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

by Harlan Ellison

  How it happened was this: Elyse had been scheduled for the week preceding, but Carson got to rapping with some banal ex-vaudevillian, and time ran out. So Elyse was promised for the next night. She never showed. They shunted her around like REA Express. The following week, with Carson on sabbatical, and Wilson doing the turn, Elyse was slotted.

  On a show distinguished by its paucity of talent (even the incredible Joe Tex was gawdawful), Elyse was bucked back and back and back till they managed to squeeze her in between a couple of pimple commercials, She did one number, no backdrop, perched on a stool circa Andy Williams 1965, showed none of the fire or verve so handily available on her album, and with a smattering of applause (as much as due a trained seal act), she was blacked out. It was ruthless treatment of a skillful performer, and if anyone conceived of that shot as furthering a career—forget it. But, annoyed at having watched that entire dumbass show for three and a half hours, just to see Elyse, and having been short-shrifted, I did derive one benefit: it exposed Flip Wilson to my penetrating gaze for a protracted period.

  And, Elyse now passed into obscurity and last week’s column, let me deal with the estimable Mr. Wilson, as a manifestation of his times.

  For openers, he’s about as funny as a ruptured spleen. Now, I am by no means calling for a return to Amos n’ Andy—though they had the saving grace of being genuinely funny—but I’m observing jaundicedly that aside from Cosby and Dick Gregory, the last ten years of struggling for equal rights for blacks has produced a strain of handkerchief-head shuffling comics of the Flip Wilson/Scoey Mitchell sort that demeans the dues paid by millions of their brothers.

  The genre comedians—Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley and others—still get denied prime-time exposure (unless you call Pigmeat slapping the Laugh-In cast with his famous pig bladder exposure), while the mocha comics slurp up the gravy with weak-wristed routines that present to the Honkie Mass a picture of the black man as litfle better than the good-natured, kinds dumb Uncle Tom was all recognize as thirty years out-of-date. Oh sure, every once in a while Wilson or Mitchell will make some fairly safe social comment about the Detroit Riots or looting or bigotry, but they are de-fanged comments, bearing none of the genuine rage we know lies in the world-view of every rational black man. They are the bought comedians. They are neither black nor white, but a colorless, emasculated something-else. They have opted for show biz, for the phony camaraderie of the klieg lights. They have copped-out on their people and their destiny.

  I cannot watch Flip Wilson and his breed with anything but contempt, even though I understand the glittery appeal inherent in belonging to that select little circle of stars, superstars and semi-stars. Nonetheless, it’s a cheap in-group reward, a mess of pottage exchanged for dignity and responsibility to one’s own kind.

  Hell, Lenny was white, and he took more risks with his material in defense of the black man than Wilson or Mitchell or even Nipsey Russell has ever taken.

  How it must gall a guy like Dick Gregory, who can’t get booked on a major TV show, to see a hankie-top like Wilson hosting the top night-time talk show, playing the biggest clubs, working the lounges in Vegas, copping top bread for routines as simpering and approbation-seeking as the worst shuffle ever displayed. What must Gregory think, a man who lays it on the line as he does—for instance—in a new two-record set called Dick Gregory: The Light Side: The Dark Side? We hear the genuine humor of the black man thereon; we also hear his rage, his hatred, his frenzy, his demand for a better life ... not only for blacks, but for poor stupid rednecks and even the rest of us provincial, terrified scuttlefish who walk through Spanish Harlem after midnight

  What does Cosby think of these others? He seems to be a man who has not deserted his people, who pours time and money and effort back into the black community. What does he think about those routines Wilson twinkles, in which the new cliche of the black man is tendered?

  In Mario Puzo’s brilliant novel of the mafiosi, The Godfather (which I recommend to you unreservedly), the second- and third-generation Sicilian-Americans refer to the old-style caricature capos as “Moustache Petes.” What do the new blacks, the Clarence Williams and the Hari Rhodes, call the Flip Wilsons? What name is Scoey Mitchell given by Greg Morris? Does Otis Young identify with his soul brother Nipsey Russell?

  How nauseating it is to realize that the cunning racist society in which we move has once more manipulated its opposition. If you can’t take the gun and the hate away from the black man, then buy him. Give him prime-time shots, give him Harry Cherry suits and good living, and he’ll prance around on the set telling the white community that the nigger is still impotent, kinda silly, and just downright grateful to be allowed to loot and pillage and bum every once in a while, in exchange for the amazing benefits of the Great Society.

  Flip Wilson did a week on the Carson Show. I didn’t watch him more than once more, just to see if my perceptions were consistent. He did it the next night, too.

  During WWII they had a name for guys who sold out. The informers were called Quislings.

  I wonder if Dick Gregory knows that word. He might mention it to his black, er, his mocha brother, Flip. We honkies haven’t the right to say it. Shit, we haven’t even got the right to be disgusted by shmucks like Wilson. All we have the obligation to do is go out on Rainbow Beach and get our ribs banged in. Even for jerks like Wilson.

  I’m getting angry. Forget it.

  Next week, at long last, my Rio contact has managed to smuggle out that dope on dictatorship-ruled TV in Brazil. Watch for it next week.

  * * * *

  39: 19 SEPTEMBER 69

  History refuses to allow me to keep my promises, which annoys not only me, but you readers as well. The promise: I wouldn’t miss any more columns. How broken: last week, no column. Cause: history. Explanation: I’d promised at long last to do that column on the state of television in Brazil, a column I’d been planning since my trip to Rio many months ago. It took this long to get the information smuggled out. And no sooner had I written the column, a week ago Monday, than all hell broke out in Brazil, as your other newspapers told you, and I pulled back the column to rewrite it, to get it up-to-date. And missed my deadline. I’m sorry. And here, totally revised, and quite a bit longer, is the column.

  After I returned from Rio, after I’d had the time to let what I’d seen there sink in, I included some thoughts about it all in an introduction I did for my most recent book of short stories. I’d like to excerpt those sections from the introduction and present them here, as something of a preamble.

  THE WAVES IN RIO

  Standing in the hotel window staring out at the Atlantic Ocean, nightcrashing onto the Copacabana beach. Down in Brazil on a fool’s mission, talking to myself. Standing in the window of a stranger whom I suddenly know well, while down the Avenida Atlantica in another window, one I know well, who has suddenly become a stranger.

  Watching the onyx waves rippling in toward shore, suddenly facing-out like green bottle glass, cresting white with lace, reaching, pawing toward shore, and spasming once finally, before vanishing into the sponge sand. I am a noble moron. I compose a poem.

  My poem says, standing here, staring out across the works of man, wondering what the hell I’m doing here, an alien in a place he can never know...and there are the waves. Boiling across two thousand miles of emptiness in the terrible darkness, all alone, all the way from Lagos like the Gold Coast blacks who came, stacked belly-to-butt like spoons in the bellies and butts of alien ships. All that way, racing so far, to hurl themselves up on this alien beach, like me.

  Now why in the name of reason would anyone, anything, travel that far ... just to be alone?

  * * * *

  Christ on the mountain looks down over Rio de Janeiro, arms spread, benediction silently flowing from stone lips. He was sculpted by an Italian, and brought to this mountain, staring off toward Sugar Loaf. There are lights hidden in Christ. Once a year—you know when—a remote switch is thrown at the other
end of those lights, in the Vatican, and the Pope lights Cristo Redentor.

  This is the Christ of the wealthy who live in the bauhaus apartments out along Leblon; the Christ of the blue carpet bettors at the Jockey Club; the Christ of those who dine on fondue orientale at the Swiss Chalet; the Christ of those who sail into Rio harbor on proud white yachts so proud and so white the sun blinds anyone staring directly at them. This is the Christ on the mountain.

  Rio de Janeiro is a city of startling contrasts: from the yachts and the Jockey Club and the bauhaus apartments ... to the shanty villages glued to the sides of the hills, where the poor scrabble for existence in their tropic paradise. Favellas they are called. Down there below the big Christ, but above even the wealthy, the Gold Coast blacks have deposited their descendants, and the poor mestizos crowd one atop another in shanties built of corrugated shed roofing and wood slat that rots in the pulsing heat. They rise up in a crazy-quilt city above the city. And above them is a smaller hill. And on that hill they have erected another Christ. The Christ of the poor.

  They are not noble morons. They are not writers who draw senseless parallels between the great white Christ on the mountain, and the little black Christ on the hill. They only know he is Christ the Redeemer. And though they have not enough cruzeiros to buy food for their rickety children, they have centavos to buy cheap tallow candles to set out on the altar of the street church. Christ will redeem them. They know it.

  They are alone. In their own land, they are alone. Christ will never save them. Nor will men ever save them. They will spend their days like the waves from Africa, throwing themselves onto the beach of pitiless living.

  They are no better than you or I.

  It is only truth to tell you that as night approaches we are all aliens, down here on this alien Earth. To tell you that not Christ nor men nor the governments of men will save you. To tell you that we must all work and struggle and revolt against those who live in yesterday, before all our tomorrows are stolen away from us. To tell you no one will come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. God is within you. Save yourselves.

  Otherwise, why would you have traveled all this way ... just to be alone?

  * * * *

  That was written in March. Two weeks ago, on Saturday, September 6th, the people of Brazil formalized their belief that God was, indeed, within them...that no one was coming down from any mountain to save them from the unspeakable dictatorship that rules Brazil as if it were a humid madhouse. Members of what the American establishment press call a “Castroite terrorist group” (the same kind of terrorist group to which Paul Revere belonged) kidnapped the U.S. Ambassador, C. Burke Elbrick. Two days later, with the release of fifteen political prisoners being held by the detestable military junta that had taken over Brazil, Elbrick was turned loose.

  I will not go into any lengthy discussions of our part in the disgraceful treatment of an entire nation’s people—we’ve done it too often, in too many other places. Suffice it to say, the poetic justice inherent in the kidnapping of the Norteamericano Ambassador is sufficiently pellucid to delight even a Thomas Hardy.

  We supported the dictatorship, with money and arms and trade pacts. Even when the people of Rio could not pass unmolested in their own streets—littered with tanks and armed soldiers—we expressed no concern.

  So when they decided to break out, the National Liberation Action organization and their militant arm, MR-8, went for pay dirt. They didn’t kidnap Foreign Minister Jose Magalhaes Pinto or the Generals leading the First, Second or Third Armies—they copped Elbrick. They knew which side the bread was buttered on.

  At long last, the Brazilians decided to take some concrete action against the level of poverty, illiteracy and degradation in which they’d been forced to exist. And they went for the money. They didn’t bother with the puppets, they went for the puppet master. And won the day. Yeah!

  But what has all this to do with television? Well, it had a lot more to do with it in the unrevised column you might have been reading had not MR-8 slapped chloroform over Elbrick’s ambassadorial snout. Because, before September 6th, television (and to an even greater degree, radio) in Brazil was one of the most potent weapons used to keep the people happily mud-condemned. Before the Age of the Machine it was God and Religion that kept the poor blacks in America hardly content but certainly befuddled. In Brazil, in the Age of the Machine, it is God and Religion and clowns like Silvio Santos from Sao Paulo and Chacrinha from Rio.

  The latter is a grossly boorish television star, cavorting about like a Saturday morning kiddie show emcee, hosting one of the most popular shows in Brazil. The former is Chacrinha’s counterpart from “more serious, sober Sao Paulo.” Some serious; some sober. His program consists of selecting the ugliest man in Brazil, the fattest man, the longest moustache, the most ridiculous name of an individual, and something called City Against City, in which the insipid rivalries of the cariocas (Rio residents) and the paulista (from Sao Paulo) are exploited. Under the guise of an amusing inter-city contest, the TV medium manages to keep alive and fiery a sectional hatred no more sensible than that of Catholics and Protestants in North Ireland. The name of the game is divide and keep subservient.

  Santos is a classic example of the bread-and-circuses Quisling whose lust for the buck (or in this case new cruzeiros) forces him into such public positions as the one expressed in a recent interview:

  “But what do you want me to do? A certain publication criticizes me. It wants me to present programs of a higher level. But TV is a fierce battle to capture the audience. There’s no middle-ground, either you have an audience or you don’t. Who doesn’t, disappears.

  “I was always crazy about money.

  “There are certain programs which are bad for my image. For instance, the City Against City show. When one of the cities loses, all of the people from that city turn against me. Even though it’s prejudicial to me, it can’t be taken off the air because of its popularity with the viewers. Because of this, many shows which were considered horrible—and I agree that they were— couldn’t be taken off.

  “I’m the most optimistic guy in Brazil.”

  His optimism is based, probably, on his position as a 34-year-old millionaire (in Brazilian terms) with more side-interests than Senator Dodd.

  Santos is only one of many manifestations of the corrupt and debased nature of Brazilian television. Even as the Roman -arena and stock car races have kept the groundlings too busy being entertained to know their heads are being turned around by their governments, television has been turned to this most odious of uses.

  Telethons on which physical deformities and terminal cases have been exhibited as grand guignol works of art.

  News reports filtered, laundered, managed and castrated by such government agencies (horrifying object-lessons to those among you who think Yanqui TV ought to be government overseen) as the IBOPE, the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics. News reports that come on almost simultaneously on every radio station and TV channel, each one a carbon copy of the others.

  Frequent news blackouts, when things get sticky ... such as now.

  No documentaries, save travel talks.

  The deification of the absurdly banal in such comedy soap operas as The Trapp Family. You think our daytime soapers are bad. They are as a cold sore to mouth cancer when compared to their Brazilian counterparts.

  A level of programming guaranteed to provide no thought, no controversy, no enrichment.

  By aiding and abetting the Brazilian Establishment in keeping the illiterate mass desensitized to the winds of revolution and change sweeping over the world, by substituting cheap slapstick for social involvement, by permitting the nationwide audience to believe it cannot rise above its station in life, television in Brazil has become a more effective riot control weapon than tanks or mace or troops.

  It seems almost as though Brazilian video (divided between TV Globo and TV Tupi) is engaged in a program of ba
rring the way to the twentieth century for the common man. The twentieth? Hell, consider the twenty-first century! And consider how Brazilian television handled the Apollo 11 moonflight:

  No preparations were made to utilize the facilities of INTELSAT properly. Where almost every other nation in the world had been rigging its equipment and schedules for a month before the lunar landing, Brazilian television went on its imbecilic way with its usual belly-laugh programming, and on the day of the landing, beginning in the early afternoon, rather than showing what was happening at Houston, rather than relaying information as accurately as every other televising country was doing, Brazilian TV broadcast the microcephalic antics of Silvio Santos followed immediately by the loon Chacrinha.

  Kindly note these were special programs, cut specifically for that day. It was as if on the day of JFK’s funeral, CBS and NBC had prepared two special three-hour segments of Green Acres or Queen For A Day to be shown in lieu of the grim proceedings. Granted, it makes life a little more smiley, but it could hardly be construed as serving the needs of the viewing audience by keeping them in touch with the world around them.