack, for instance, I was thrown into contact with her, and we barely managed to exchange a few words. But it was as strangers. She doesn’t understand the way I live my life, and I understand the way she lives hers too well.

  But about three months ago, she and her husband Jerry, who is a very good man indeed, much too good for her, I suspect, came out to California for a visit. During that visit I learned…relearned, for I’d known those core truths intuitively for many years…that my sister was not only prejudiced and a bigot, but she is essentially a stupid person. It is not an easy thing to accept: blood of your blood is bone, stick, stone stupid. And a bone, a stick, or a stone could serve as well. But it became painfully, irrevocably clear to me, in such harsh terms that never again will the absence of years soften my memory so I delude myself into thinking there is warmth or saving grace there.

  She is alien to me in her thinking, in her references to blacks as “those people,” in her lack of understanding of why students go to the barricades in an effort to save a country they love in a much deeper way than those who fly their flags on the Fourth or festoon their cars with jingoistic bumper stickers love it, in her callousness about the conditions of life that make us ripe for police stateism. She is alien to me, not only because she lacks soul in the most basic ways, but because she is typical of the majority of people in our country who worry about #1 and give not a damn for the commonweal.

  Were I a more devout Jew, I would sit shiva for my sister; for me, she is dead.

  And for precisely these same reasons, I have come to despise the larger part of the membership of WGAw. I do not despise Carey Wilbur, nor Danny Arnold, nor Gene Coon, nor Chris Knopf, nor George Clayton Johnson, nor Paul Dubov, nor any of the other minority members of the guild who tried, vainly, helplessly, outnumbered and doomed from the outset to failure, who tried to swerve the guild earlier this week from accepting a new contract proposed by the Producers’ Guild that is a cowardly, shabby, simply bad contract. But I do despise the men and women who put the fears of losing their plush homes and cushy sinecures before their obligations to their fellow members, to their guild, to the mediums of film and tv, and to the country and world as a whole.

  These may be grandiose accusations, but I think they obtain, and I take this opportunity to explain why, for I waited many weeks, as the WGAw negotiating committee worked to extract a decent contract from the Producers’ Guild of America and its affiliates, before I sat down to write these words. My fellow guild members will find this difficult to believe, but I am a guild man all the way; I commend my union for all the good things it does; but I would be a cop-out were I not to suggest that they are something less than godlike for their actions this past week. That I did put in abeyance this column till the contract had been settled, one way or the other, is my small demonstration of allegiance. But now that allegiance is superseded by my obligation to greater causes.

  A momentary digression, before outlining chapter and worse: to explain why accepting a shitty and demeaning contract helps push the world’s head underwater for the third time.

  The two-thousand-odd members of the WGAw are the most powerful group of communicators the world has ever known. In an age when the mass media literally control the thought processes of the world’s population, can sway their attitudes and directions virtually unassisted, the writers stand directly in the eye of the hurricane. They are able to reach more people more effectively than Shakespeare, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Funk & Wagnalls, and Mickey Spillane jammed together.

  Had they the slightest, smallest vestige of control over the material they contribute to television, the members of the WGAw could conceivably arrest the trends in this land toward repression, violence, mass ignorance, and the death slide down the trough to ecological and sociological ruin.

  But writers in this industry have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into believing they are no better than bricklayers, crop-dusters, sewer maintenance men. They are creative typists. They fill the somnolent hours of vapid primetime with stock characters, reinforcing the massmind in its preconceptions and clichés about women, youth, minorities, social conduct, political issues, and most tragically of all, a way of life that has not worked adequately in this country since the early thirties. Instead of demanding the right to speak of the world as it is, of the world as they would wish to see it, they succumb to mingy blandishments of money and comfort, living in a show-biz world of Los Angeles pseudograndeur. They fiddle as the world burns. They ignore their responsibilities. This time, they had a chance to alter that condition. Perhaps not in a massive way, but it was a potential foot in the door.

  This time, a vocal coterie of younger WGAw members tried to make a heavy issue of censorship, in an attempt to gain some small measure of control over the material they contribute to television. To have some minor-key say in matters usually decided by old men on faraway mountaintops: advertising men, network executives, studio heads, pollsters, test firms, continuity acceptance officials, FCC nabobs.

  In a forty-two-demand contract, censorship was the forty-second item. It followed concerns about
new minimum wage scales, about representation of writer-producer hyphenates, cable and cassette usage of material written by WGAw members, and a host of other workaday problems with which writers are concerned.

  The first offers from the producers were so outrageously demeaning, the guild saw dollars being taken from pockets, and they turned them down. But it was no show of solidarity. It was fear of rollback, to levels that were lower than our last contract.

  Those of us who have virtually cut ourselves off from writing episodic tv because we cannot stand the unartistic hassles of seeing our work butchered, continued to insist that money was not the important issue: control of our work was. And when we were presented with a workable system for preventing some of the censorship—what is called “The English System” because it has worked so well on the BBC—we felt the last argument against a strong stand on that issue had been answered. We made our wishes known to the negotiators who were, admittedly, concerned with the welfare of all WGAw members and special-interest groups.

  Well, we had a feeling—born out of experience and, sadly, cynicism—that if push came to shove, if it became a matter of money against control, that the censorship issue would be soft-pedaled and sacrificed. We felt this was a hideous alternative. The issues are too large, the times too deadly to allow expediency to dictate our actions.

  The negotiators did a splendid job. Every man, from Ranald MacDougall and John Furia, Jr., on down, did yeoman work. But the contract was not a good one. It was a sop to each group in the guild. The money was inconsistent with the cost-of-living index rise, the cassette issue was postponed, control of our writer hyphenates was sidestepped, and the censorship issue wound up being under-the-rug material. Oh, they agreed that complaints of censorship would be referred to a committee of ten men each from WGAw and the PGA (with network people sitting in at their discretion), but we all know how ineffectual that sort of mickeymouse is.