An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  Photo: Mark Shepard

  The complaints are, of course, another matter.

  They are usually deranged and I will do my best to present said material in as unflattering a light as possible, thereby affording me the opportunity to ridicule my critics without permitting them a proper forum to reply. This is called Democracy. I learned the technique from Spiro Agnew and Richard Whats-His-Face—you know, the one whose upper lip always sweated when he was lying.

  Take for instance an unsigned letter I got from a woman the week following my column about how I preferred my dirty 1967 Camaro to one of those incredibly expensive “sporty little Oriental runabouts in which one rides with knees tucked up under one’s chin.” The letter (with the plethora of typos and illiteracies and misspellings corrected) read as follows:

  “Hey, Ellison, a ‘sporty little Oriental’ etcetera etcetera must be awfully small if even your knees are tucked up under your chin. I guess you can tell that my opinion of you is pretty small, too. Signed, Not a Fan.”

  The allusion is made, one supposes, to my height. I am 5′5′ tall, which seems to me a perfectly acceptable height for a human being. Or a caterpillar. Heightist remarks of this inane sort are one of the last conversational bastions of the intellectually deprived, to be sure, but we must go beyond the content of the denigrative to pierce the true motives of one who takes time out of her day just to cast a random insult at a stranger. When we slog our way through the psychotic morass we find that surely this is no casual brickbat, but the need of a seriously inadequate person to draw attention to herself while hiding behind the anonymity of an unsigned letter.

  We all know the syndrome. It is a classic symptom of arrested adolescence. The kid in the schoolyard who throws a stone when the object has his or her back turned.

  But being an essentially loving and concerned guy, I could not let this cry in the wilderness go unheeded. Attention was what the correspondent sought and, in a spirit of Christian charity, not unknown to those of us of a Semitic-Atheistic persuasion, I determined to locate the letter-writer and give her some of the attention she so desperately sought, (I’ve always thought it was just disgraceful the way they used to throw those Christians to the Protestants) craved, yearned for.

  It wasn’t all that difficult. Like most people who do an unsavory act and want to be punished for it, she left all manner of clues behind. The most important was that while she had not signed her letter, she had used a business envelope stolen from her previous employer. As I knew some people in that firm, I called them and asked them to check around, to see what possibilities for identification they might find. In an hour or so I received a phone call advising me that the woman my contacts had suspected was the writer, who had been fired from the firm some time earlier, was now working for another company in Los Angeles, a record promotion company or suchlike.

  I was told that she went by the name “Spock” and that she was quite a fatty. I was given the phone number and address of the company for which she now worked as receptionist. All in the spirit of helping her overcome her feelings of unworthiness, I called the company and asked for “Spock.”

  “This is Spock,” said the woman who had answered the phone.

  “Ah,” I said. “Well, it seems to me that if you’re going to insult people, you ought not to be in a position to get found out. And while I may have to ride around in even a tiny car with my knees tucked up under my chin, at least I’m not such a grotesque overweight blimp that I can’t get into the car.”

  There was a horrified silence at the other end of the line.

  “Who is this?” A tremor of panic in the voice.

  “You know who it is, Spock,” I said. “I’m watching you. My agents clock your every move. You can’t sneak a Twinkie without my killer minions letting me know.”

  There was a discernible gulp at the other end. I knew the therapy, generated out of compassion, was already having salutary effect. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Do? Do?” I responded. “Why, Spock, dear old tugboat, I’m not going to do anything.” And I added, “I guess.”

  “Bye-bye,” I said, and went my way, knowing that another good deed, like bread upon the waters, had been cast out into the lonely darkness of the world.

  Beyond that exchange, the most interesting of the several hundred I’ve received in nine weeks, only three postcards seem to need responses this time.

  The first was from Nancy Buchanan, who applauded the stand this column took against knife-kill splatter movies in which women were endlessly brutalized, but who suggested I dote for a moment on films that were child-hating. She noted the existence of a number of films reprising the sentiments of The Bad Seed in which children were portrayed as the spawn of the devil, or as harbingers of evil—The Omen, The Exorcist, et al. And she asked, “Do Americans really hate kids?”

  To which I respond, of course Americans hate kids. Older Americans, that is. And kids hate older Americans. It is called the generation gap. And there is provocation on both sides. But I don’t think films such as The Exorcist are manifestations of that distrust and hatred. I think such films seek to enhance the terror and evil of the plot by taking the symbol of innocence, a child, and using it as a vessel of ghoulish malevolence. It is an artistic construct, not having much to do with sociology.

  Richard Morse asked, “Given the horrors you’ve written of so far, how do you preserve your outlandishly high opinion of humanity?”

  Easy, kiddo. I believe to my shoe-tips that the human race is the noblest experiment ever attempted by the uncaring universe, and any species capable of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, of writing MOBY DICK, and of putting a man on the surface of the moon, is a species worth giving a damn about. It is when representatives of that noble experiment settle for McDonald’s toadburgers, Judith Krantz novels and The Dukes of Hazzard that my love affair with the human race becomes polluted, and I rail not against what we can be in our noblest moments, but what we settle for. I wrote an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times to that effect, shortly after New Year’s, speaking out against The Common Man…saying that it was the Uncommon Man who moved society forward, brought about social change that bettered people’s lives, and made us proud to be human beings. Like the “man in the water” at the Washington, D.C. crash of Air Florida’s flight 90 back in January, the man who passed the rescue ring from the helicopter to five other survivors while waiting in the freezing water until they had been saved. And who drowned for his act of humanity. He has been painted as an example of “the common man,” but I see him as an Extraordinary Man.

  With recurring examples of nobility such as that, how can one hate our kind totally?

  And the final card was from one Kent Beyda who sought to invalidate my criticism of splatter movies by saying he had sat behind me at a press screening of The Howling, a film he said he “would defend to the death,” as a wonderful example of film making. Well, my carp about that movie was less with what was on the screen than the ghoulish manner of the audience. Mr. Beyda swears I screamed my objections out loud and made it difficult for him to hear the full richness of sound as the werewolves ate their victims. If such was the case, and I suggest Mr. Beyda is full of horse puckey right up to his eyeballs, I apologize for getting in the way of his full enjoyment of the gore he so clearly needs to sustain him in his otherwise tragically boring life. But as I have checked with the others who sat in the row on both sides of me, to ascertain if I was, in fact, so rude…and as they have informed me that I sat there like a little gentleman throughout the film save for the one time I turned around and said to the guy behind me that his fetid breath was wilting my shirt collar, I must believe that Mr. Beyda is perhaps fudging the truth just a tot.

  Beyond these specific responses, I thank all of you—too numerous to thank individually—for your support and kind words. I trust next time we sweep up the mail, in about six weeks, there will be more scintillant examples of run-amuck thinking and verbal mayhem.


  Until next week, I take my leave. Incidentally, as you read this column, know that it was written in a motel in Florida where I pound out these words while getting ready to go out to do yet another public speaking engagement in behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. We have less than four months, friends. And if you have it in your power to add some thrust to the final days of this noble effort, it behooves you to get off your complacent asses and do it now.

  INSTALLMENT 22: 19 MARCH 82

  Why the ERA Won’t Go Away

  I’m back from sunny Florida. Hardly a vacation. I do quite a lot of college lecturing. Always did a brisk business with institutions of higher learning in Southern states. But when the National Organization for Women slapped a boycott on the eleven remaining states that hadn’t ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, I honored the blockade by turning down all speaking engagements in non-ERA states unless. The “unless” was that if they wanted me to appear badly enough, they had to sponsor a concurrent ERA fund-raiser, or a seminar, or whatever form of pro-ERA chivari the local NOW / ERA branch thought would serve the commonweal best. That’s been the MO for about six years.

  Most of the universities gave that option a pass. “We don’t want to get involved in politics,” they usually said. (I always restrained myself from pointing out that if they didn’t want to get involved in politics—what an unthinkable concept for a college, alleged to be a “marketplace of ideas”—they ought to eschew the government contracts for new war toys that help fund their campuses.)

  But Tulane in New Orleans and U. of Chicago in Illinois went for it, and I did what I could. Two weeks ago I went to Tampa to speak at a futurism seminar, and the U. of Tampa was sensational in establishing a liaison with the Tampa NOW office and its president, Pat Rowentree.

  The time for ratification for the ERA runs out in less than four months, and everywhere I go I get a distinct feeling of desolation and betrayal by men and women alike, those who have put their time and their hope into this desperately-important Amendment to the Constitution. They see the years and the effort going down the drain. So in Tampa and St. Pete and Boca Raton where I had interview after interview, night and day for eight days, I kept saying, “It’s not over. Do not despair. We just have to start all over again.”

  The ERA will not go away. Women have been trying to get similar human rights laws passed since 1923! And as dismal as the situation may seem now, every reliable poll tells us that 65-68% of the American people want an ERA. Consider that figure and then ask why the opposition to something so direct and uncomplicated as the 25 words that codify the core of the Amendment. (For those who may never have seen those 25 words, they are: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”)

  Since the Amendment doesn’t even mention women, it becomes obvious to all but those blinded by the flapdoodle of a self-serving termagant like Phyllis Schlafly that it is not a women’s Amendment…it’s a people’s Amendment. So why the strident voices of the anti-ERA forces, and who the hell are these 32-35% who are keeping the majority of us from bringing the United States fully into the 20th century?

  Well, there are the Mormons, of course, whose religious view of women is that they are inferior and are best kept in the role of little homemaker; allegedly to preserve “the family unit,” that nuclear family they constantly tell us is the cornerstone of civilization. But the census informs us that though twenty years ago only 1 out of every 10 households was a single-person household, today only 1 out of every 4 is a traditional family unit, thereby demonstrating that our culture is rapidly heading toward a set where the individual dominates and controls his or her own life, as opposed to the traditional template of Mom-Pop-&-the-Kids all snuggled under one roof.

  And the biggest financial backing for Schlafly and other anti-ERA operations is Big Business. Millions have been funneled into anti-ERA coffers by the multinationals. Why? Because the last large pool of cheap labor in this country is not Blacks or Hispanics or Paraplegics or Hunchbacked Transvestite Midgets. It is women. Consider what the comptrollers of major corporations think about women being at parity with men when it comes to salaries.

  I do not offer the above remarks as surmise. Recently, in Florida, one of the Miami newspapers uncovered the fact that $40,000 had been channeled into the state by a major corporation intent on buying the two senatorial votes necessary to keep the ERA from passing the State Legislature.

  All of this…four months away from being irrelevant.

  When I said this on a radio call-in show in St. Petersburg, a woman phoned in to ask what I said to men who opposed the ERA. I replied that I seldom have to say anything to men about the ERA. Not that many men don’t oppose it, but that men can keep quiet because they have misguided women doing their work for them as Fifth Columnists. These are women held in the stingy paw of the mischievous Schlafly and her breed, who are, themselves, pawns. Why should men get out there and look like chauvinist assholes when they can gull women into taking the front lines and sucking up the philosophical bullets? Even Schlafly is tool, mere figurehead. With her to hate, we have no need to go behind her to see the dark masters she serves like the good little handmaiden she is.

  It is a classic example of avoiding having to look at the corrupt nature of some of our most cherished institutions by pillorying the women who serve those institutions. It is one more example of prejudice against women as manipulated decoys of the real power-masters.

  But the ERA will not go away. As more and more women are bruised by society, as more and more cases of sexual harassment on the job surface, as more and more women find their legal rights abridged, as they find they cannot get loans for cars, or credit, or the bank blessing to start their own businesses…as they understand that a husband in Utah can sue a hit-and-run driver for striking a child, but the wife and mother cannot…as they find out that a widow pays inheritance tax in Nebraska but a widower does not…as they perceive that if a wife dies the husband would not automatically keep receiving Social Security…as they learn that in Illinois a man and a woman working for the same publicly-funded clinic, who are the same age and earned the same money and retired after the same number of years, would receive pension checks of which the woman’s would be much smaller…when they are astonished to discover that by Alabama state law a boy can have a summer paper route but a girl cannot…when more women tragically join the ranks of the denied and bruised and frustrated…the ranks of the angry will swell.

  And the ERA will not go away. Because the way we’ve set up the game, women will lose more often than they’ll win. And even the most misguided, even the ones who actually believe that an ERA will mean their golden-tressed daughters will have to fight in foxholes and that unisex toilets will make perverts of us all—even those women will have the scales ripped from their eyes. And they will join the men and women who resent the hell out of those remaining eleven porkchop politics states that have denied us a better country and a better condition of life for male and female alike.

  At which point, the liberal-conservative revolution of the Sixties and Seventies in this country will come to seem to us merely a Sunday outing. Because like it or not, women are as capable of fighting back as men; and when that revolution breaks out, gentle readers, which side you were on in 1982 will mean about as much as a lone white face in the middle of a crazed ghetto-burning.

  Thoughts like that make me look on an early retirement in Bora Bora with great delight.

  Less than four months. If you haven’t done something yet, get your ass in gear. By July it’ll be too late.

  Interim memo

  When this installment was reprinted, I titled it “A Hero for our Times.” I believed it then, I believe it now, and when interviewers ask me who my “heroes” are, I name Hank Aaron, Willie Joe Namath, Ralph Nader, Gloria Allred, Christine Craft and most notably, Norman Lear. What a sad, fuckin’ place this world would be for all of us, even you dips who support Falwel
l, without Norman Lear in it.

  INSTALLMENT 23: 29 MARCH 82

  A Hero for Our Times

  I move to the rear of the bus for no one in my admiration for Norman Lear. During a recent radio interview, the host asked me who my “heroes” were, and though I was hard-pressed to expand the living list much beyond Ralph Nader, John Simon, Joe Namath, Gloria Allred and Francis Ford Coppola, the first name that popped out of my mouth was “Norman Lear.”

  To me, he represents in great measure what I respect in terms of decency, rectitude, human concern and application of talent. But more, he is as close to a model of how to handle and put to proper use the benefits of fame, power and success as anyone currently in the public arena. I have observed his career closely since March of 1969 when I attended the taping of a situation comedy then called Those Were The Days, a proposed series which ABC (in its infinite wisdom) turned down. It was not until two years later that CBS picked up the show, which has enjoyed what might conservatively be called ebullient success for the last eleven years. The Lear-generated series, of course, was All In The Family (currently metamorphosed as Archie Bunker’s Place).

  On that evening in 1969 I perceived Norman Lear as a man of courage and high goals, and over the years I have had no reason to alter my opinion, even when conglomeration made him an industry and the quality of some of the product his Tandem Productions proffered was less than iridescent. Tandem / Embassy is big business now, and while Lear may have turned over much of the day-to-day workings of his creative mill to the worshippers of the bottom line, simply because one man cannot reasonably be expected to ride all horses at once and still get a decent night’s sleep, any sane estimation of the situation will agree that though business is definitely business, by doing bigger business a man like Lear can employ the clout it accrues in service of the commonweal. Which is, in large part, what he has done. But now comes the but: