In the week following the most divisive horrors in recent American history—Kent State murders, Cambodian quagmiring, New York construction workers amucking, Georgia blacks slaughtered—TV Guide comes forth with the most consummately hateful cover imaginable. As though intent on taunting the tenor of the now vocal majority, that singularly Establishment-oriented handbook proffers the Right-Wing Dart Board: a painting of Spiro Agnew by Norman Rockwell.
It is impossible to talk about the many things on the agenda—the wrap-up of the F-310 business (use Texaco Lead-Free), the 60 Minutes segment on the Bill of Rights, a Susskind spectacular featuring a dozen ex-GIs who opted for sanity over lunacy by exiling themselves to Canada, the truth about how our boys in Vietnam booed Bob Hope when he toured espousing his rally ’round the flag shtick—because the eyes cannot leave the news shows, the mind cannot escape the volcanic temblors threatening to split this country, the emotions cannot wrench free of the overriding misery and sadness of hopeless frustration to which we have been consigned.
How can I dote on some silly situation comedy and its banality when my mail brings me letters like these?
“Dear Mr. Ellison:
“I have never before felt the urge to write my thanks to an author but your book, ‘The Glass Teat,’ deserves thanks not only from me, a thirty-five-year-old establishment cat, but from the whole range of American conditions…I believe that in the quiet, alone hours, even those people who are embarrassed by the smell of their own bowel movements know that what you say is true. Reality, like douche powder, must be sold… As shitty as it makes my mouth feel, I must say, ‘You’re a good man…’”
Signed, Harold Conrad, Portsmouth, Virginia.
And, from the other side, this one:
(Included with this letter is a news story datelined Kent, Ohio, from The New York Times Service, bearing the headline: Should Have Kept Agitators Out of Kent, Residents Say. Just a few excerpts from the article, which my correspondent has pencil-annotated as “The Common Man: Part III.”
(“It’s a shame it had to take killing to do it, but all those kids were someplace they shouldn’t have been,” said Dick Richards, a florist lunching at the weekly meeting of the Lions Club…there is little disagreement among the townsfolk of Kent. It’s too bad, they say, but the National Guardsmen were right—the students shouldn’t have been there. There’s a minority that cause trouble, and outside agitators that shouldn’t be let in. And the troublemakers have long hair, use bad language, go barefoot, and even destroy property, and they had to be stopped.
(“I make my living in Kent,” said Don Ruble, who operates laundry machines in dormitories. “But I wouldn’t send another son there.” The teachers fill them full of wrong ideas, he said, and they come home rejecting the adults and their values. His eldest son went to Kent and now teaches retarded children in Cleveland. “I respect him for that,” but the two have grown so apart in thinking that “I don’t even want to see him.”
(“My own gas station man said they should have shot 100 of them,” said Tom Bohlander, who sells Fiat cars and Honda bikes near the campus…“They’ve got to keep order some way. One thing they ought to do is chase them all out if they don’t get their hair cut and cleaned up,” said Harry Miller, a 58-year-old house painter. At Water and Main Streets, the center of Kent, five men talked about the shooting. “If I would have been shooting, I’d be shooting more than they did,” one said.
(“If you would have had townspeople with guns out and on their roofs to protect their property, you would have had a lot more than four dead kids,” Mr. Richards said at the Lions Club meeting.
(“The people I talk to say it’s a terrible, terrible shame they had to be killed, but how long are we going to put up with these punk kids?” said Dale Miller, who works at a bank.)
“Dear Harlan:
“Quite literally, these quotes scare the shit out of me. The rage, the fear, the willingness of people to kill merely because someone rejects their values; one sits stunned and says, ‘How? How could people be like that?’ And the sad part of a…book like The Glass Teat is that the people quoted here, the people who really need to read it will never see it. You may not convert any of the Silent Majority of Common Men but I’d like you to know that at a time when events were conspiring to make some of us feel that there was just no hope, no use in going on in a nation where Cambodia and Kent and New York construction workers can occur, that your book was dug, that it gave at least a ray of hope that we do have a spokesman who may be heard and that as long as one voice remains unsilenced there is a chance. So tonight we’ll go on the demonstration no matter how futile it may seem and at the very least we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that our countries did not go to Hell unlamented. Thanks for your book, Harlan. We needed it.”
Signed, Mike Glicksohn, Ottawa, Ontario.
And, oh, God, the other letters. The one from the sixty-year-old man in Moline: terrified, concerned, lost, asking for personal words beyond the book or the column, suggesting what he can do. The letter from the GI in Vietnam that ended with inarticulate grief for not only any strangers he may have killed while firing into a village, but for those four kids at Kent State. A letter of shame and remorse and hopelessness at his own inability to flee the battlefield and suffer the prison to which they would certainly send him. The letters, the many letters, so many voices from both sides…
And TV Guide gives us Spiro, by Norman. God, how can such blindness, such terrible cruelty exist?
Mr. Conrad says I am a good man, and Mike Glicksohn says I am a spokesman for him and the others who demonstrated. No.
No!
I can’t be trusted, either. None of us can. Over thirty isn’t the gauge. Pollution of the morals is. Don’t trust me…trust only yourselves. I didn’t die at Kent State…you did. Your brothers and your sisters. Shot down by the editors of TV Guide and the prime rib and pork diners at the Lions Club, and Spiro, of course, and all of us who got past your age and learned nothing. Our morals and our ethics have been hopelessly polluted by decades of killing and lying and rationalizing and seeking vindication in the wholly untrustworthy approbation of that killer animal, “the majority.”
How can people be like that, Mike Glicksohn? I’ll tell you. McLuhan was right. We’ve watched the deaths of thousands on the glass teat for almost twenty years, and now we are systemically ready to witness the deaths of tens of thousands, of millions, if necessary. They are no longer human beings going to meet their various Makers with blind eyes staring at dreams that will never be. They are statistics.
“280 Viet Cong were killed in the human wave at Bunker City, Cambodia. One American dead.”
Bullshit! Do you believe that!?! Every day the tv news dons its Howard K. Smith serious face and tells us nine million VC were planted, and three Americans stubbed their toes. Yet at week’s end, the legitimate (?) totals are released, and last week, a week in which the daily newsvideo reports totaled 13 American deaths, the final tally was 168, highest in four months. They are lying to us. Even as I lie to you. I lie, and they lie, because we are weak, and we have been lying so long we don’t know what it means to be honest and up-front.
So don’t trust us, any of us. None of us who live good and dine at the Lions Club and say tsk-tsk what a terrible shame, and stuff more prime rib in our mouths.
Trust only yourselves.
Work to change it, if you can. But it may even be too late by years for that.
If we were truly to work for something, we should work to have all guns banned in this country. Take the guns and the gas from the cops. Turn them out on foot with batons if necessary, but let them work in the community the way London bobbies work, sans firearms. Then they would have to deal with the kids vis-à-vis, face to face, and maybe, just maybe, they would have to start acting like human beings, not killing automatons.
Talk about tv? Maybe next week. But this week my thoughts—and yours, for God’s sake—are on the other choices.
Choices like the bomb, like the fire, like the swift knife in the dark.
They are terrible choices, because they are no choices at all. They are hideous extremities to which we are being pushed.
TV this week? No…my thoughts are somewhere else. They are with small groups of guerrilla fighters in Ohio and Kansas and Georgia, ex-students who have renounced their names, their homes, all ties. Who, packing plastique in haversacks, roam the countryside blowing up the Lions clubs, shooting down Ohioans like Dick Richards and Don Ruble and Tom Bohlander and Harry Miller and Dale Miller where they stand on the corner of Water and Main, discussing how they will protect their fucking property. My thoughts are of an America seeded with killer-skirmishers who have been driven mad as mudflies by the death clutch on outdated values and phony patriotism of their parents, the government, and vested interests.
Four died in Kent and the world mourned. That is because we have been so morally polluted by McLuhanesque imagery that it takes a new kind of death to move us. Six blacks were gunned down in the streets of Augusta, Georgia, just a few days later, and no one mourns. But we mourn those four white middle-class kids. That is the final extreme to which we have been brought by lies and unilateral brutality and the holy informant, God-Mother tv. We have become a nation melded into one Roman arena surfeiting on various kinds of murder. Kill blacks and we yawn…we’ve seen that…lions and Christians are old stuff…but move on to a fresh thrill…kill the white middle class…and we sparkle.
How can people be like that, Mike? If a man sits and sips his beer placidly at the sight of thousands writhing in the love grip of jellied gasoline, how can he be terribly concerned about four more?
And you expect truth from them? You expect to be able to reach them? Dear God, I hope so. I hope all of you who have cut your hair and are moving through the communities speaking softly, all of you know what you’re up against. And from even those of us who lie and know we lie, there is a desperate hope that you can penetrate to us; because if you don’t, the next time we’ll see you, you’ll be part of some smash&grab kill force moving through the Great American Heartland, and you’ll have been reduced to the level of bestiality on which the Lions Club diners exist.
Television comment? Not hardly. These are days of blood and sorrow. If only there were some light.