Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  KATE

  Well, Aaron. Apparently, David was right. I shouldn’t have interfered.

  AARON

  If you hadn’t, and if I hadn’t, it would have been much worse for her. She’s sick, your honor.

  KATE

  I read the report, Aaron. But we can’t excuse criminal acts because we feel sorry for people. Or because we knew them once.

  AARON

  I’m not asking for Hallie to be forgiven, Judge.

  (beat)

  Her crimes were those of someone on speed. Not premeditated, just compulsive. She stole from her mother, her friends, anyone near her, to keep using. The lying, the amorality, the neglect of her child, they’re all part of the habit-pattern of someone whose nervous system’s been chewed up by drugs. If she’s a criminal, Judge, then all the kids we’ve lied to about drugs are criminals.

  KATE

  Aaron, society isn’t on trial.

  AARON

  But it is! Every time a kid watches tv and sees a chemical answer to warts, or bad breath, or insomnia, every time a kid goes into a drug store and sees we have a pill to make her feel good or slow down or ease tension – we lie to her, and lead her to believe chemicals can solve all her problems.

  (beat)

  We’ve been lying so long, now we’re trying to stick kids like Hallie in jail for believing the lies.

  (beat)

  She doesn’t need jail, Judge. She needs medical help.

  KATE

  Mr. Klegg? How do you feel about all this?

  PROS. ATTORNEY

  Of all the cases I’m asked to prosecute, I despise these the most. Mr. Silverman may be right, your honor. If you want to recommend Miss Benda for medical rehabilitation, I won’t fight it.

  KATE

  Thank you, gentlemen.

  They rise, all clearly troubled, and they leave the judge’s chambers quickly.

  CUT TO:

  82 INT. COURTROOM – med. shot on int. door – day

  as Aaron and Klegg emerge. Aaron goes back to the spectator section, as Pat and Claire rise. They start toward the back and Aaron stops, to look at Hallie.

  83 ON HALLIE

  She’s turned around, staring with hatred at Aaron.

  84 WITH AARON & CLAIRE & PAT

  as they go through the doors out of the courtroom.

  85 COURTHOUSE CORRIDOR – ON AARON AND CLAIRE – DAY

  CLAIRE

  Will it be all right for her?

  AARON

  I don’t know. The Judge is going to give her the chance, anyhow. But I’m starting to believe there aren’t any happy endings this side of the movies.

  CLAIRE

  Can I buy you a cup of coffee?

  AARON

  Okay. Anybody likes me as much as you, I ought to treat better. Better than I have.

  CLAIRE

  And what makes you think I like you so much?

  AARON

  Don’t you?

  CLAIRE

  Yes, but what makes you think so?

  AARON

  Because you lied to me.

  CLAIRE

  I did what?

  AARON

  When we got Hallie out of jail, you said you thought we’d like to be alone to talk, and you had a class to go to.

  (beat)

  That was Saturday. You don’t have any classes on Saturday.

  Aaron smiles at her. Pat chuckles and walks away. Claire looks exasperated, takes Aaron’s hand and they walk away as we

  FADE OUT.

  THE END

  And there it is. All of it, just as it appeared in the first draft. There has been a final draft, and as loudly as I decry the rewrites that emerge from fear and ameliorative copping-out, I must confess that the revisions requested by The Young Lawyers' producer, Matthew Rapf, its story editor, Jim McAdams, its story consultant, Jack Guss, and even those set forth by Miss Dorothy Brown of ABC network continuity, were informed, constructive, served only to tighten the story and its interior conflicts, and on the whole made the script better and smoother than its first-draft version. Note this day, friends: it may be the only time you will ever hear me praise those who demand revisions.

  (The only serious point of contention was the conversation between Pat Walters and Eunice Johnson in act 3: the discussion of the landlord who had been in a Nazi prison camp yet who had so little humanity for his tenants. Jack Guss, Matt Rapf, and Miss Brown all felt it was anti-Semitic and that it had to go. As a Jew, my contention was—and is—that the brutalization of people that kills their empathy for others transcends race or religion, and while there was no intent to reflect “Jewishness” in the attitude of that unseen landlord—after all, Catholics, Freemasons, gypsies, trade unionists, and dissidents of all religious persuasions became inmates of Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the other death camps, though history and casual memory choose only to deal with the horror statistic of six million Jews who met their terrible fates there—even so, the loss of caring in many Jews who went through that monstrousness is part of our heritage and to deny there are Jews who act as that landlord acts is to deny a truth all blacks know about Jewish slumlords. To pretend that a Jewish landlord cannot be calloused is as dishonest as allowing Italian-Americans to browbeat ABC into making all The Untouchables gangsters WASPs, when history and common knowledge tell us most of them were Sicilians. Not all, of course—Guzik and Schultz and Moe Dalitz and Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen and Lou Rothkopf were Jews, sad to say—but unfortunately for all the decent Italian-Americans who have to contain the Cosa Nostra in their heritage, even as “Greasy Thumb” Guzik is part of mine, Capone and his contemporaries and their descendants are an immutable part of American history. All of which speaks to my insistence that the conversation about that landlord—who was not specifically intended to be Jewish—be retained.)

  And now we come to the tears, mah fellow Ammurricans.

  The script you have just read may never be produced.

  Before you rant and scream at the egomania of a columnist who will take over four weeks to fill a newspaper with his commercial writings, let me assure you the bad news fell on my head this week as unexpectedly as I’m dumping it on yours.

  Because everyone who has seen this script, everyone connected with the network or the show, not to mention my girlfriend and the actors on the show, has loved it. So why won’t it be produced?

  Well, would you believe Spiro Agnew killed it?

  (Oh, Jeezus! There goes that paranoid asshole Ellison blaming the Veep again. How much longer must we put up with this irrational hectoring of a fine, good man who Loves His Country?!)

  If you recall, five weeks ago when I introduced the script, my reasons for publishing it as segments of a column devoted to tv and its effects on our society were (a) for your simple enjoyment, (b) to see what a script looks like, in answer to many requests for same, (c) so you could compare the original with the filmed version, and (d) because I had to go to New York for several weeks on business and I wanted to make sure I had columns in advance with the Freep, ready to go.

  And when I left, Paramount, ABC, and the staff of the show were very high on the script. It was to go into production late this month or early next, and air sometime in December or early January.

  But while I was away, the networks got Agnewized.

  Despite the drubbing Nixon and his toad Veep took in the elections—god bless the bulk of the American People for rejecting the terror tactics of Repression’s Tots—the networks did not take note; they found that their hypocritical pandering to “relevance”and “commitment” (“The Glass Teat,” 9/25/70) had backfired. Attempting to snare the demographic youth market, they slanted everything to the young rebels and the young doctors and the young lawyers and the young youth. And to hell with the older viewers, who were given Red Skelton as a sop.

  But kids can’t be hyped.

  As I predicted (he said, humbly), the kids knew the same old cynics were behind these new “r
elevant” shows, and they stayed away in droves, reinforcing their disdain for tv and all it proffers. And the Middle American scuttlefish had their guts full of longhairs and militants jabbering “dig” and “like” and “that’s where it’s at” from every channel. So they rejected the shows, too.

  Apparently, ABC (among others) didn’t do such a hot job of getting it all together.

  Precisely put, the bastards have no one to blame but themselves. For instance, when Nixon invited a horde of top producers and studio prexies to D.C. prior to the season’s opening, and hipped them that there was a (shhh!) drug problem in the country, he asked or ordered that their first few shows deal with narcotics. And so, for weeks, every dramatic (and even comedy) series featured the wonders of rolling joints, kids o.d.’ing, college students running amuck on the ee-vil vapors of mary-joo-wanna, et cetera. Naturally everyone threw up hands and said fuck’it, and tuned in to Lawrence Welk. (We’ve got enough depressing stuff all around us, said Paul and Priscilla Patriot, we don’t have to watch that crap on teevee, too. Turn on Nancy. And they did, too.)

  So the terrified tremblers of teevee saw their ratings vanishing, and this is what it looked like, the week ending November 8, in the seventy-city Nielsen:

  The Top 20

  Flip Wilson (NBC)

  Mod Squad (ABC)

  Gunsmoke (CBS)

  Ironside (NBC)

  Men from Shiloh (NBC)

  Thursday Movie (CBS)

  Monday Movie (NBC)

  FBI (ABC)

  Lucy (CBS)

  Bonanza (NBC)

  Walt Disney (NBC)

  Hawaii Five-O (CBS)

  Sunday Movie (ABC)

  Room 222 (ABC)

  Partridge Family (ABC)

  Kraft Music Hall (NBC)

  Nancy (NBC)

  Medical Center (CBS)

  Laugh-In (NBC)

  Newlywed Game (CBS)

  (It should be pointed out that the segment of Nancy wherein the Julie Nixon surrogate marries the David Eisenhower Doppelgänger is the one that made it into seventeenth place, but the ratings were so low—as was only fitting and proper for a series that awful—it didn’t stop the NBC cancellation. Thank god.)

  So I returned from New York to find that The Young Lawyers had only barely escaped cancellation in the purge that blissfully rid us of The Immortal, Barefoot in the Park, The Most Deadly Game, The Silent Force, The Young Rebels, Tom Jones, and Matt Lincoln.

  But the price for being kept on the air is a high one. It is total Agnew-ization.

  No scripts dealing with drugs. No scripts dealing with “youth.” No socially conscious scripts. Lee J. Cobb comes into prominence, Zalman King fades back quite a lot, and a pure WASP attorney will be introduced to ease the identity crisis for the scuttlefish. (Steve Kandel, one of the more lunatic scriveners in Clown Town, when assigned the chore of writing the script that introduces the new characters, despising the idea, named him Christian White. It went through three drafts before anyone got hip to Steve’s sword in the spleen.)

  The show has been moved to ten o’clock on Wednesdays, and the really ugly part of the whole shake-up is that—needing, as they always do, a scapegoat—ABC has “kicked upstairs” the producer who very nearly lost his health trying to produce a good show while fending off the ABC brass and their nervous spasms. Matt Rapf is now executive producer. It’s a bullshit title, and everyone knows it. They’ve brought in a new line producer (whose reputation has always been an enviable one, as a crusading liberal producer out of New York), and he’s now faced with hurry-up scripts that were hurriedly put into work to meet the new guidelines.

  So, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” probably won’t get shot. Maybe, possibly, if the series lasts the season, they’ll do it after January. But chances don’t look too hot.

  I haven’t space this week to go into it, but next week I’ll dwell a lot longer on what all this portends, because it is far from simply my script no longer being “suitable.” It is the first genuine manifestation of Agnew’s concerted attacks on television taking effect. And that, friends, heralds a return (after four weeks of artistic brilliance) to those fire-breathing columns of yore.

  My anticipation is that after next week’s verbiage my telephone line, which is now only tapped by the Los Angeles Police Department (you remember them, the people who brought you the death of Ruben Salazar), will have tie-lines into the Federal Building and very probably Spiro’s bathroom:

  Where, it is reported by a high government source, he masturbates with copies of the Reader’s Digest.

  Next week: death and transfiguration.

  87: 4 DECEMBER 70

  “Punk” is a fascinating word.

  Out of the mouth of George Raft, James Cagney, or Humphrey Bogart it summed up the loathing of a man of guts for the yellow-spined cravens of the world.

  As spoken by Paul Muni in The Last Angry Man it was an epithet comprising of equal parts bewilderment and compassion and angered frustration.

  Combined with the words “longhaired,” “dope crazed,” “yellow,” or “Commie pinko nigger fag kike greaser,” it provides the basic tinkertoy slur in the hardhat vocabulary.

  But like the words pig, stoned, patriotic, or speed, the meaning of “punk” has changed—if you will, radically.

  A “punk” used to be an image cast in the mold of Marlon Brando or Lee Marvin or Jerry Paris in The Wild One. You know: leather-jacketed, essentially cowardly, tough only when backed by a horde, chains, or a busy broken beer bottle. It used to be the kind of young thug who beat up old ladies and stole their pension checks; it used to be chop&channel goons picking fights at the Big Boy for the amusement of the carhops; it used to represent a nadir of human behavior to which no self-respecting Jack Armstrong would sink.

  But times change. And words change. And we now discover that Wheaties, the “breakfast of champions,” rates twenty-ninth in nutritional value in a field of sixty dry cereals, losing first position to such sissy foods as Sugar Smacks, Froot Loops, and Apple Jacks. And so, in apparent defiance of Gertrude Stein, in a pardonable paraphrase, a “punk” is not always a “punk” is not always a “punk”…

  When a “punk” grows up, he grows up to be Spiro T. Agnew.

  Over the past three years, in this column, I have taken potshots at The Deadly White Spirochete, and for the most part they were bemused, offhand sideswipes. Until Dayton, Ohio, and what happened to me there (but that’s all last year, and it’s in the book, so I won’t go over it again).

  But this week, after the “shelving” of my script, and the abrupt, terrifying Agnewization of the television horror show, the time has come to admit that Spiro, Destiny’s Tot, has had his way at last, that the coils of repression have settled around us, and now we can only hang here in boa-constrictored helplessness as the Orwellian nightmare synchs into focus. Grandiose terminology simply to say we have been royally, handsomely, thoroughly, expertly, and Kafkaesquely shafted, friends. Spitted. Roasted. Salted. And about to be savored.

  One year ago, when Agnew began his campaign against the unruly media that persisted in laughing at his Willie Stark stance (poised like flamingo on one foot, the other jammed cleverly in the mouth), we all laughed, from our Ivory Towers of Intellectual Snobbery. He was another in the endless troll horde of demagogues and know-nothings with which the human race has been barnacled since the first Middle Pleistocene Pithecanthropus McCarthy harangued his pre-hominid companions with scarce rhetoric about the subversives endangering the tribe with that earlier red menace…fire.

  Ignoring the warnings of history, we laughed. And the chuckling became ever more hollow as the attacks continued, as the media “fought back” with defensive arguments as to their impartiality and responsibility. Instead of attacking him front and center, they backpedaled.

  The rulers of the greatest informational and propaganda medium in the history of the world, and they sank to their knees, touched their foreheads to the carpet, begged for indulgence, allowed
this semiliterate troglodyte buffoon to lacerate them with the birch rod of scriptwriters’ prepared canards. And emboldened by their supplications, he escalated. Upward and onward he spiraled, denouncing and declaiming, until he had concretized his reality to a degree where newspeak and changetalk were permissible.

  (I. F. Stone, the brilliant observer of Administration skullduggery, in an article in the December 3 New York Review of Books, dealing with fabricated evidence in the Kent State killings, notes:

  (“To those who think murder is too strong a word one may recall that even Agnew three days after the Kent State shootings used the word in an interview on the David Frost show in Los Angeles. Agnew admitted in response to a question that what happened at Kent State was murder, ‘but not first degree’ since there was—as Agnew explained from his own training as a lawyer—‘no premeditation but simply an over-response in the heat of anger that results in a killing: it’s a murder. It’s not premeditated and it certainly can’t be condoned.’”

  (Which is diametrically opposed to Agnew’s later and frequent characterizations of the students as bums and dangerous degenerates heavily in need of thrashing. Or as Maxwell Anderson phrased it in Lost in the Stars, “There is only one course they understand—a strong hand and a firm policy.”)

  There are even those who contend that, due to Agnew’s fiery denunciations of network analyses of Nixon’s speeches, the FCC moved to express a degree of pinky-slapping in behalf of the Administration by enforcing a kind of “states’ rights” return of one half-hour’s primetime per night to local stations, in an effort to encourage “local analyses” of Dickie’s dicta. I tend to think that’s a bit of conspiracy paranoia. We all know that despite the F in FCC standing for “Federal,” those boys can’t be bought. Honest men, all.