He sat right there and, though I couldn’t see him on the radio I know he wouldn’t lie about it, he said he held in his hand the reports that proved the Movement was being directed out of the Kremlin. When one of those snotnosed reporters asked, uh, just what are those reports, our President said just the right thing. He said, “Well, young fellah, I’d sure as shit love to let you see these reports, but they’re very secret stuff, and it would compromise National Security if I permitted you to peek at them.” And then he said, with a lower tone, “And besides, how do I know you’re not one of them?”
Well, let me tell you, friends, I was convinced.
’Cause, if you can’t trust the President when he says he’s got the goods, well then, who can you trust? He said it: he said he had the facts right there in his hand. Reminded me of the times Senator Joe McCarthy held up those skinnys and said he had right there in his hand the names of 312 card-carrying Communists in the State Department; 165 card-carrying Communists in the movie industry; 944 card-carrying Communists in the Pentagon; 1181 card-carrying Communists in the Toledo, Ohio Department of Water & Power. It has the same sense of reality about it.
And when I stopped to think about it, I could see that our President was right. This whole Nuclear Freeze thing must be Red directed. I mean, what right-thinking American doesn’t lie awake nights worrying about first strike capability, the necessity for dense-pack missile siting, nuclear retaliation shortfall, massive destruction parity? Bothers me a lot.
When some Pollyanna goes all treacly and says s/he isn’t worried about a Nuclear War because for the first time in the history of the human race there’s existed a kind of weapon that no one has used after its first demonstrations, even though it’s been around for almost forty years, I say, “Muddy thinking, youth!” Okay, so the only other example of human beings abstaining from using an available weapon was when the Japanese, a long time ago, decided they didn’t like what firearms could do, and they said forget it, we’ll go back to the sword to kill each other, and nobody used the gun for two hundred years or something like that, till Admiral Perry came steaming into Uraga harbor and brought culture at the muzzle of gunboat diplomacy.
Apart from the Japanese eschewing the use of the gun for two hundred years, there’s never been a weapon available—from the pointed stick to the arbalest to smart bombs—that someone hasn’t used against an enemy, usually in “self-defense.”
(I saw a wonderful bumper sticker on my way to LAX two weeks ago. It was on the ass-end of a camper, naturally, and it said: MY WIFE, YES: MY DOG, MAYBE: MY GUN, NEVER!)
So these Luddites get all mushy inside when they observe that here we’ve had the A-and the H-Bomb for almost forty years and, apart from the first demonstrations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that thrilled and delighted all of us, no one has used nuclear strike potential even though we’ve had about a hundred and six wars in that time. Not even the French have used it, and we all know how weird they are. Or the Israelis, or the PLO, or even that kid from an Eastern college who made one in an attaché case. So the Appeasers who don’t understand that we have to be strong, Jack, real real strong, they say, “Oh ain’t we a glorious species, how sane and reserved we are…there just won’t be a Nuclear War, because we’ve learned better.”
Well, sir, let me tell you those people just don’t know which way the wind blows when the cow craps, and I say that they’re just misguided tools of a sinister intelligence.
They’re part of those millions and millions of dopes who’ve voted for Nuclear Freeze Initiatives in states from coast to coast, each person of whom is a Commie dupe!
Are you a dupe? Well, I’ve been a dupe; watching those rivers of humanity on television newscasts, those endless hordes of dupes protesting in front of the White House; seeing the baby Bolsheviks with their mommies, carrying banners that say A NUCLEAR WAR CAN REALLY FUCK UP YOUR DAY; unquestioningly believing that all those people who voted for Freeze Initiatives knew what they were doing. Now I understand that most of them were outright Commies, and the rest were just dumb fellow travelers.
I’m glad our President sounded the first clarion note of the forthcoming purge of Freeze Fanatics. No longer will I stand by as civil disobedients climb the fences of nuclear power plants and cause grief to the power company. No longer will I turn away in embarrassment from the sexism of the sandwich board worn by the pimply guy at LAX, the sign that reads NUCLEAR PLANTS ARE BUILT BETTER THAN JANE FONDA. No longer will I sign those petitions suggesting that because millions of Americans want a Nuclear Freeze they should be listened to as a constituency of our President. No longer!
Because sometimes our President knows what’s best for us. Even if we don’t. Sometimes he has to treat us in the way other Presidents have treated us, as exemplified by Mr. Nixon, who once said (Washington Star-News, 9 November 1972), “The average American is just like the child in the family.”
Yes, I can see Mr. Reagan’s early warning remarks as the first step in the necessary propaganda campaign that will surely manifest itself in the next months. The subtle campaign that will begin to throw doubts into the minds of the children in the American family, as doubts were thrown into their minds about the gun control initiative, so they will come to understand that paranoia is good for them, that the Nuclear Freeze Movement is just one more sneaky attempt by the godless heathen Commies to weaken us.
I’m all for it. I intend to be right there at Mr. Reagan’s good right hand, helping him dissolve that sinister conspiracy of clergymen, scientists, doctors, housewives and radical college students who get their orders directly from the Proscenium of the Supreme Soviet. Those millions and millions of Americans who get their orders through the mail and by word of mouth from what must be the millions and millions of Russian spies needed to infect so many people.
Why, just thinking about it, I wonder if there are any good Americans left in this country, what with how many must have been co-opted already. I know of at least two good Americans: me and my President. And if you can’t believe us, well then, just who the hell can you believe?
You certainly can’t believe the will of the people! I mean, that would be too radical to consider.
—————LETTERS—————
Bite Your Tongue!
Dear Editor:
Regarding Harlan Ellison’s Nov. 12 article, is it possible Harlan is just another dictatorial, hypocritical closet redneck/? It’s long been my understanding that real liberals fight to preserve the individual liberties guaranteed us by the U.S. Constitution. Yet through his advocacy of Prop. 15, Harlan actually endorsed the destruction of five amendments.
Obviously Harlan did not have time to divert from his rigorous schedule of making big bucks (of which he so often and openly brags) to actually read and comprehend all 33 pages of Prop. 15.
Because if he had he’d have seen the three sections which demanded outright confiscation of handguns without compensation. Surely, as a great liberal, Harlan would have recognized the confiscation of private property without just compensation is more than slightly unconstitutional.
On close examination, Harlan would have discovered Prop. 15 also violated the Fourth Amendment by giving police the right to make searches and seizures without probable cause or warrants.
He’d also have noticed it violated the Eighth Amendment by imposing excessive fines and making cruel and unusual punishment the norm for honest gun owners.
And Harlan would have seen that Prop. 15 established the “rebuttable presumption of guilt.” In other words, the honest citizen is presumed to be guilty by the court and must prove innocence, rather than vice versa.
Then Harlan would have discovered that the 14th Amendment would have been destroyed by insuring unequal treatment of citizens. Harlan has made it clear in many articles that he makes a lotta bread! But surely he hasn’t become so callous as to believe that he has more of a right to self defense than a lower income person not nearly so fortunate as he?? If Prop. 15 had passed, the bas
ic economic law of supply and demand would have forced the price of handguns sky high!
Just because multi-billionaire-millionaires such as Otis Chandler, Armand Hammer, Justin Dart and David Murdock donated $50,000 each to Yes on 15, it doesn’t mean that Harlan had to blindly join their attempt. If Harlan had read the initiative, he would have questioned why some of the world’s richest men were trying to disarm the individual citizens of this state.
Say it ain’t so, Harlan!! Please…
—William Keys,
N. Hollywood
INSTALLMENT 54: 6 DECEMBER 82
Back from the dark and smoldering interior of a strange land, I come to tell you of the quaint native customs.
On a day when the NAACP conferred its 15th annual Image awards; the SANE Education Fund Peace award was given to Ed Asner at a dinner in Philadelphia; Ronald Reagan presented the 5th annual Kennedy Center lifetime achievement honors to Benny Goodman, Lillian Gish, Gene Kelly, George Abbott and posthumously to Eugene Ormandy; and the National Women’s Political Caucus honored Valerie Harper for her years of service to the feminist movement with their first annual “Bread and Roses” award…I was serving as one of five judges who crowned Miss Tush of 1983.
We pause for a moment of reflection.
When acquaintances ask me why I married my fourth wife, the best response I can give, six years after the divorce, is this: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Like all but an aberrant few of you, I love roller coasters. Even so, on the day that Mike Moorcock and I went to Magic Mountain, soon after they opened the Colossus, specifically to ride that great beast, I declined all importunities to join my friends along those winding trestles and steep inclines. But the next night, when the park had closed, I dressed all in black, melodramatically smeared my face with soot so it would not shine in the moonlight, and like Paul Muni in the 1942 Commandos Strike at Dawn, went over the fence at Magic Mountain, avoided the guards, climbed the Colossus, and walked and crawled every inch of that wonderful Cyclone.
Photo: Fritz Ptasynski
When acquaintances whom I told of this asked me why I’d done such a thing, I told them: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
In the course of almost thirty years as a writer, I have willingly put myself in the middle of race riots, youth gang rumbles, protest demonstrations, twisted liaisons, doomed romances, dangerous occupations. There is nothing of machismo in it, they simply seemed like good ideas at the time. To report the quaint native customs of my bewildering species I would go to black masses, crucifixions, Chinese weddings, six-day bicycle races, Australian rat fucks, dolphin birthings, civil wars, jai alai snowslope tournaments and the executions of mass murderers.
When acquaintances asked me why I had been a judge for the 1983 Miss Tush of the Year Lingerie Beauty Pageant, knowing my active support of the feminist movement, this is what I said: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
But I am returned from that journey into the uncharted heart of the South Bay mentality, to report what I thought would be a lark…and I have no answers. Only observations and some questions about who we are as 1982—near to the turn of the century—comes to a close. And I do not know if it was a good idea or a bad idea, at the time I decided, as it happened, and as I write these thoughts. The only thing I know for certain is that, for high or low, the Miss Tush of the Year Pageant is as down home American as beer drunk from the bottle, sock hops and credit cards.
Begun in 1979 as a promotional device by Pauline Barilla to exploit her Tushery lingerie shops in Hermosa Beach and San Pedro, in merely four years the spectacle (and its allied Mr. Tush Pageants) has become a proletarian South Bay social event that generates not only vast expenditures of money, but vast enthusiasm. It is an unqualified crowd-pleaser.
So irresistible is the lure of this mise-en-scène in adoration of the callipygian esthetic that no banquet facility in the South Bay exists large enough to contain it. The 1983 Miss Tush Pageant was held on Sunday the 5th at the Proud Bird Restaurant on Aviation Boulevard near LAX. The doors opened for buffet and No Host Bar at 6:30; by the time I arrived at 7:00, the foyer was already impacted, the lines were twenty deep at the bar, the Grand Ballroom was packed to the walls, and all that was left of the buffet was a bowl of what seemed to be potato salad that no one had defiled because there were no forks. (They came later.)
The crowd was spectacularly well-dressed: coats, ties, tuxedos for men; cocktail or evening dresses for women. The style of acting-out attire that used to be reserved for thespians; that in a time in which we have all become attention-seekers, draws little attention, no matter how chartreuse the hair or high up the thigh runs the skirt slit. It was a youngish crowd—even those members with gray hair and the faint white scars of having had an uplifting encounter with an anaplastist. A smattering of black faces: not enough to alarm a hip, white crowd.
Were one to sweep into a giant’s hand an even dozen Marina Del Rey condos and singles complexes, upend them and shake out the residents, it would approximate the handsome velvet crowd that jammed the Proud Bird that Sunday night.
I went into the Grand Ballroom.
Men outpopulated women by eight to one. I was told the attendance was over 750. I was told the attendance was over one thousand. I doubt neither figure. There wasn’t enough unused space to change your socks. And apart from comps, reservations for each of those statistical elements was twenty dollars a shot. There’s nothing amateur about this action, I thought. A promotional Einstein has invested some good moneymaking ideas in this caper.
As I threaded my way among the tables I was impressed by the size of the crowd again and again; and it became obvious that all of the women were with dates. Though there was a plethora of spiffily turned-out young men (most of them sporting Tom Selleck moustaches) who had come stag, there were no unattached females. If any guy had come for a singles event, it was lousy cruising.
I found my way to the judge’s table and introduced myself to martial arts actor Chuck Norris and Mary O’Connor, Executive Assistant to the Chairman of the Board of Playboy Enterprises (i.e., Hugh Hefner). I was never introduced to, nor spoke to, the two other judges who sat at the table—actor Stan Ivar of Little House on the Prairie and KFOX-FM’s “morning man,” disc jockey Steve Lehman. In front of me on the table was a rating sheet listing the fifteen “Tushette” finalists who would be competing in order. The sheet was divided vertically into three “passes” on stage. It was indicated I was to grade each of the women on tush, legs, grace and general appearance.
Conversation was impossible save by leaning in close to the nearest ear, which limited my social intercourse for the next four hours to Chuck Norris’s right ear and Mary O’Connor’s left. (I am pleased to report both parties are amiable and decorous individuals who use Q-Tips.) The reason for this aural limitation was a popular South Bay band called Wizard & Co. who seem never to have learned that a decibel count in excess of 180 is no substitute for artistry. They had to be asked at least twice to lower the gain on their amps, which were the size of Latvia; and if one made the mistake of passing directly in front of those units, one had the less-than-salutary experience approximated only by being exposed for several years to the kind of verbal cacophony engendered by screaming bouts in Italian and Jewish families.
It was horrendous enough to make me reflect with admiration on the previously-abhorrent tea dance music of Lester Lanin and Lawrence Welk. I pray for the return of civility in popular music. Or the Apocalypse, which would be more soothing.
Unable to carry on normal human congress, and having been asked not to leave the judges’ table until the break after the second parade of contestants, I spent my time examining the crowd that had, by this time, filled the Grand Ballroom.
I was to learn later that many of the tables had been purchased by the companies that had ponied up the sponsoring fees for the fifteen finalists. These tables, for the most part, were tenanted by groups of men, as would be expected. Since I saw no
one who was less than attractive, I had to assume these men had wives or lovers whom they had chosen to leave behind for this evening of ogling. A compendium of the alibis, rationalizations, obfuscations and outright lies that gave wind to these solo flights would certainly fill a good sized notebook.
Then the entertainment commenced. A quartet of deliriously energetic dancers calling themselves The Bod Squad charged onstage and hurtled through six muscular minutes of an in-place dance routine that vibrated more in hommage to aerobics than to either Martha Graham or Bob Fosse. By the time they bounced off, apparently no worse for wear, the audience was exhausted and sweating. At which point television second banana Lyle Waggoner mounted the stage to function for the rest of the evening as host, emcee, interlocutor and commentator on passing flesh.
For those who may be unfamiliar with Mr. Waggoner, his three most outstanding credentials are his onscreen familiarity as a foil for Carol Burnett; as Wonder Woman’s main squeeze, Steve Trevor; and as a man so blindingly handsome that not only can he wear a tuxedo in a manner that would make Noël Coward and Cary Grant seem like Okies, but looks as if he should be on a pedestal somewhere in Thrace; and exudes charm in what can only be called a slow charisma leak. He made several introductory remarks about Carol Burnett’s chest measurements that dribbled over into smarmy, and then introduced his wife Sharon, who was to share commentary responsibilities during the pageant. Sharon Waggoner, a former Miss Missouri, rivaled her husband for gorgeousness.
Then began the parade of fifteen finalists. The first pass across the stage and down the runway among the tables, with a 90° turn that brought the women directly in front of us at the judges’ table, was done by the numbers, each contestant called Miss Maureen or Miss Cindi or Miss Laura. No last names.
The first pass, the women were clad only in shorties, teddies, bikini briefs and other diaphanous undies for which I do not know the proper nomenclature. High heels, body stockings and spectacular hairstyles credited in the program to Michael J’s Hair Force completed their ensemble. And here they come, fellahs!
An Edge in My Voice Page 40
