The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television

by Harlan Ellison

  It was crazy as sixteen battlefields. Screaming, sliding chicks, crawling on their bellies across the stage—and the Stones were already gone. They were by that time in the basement, going out a service door, into an unmarked little compact car (the kids would never suspect it was the getaway vehicle, because the decoy Continental was parked in front of the stage door), and were out of the area, on the way to the airfield where their private plane was already warming up. But back in the theater, a thousand mindless little hippie mommas were tearing that jacket to shreds, and themselves in the bargain.

  I remember that now, listening to Miss Chest of ‘69 tell me how thrilling it was to see Tom Jones “tease” the girls in the bleachers on his show. I remember, and I have the insight (not for the first time) that there was nothing noble in Mick Jagger’s “tease.” He didn’t take those three steps forward, rather than back, because he cared about his audience and wanted those kids to get their money’s worth. He despised the kids. Traveling with the group for three days I could understand why. The fans were as filled with love and adoration as the cannibals who tore Sebastian to shreds and ate him in Suddenly, Last Summer. They were a mindless, slavering horde; individually they were lovely kids, but jammed together they were as terrifying as the mara-punta, the army ants.

  Jagger despised them, and he had goaded them purposely into wrecking his vengeance on themselves—as well as $160,000 worth of damage to the theater. It was a mind-croggling demonstration of the love/hate relationship between superstars and their insatiable fans.

  And I had seen that same detestation in Tom Jones when he turned-on the girls in his audience.

  And it tied in with the artificial “soul” of Tom Jones singing, with the Vegas-style trappings he employs to straddle the line between music the older generations can accept, and the younger dig. It was a keynote to the hypocrisy and shallowness of the Tom Jones scene, the Tom Jones show, and the ease with which people allow themselves to have their energy tapped and their emotions fucked-over.

  I guess, in that moment, 31,000 feet in the air, I understood why I had always been vaguely repelled by Mr. Jones, who sings like a angel.

  That he is a sensation among women of all ages from one corner of this country to the other—a phenomenon I’d glimpsed in New York, Texas and Florida—is a dead giveaway to the state of flux in which the sexual idiom of our times finds itself. In a society where everyone was getting it frequently and healthily and effectively, Tom Jones would probably appeal to an audience as large as the one that digs Mrs. Miller.

  * * * *

  Hey, did I tell you I lost that Writers Guild election? Well, yeah, I did. Predictable, of course. They take unkindly to people who Speak Out. Might make waves and jeopardize the gravy train’s journey to the sea. George Clayton Johnson and Joyce Geller and all the other young turks got defeated as well. With one or two exceptions they put back in office on the Guild Board the older, more stable, better oriented gentlemen who know how to “talk to Lew Wasserman” and his crowd. And I’ve been told that the reason I’m considered persona non grata with my fellow Guild-members is not so much that I’m a loudmouthed, obnoxious troglodyte, but because I did that column about the writers in these pages some months ago. They didn’t like having it pointed out to them that it was, after all, we writers who do all those crummy scripts. To be honest, I love my Guild, and I would give almost anything to be back in the good graces of my fellow scriveners, but I have a hunch the price would be too high.

  And besides, if my series goes on the air, alia sudden I’m going to be a very popular guy among my buddy writers, because I’ll be the story editor, and doing the hiring of scripters. At which point my ugly penchant for revenge will manifest itself. A chick I know was surprised a while back that I still carried a grudge from the year before. I hipped her that that was nothing: “Baby,” I said, “I’m still working on grudges from 1937.”

  * * * *

  Ambivalence, the curse of keeping your mind open and receptive to new ideas, assails me this week. The Apollo 11 went up, came down, went up again, and came down again. Like you, I sat Elmer’d (as in the glue) in front of various TV screens, watching us engaged in our first activity on alien soil: dropping litter. It scared the ass off me.

  (A reader of this column sent along a copy of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, with the following circled for my attention, and I pass it on to you:

  (PLAQUE FOR THE MOON LANDING

  (Here Men First Set Foot Outside The Earth On Their Way To The Far Stars. They Speak Of Peace But Wherever They Go They Bring War. The Rockets On Which They Arrived Were Developed To Carry Instant Death And Can Within A Few Minutes Turn Their Green Planet Into Another Lifeless Moon. Their Destructive Ingenuity Knows No Limits And Their Wanton Pollution No Restraint. Let The Rest Of The Universe Beware.)

  In the background, as I write this, Jeff Beck is singing, and all that nice stuff gives me hope that perhaps I’m grown too cynical, and there may be hope.

  But...ambivalence!

  You see, I’m a science fiction writer, among other things. I’ve been a reader of the form since I first came upon Jack Williamson’s story Twelve Hours To Live in a 1946 issue of Startling Stories. I remember very well, back in 1952, when I was 17 and in high school in Cleveland, a reporter for the Cleveland Press coming to interview me and the other members of the fledgling Cleveland SF Society. I remember this clown’s unrestrained laughter when I told him (and this was pre-Sputnik) that we would surely have men on the moon within fifteen years. He wrote an article that made us all look like morons, made us seem to be coocoos who probably believed in ghosts, elves, a flat Earth and other improbables like an actor becoming Presidential timber. A few years later, when Sputnik went up, I took my copy of that article and went to find the reporter, at the Press offices, to rub his porcine nose in it. But he’d died. It was a bitch of an anti-climax.

  So you see, I’ve been dreaming—along with all the other sf fans—about that moment when the first men would get Lunar dust on their boots. Unfortunately, for me, it was another anti-climax.

  I’ll admit I was knocked out by Buzz Aldren bounding about the Moon like a kangaroo, but there were so many negative vibes attendant on the project that it really brought me down.

  For instance, nitty-gritty, we did it like jerks. It cost us I can’t remember how many billions to put all that scrap metal up there, merely to haul men, when a mechanical probe such as the Russians postulated could have done the same thing, and achieved the very same results. But the plain fact is that we wouldn’t have gotten the appropriations for the project if it hadn’t hauled the three astronauts. People just don’t get excited about machines going to the Moon, but they do about other men. The Russians correctly bummed us for risking lives in a flamboyant publicity gig that could have been accomplished as easily by a robot.

  But a robot wouldn’t have been as inspiring for Nixon and his carnival. “Participation Day,” indeed! And that simpering buffoon on board the Hornet when they splashed down. The insipid remarks he made were almost as stultifying as the dumb things the astronauts themselves said from space. (I, for one, am sick to the teeth of hearing the Bible quoted to me from Out There. It’s bad enough we have to put up with so much outdated philosophy back here on the mudball. It would have pleasured me no end had they landed and come upon the First Church of Throgg the Omniscient, there in the Sea of Tranquility. Wow, can you see the seizure Bishop Sheen would have had!?!) (Or maybe, simply, God appearing in a burning bush and saying, “Okay, you guys, knock off that shit!”)

  You see, it just sorta killed all the adventure for me. Maybe because I’d taken that first journey so many times being led by Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who dreamed all these dreams twenty years ago. I can see why all the rest of you dug it . . . inherently it is the single most exciting thing that’s happened since Christ splashed down on Calvary, but for the guys who knew without a doubt that it was coming—all the science fiction
fans and writers—it was a letdown ... I guess. At least a little.

  But I understand there were some marvelous serendipitous benefits: such as the crime rate in the country dropping to almost nothing. All the crooks and heist-men and cat-burglars were in front of their sets, too. Right up to the point where Nixon said the Apollo 11 flight had brought the world closer together than ever before.

  After which point the crooks turned off their sets, and went out to mug old ladies for seventy-four cents.

  * * * *

  It was my own fault, my error, and I deserved precisely what I got. Turning for the David Frost talk show on Channel 11, I hit 7, the phone rang, I turned around to answer it, and when I turned back, I was watching The King Family. Oh, my dear God. Can such things be!?!

  There were a great many studiedly square-looking people of varying ages (slightly overweight suburban ladies with plastic hair dominated; the kind of chicks who tell their old men, no, I can’t fuck tonight, Fred, I had my hair done today), and they sorta sang.

  I guess that’s what they were doing, when they weren’t being homey and cute.

  Hincty songs so devoid of even that mystical “blue-eyed soul” that I had to dash to my music and lay on about forty minutes of Shakey Jake, The Dells and Richie Havens.

  What kind of people dig The King Family? Can anyone tell me? Aside from wanting to ball three or four of the King Kousins, there was such a dearth of meritorious reasons for watching that show, I cannot fathom why various syndicates and networks keep thrusting the Kings before our already-squared eyeballs. For they seem to me to represent in totality a template of all that is fabricated, artificial, lowbrow and meretricious on the American Scene. They strive so massively to be cleancut that I suspect most of the men in the group have hernias.

  How I would love to see a live King Family segment after someone had dumped specially-made acid in the water cooler. “And now, all you friendly folks out there in the Great American Heartland, something special! Right here, tonight, on our show, you’re going to see an authentic King Family orgy, with the King Kiddies and the King Kousins engaging in one hundred and thirty-five vile and noxious sexual perversions, all at once ... and while the King Sisters make it with (respectively) a St. Bernard, a Tibetan Yak, a Sumatran black panther and a sex-crazed chicken, Alvino Rey will play accompaniment on his talking electric tissue-paper-and-comb; his selection for tonight is the Love Theme From Marat/Sade. And for a once-in-a-lifetime showbiz thrill, we’ve even brought Granny King on tonight with her specialty number, wherein she machines-guns two hundred, assorted blackjack and slot machine losers from the six biggest casinos in Las Vegas! Okay, gang, everybody start rubbing on the Velveeta!”

  The King Family is the Harold Robbins of music. More below the belt than that I cannot get.

  * * * *

  One of the commitments that kept me from writing this column for seven weeks was a stint as Guest Lecturer at the University of Colorado Writers Conference in the Rockies. I did two weeks in company with such eminent writers as Richard Gehman, George P. Elliott, Vance Bourjaily and Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Alan Dugan and Richard Eberhart.

  On Friday, June 27th, I was hauled, along with Gehman and the incredible Dugan, into Denver, to do a talk show on KOA-TV.

  The host of the show, a self-satisfied, rigid-minded gentleman named Bill Barker, cozied with the three of us before we taped (the show was to be aired the following Sunday night). He stressed one point: this was a freewheeling interview show in which he most sought a level of depth-analysis that would enrich the subject. He was not after cheap sensationalism or the sort of “controversy” Joe Pyne seeks. We felt relieved; Gehman, as one of the premier non-fiction magazine writers of the past thirty years, had a store of anecdotes and opinions to impart...and Dugan, who had won not only the Pulitzer for his brilliant poetry but also the National Book Award and the Prix de Rome, was an outspoken student of the passing scene. As for myself, I relished the opportunity to speak about the Writers Conference and what it was doing to bring forth young talent.

  Yet I should have known better. Though milder in his approach than Pyne, Barker was no better, no more noble than any other cheapjack interviewer on the boondock stations. The show opened with Barker asking us what he considered to be the responsibility of the writer. It was a strangely-phrased question, foggy in its implications, but all three of us had done sufficient camera-time to re-parse it, knowing that to look confused or hesitant during an interview is to instantly invalidate anything you might say for a viewing audience. We began rapping about the writer’s responsibility to tell the truth, to keep au courant, to be committed, to pursue every facet of a subject till he could present a fully-rounded portrait.

  Dugan—a tall, distinguished-looking, gentle man— made a side-comment, nothing more than that, that it was also necessary to reproduce the speech of people almost phonographically, even if it meant using obscenity. It was a casual remark, but Barker pounced on it like a vulture finding carrion.

  It led us into an ugly, circuitous argument about the necessity of the creator using whatever language he felt was most necessary to making his point. Barker started laying that “why must you use filthy language” number on us. Dugan responded that if the word fuck appeared in the normal speech-patterns of someone in a story or poem, to substitute copulate or a similar euphemism would be to corrupt the veracity of the image. Barker got uptight and started saying Dugan was a child with a foul mouth, using the words for shock value. This, to a man whose credentials as an artist are unimpeachable.

  Things went from bad to horrendous. Barker baited Dugan, who rose to the bait only inasmuch as he used more fucks and damns and shits, just to drive Barker up the wall; thereby proving that the words were loaded for Barker, and caused him pain; it also allowed me to point out that it was the responsibility of the artist to de-fang those poisonous words so their meanings, not their emotional impacts were what counted.

  Barker refused to listen. He raved and screeched, and when the show was finished, it looked like fine old Belgian lace, so filled was it with bleeps.

  I’d confronted the stultifying provincialism before. You may recall my report on the TV talk show I did in Texas. But it keynoted for me one of the timorous areas of television programming, one of the disastrous hypocrisies that render so much of television impotent and valueless.

  I recalled one of the major networks’ broadcast of a filmed report on the President’s Commission Analysis of Violence, some months ago. It was told through the medium of interviews with people on the streets who had been interviewed for the Report, and interspersed with charts and quotes from the Report itself. Every time someone used an obscenity, it was bleeped. It made for a curiously comic program. Not merely because the viewer would substitute something far more offensive for the bleep, but because it was a flagrant example of television trying to protect its audience from that which it already knew.

  Is there anyone in America over the age of six months who is not familiar with the vagaries of the vulgar, all the way from shucky-darn to cunt? Is there anyone who will not admit that these are mere words, that they bear no more de facto power than a soap bubble?

  Then precisely what is it that makes them taboo? From whom are we keeping these words? From the fringe coocoos’ who are offended when an astronaut says damn or shit when something unpleasant has happened onboard his rocket? Are we to remain a nation of hypocrites, lumbered by our most provincial and hidebound elements? It is as valid a concept as writing every book on the level of Dick-and-Jane in order not to corrupt the minds of the young.

  It becomes readily obvious, if one extrapolates, that more and louder use of these words would rapidly render them as meaningless and powerless as “where it’s at,” “do your thing,” “confrontation” and such similar jingoisms. And what would emerge from such a situation would be a need to speak better, more precise, more original and imaginative obscenities. Which could only enrich the language. So ... yours for bi
gger and better fucks ...

  * * * *

  36: 15 AUGUST 69

  Commencing the middle of September, stay away from restaurants on Tuesday nights.

  Because, if I’m correct in my evaluation of the dangers, of provincialism in the thinking of network programming, Tuesday night television is going to be so gawd-awful on NBC that everyone will flock out to eat, and you won’t be able to get seated for two hours.

  I’ll work from the specific to the general on this one: hang on, it gets hairy.

  September 16th is the Tuesday night season premiere on NBC. Let us consider what the top television network in the country has prepared for us:

  7:30 ... I Dream of Jeannie

  8:00 ... The Debbie Reynolds Show

  8:30...Julia

  9:00 ... Tuesday Night Movies, debuting in this fresh, bright, innovative 1969-70 season with Doris Day in The Ballad of Josie.

  (About this last: one of the genuinely horrendous gut experiences of my recent past was finding myself crossing and re-crossing the continent via airplane several years ago, and being “treated” to The Ballad of Josie not once, twice or thrice, but four times in a month. Common decency forbids my explicating quite how bad the film is. Suffice it to say that it was the first time I ever considered leaving a movie in the middle, when I was 31,000 feet in the air; but until I solved the problem by locking myself in the plane’s toilet with a William Golding novel, death seemed a more desirable choice than sitting through Doris in the Wild West again.)