“You’re a heathen,” she said. “You’re damned to hell by god because you aren’t baptized.”
I wanted to run.
“Please, please”—she was almost crying—”you’ve got to believe in the Christ Child, because you’re going to Hell, and you’ll be burning, and you’ll
ask for water on your tongue, and I can’t give you any, because you’re a heathen…”
I turned and ran, terrified that she was right.
No, don’t cry for me. Cry for her.
And for those Irish who hate and don’t know.
Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, once observed that it is possible to judge the level of a civilization by the amount of religion it needs to sustain it. The closer to barbarism, the more religion the culture needs.
Father Coughlin and his Church of the Little Flower in Detroit, spreading anti-Semitic poison.
Sirhan Sirhan, murdering Bobby Kennedy because he supported the Israelis against the Arabs. The Hebraic faith versus the Mohammedans.
The Catholic Church saying give me your children for the first ten years, and they are mine forever.
Christian Scientists letting their children die rather than allowing a surgeon to operate.
The Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada torturing women and children for doubting. The Salem witch trials. The Dan Smoots and the Paul Harveys and the George Putnams…who coat their bigotry and evil with the sanctimonious jelly of religion. Pope Pius, allowing Hitler to gas the Jews and the Catholics, and turning his head away. All the martyrs who ever were. Christ, who would shrink in horror at what his faith and kindness has become.
My position: religion is an evil and debilitating force in the world.
In a time when men are separated by economic barriers, by social and political beliefs, by territorial and linguistic walls…religion keeps them stupid, keeps them intractable, keeps them locked within their fears.
It became hideously apparent, watching First Tuesday. A Protestant woman in Ulster, probably a good woman, a woman who would never intentionally hurt anyone else…saying, “They had that new housing project, and all the Roman Catholics moved in, and—a Roman Catholic coal man told me this—they wanted the coal dumped in the bathtubs. Now it’s a slum. They’re dirty. All they want to do is drink and lay around. And as long as they can go confess, they think it’s all right. They breed like rabbits, you know…”
I could hear a White woman saying the same things about black men: “They move into a good neighborhood, into a new project, and the next thing you know, it’s a slum. They’ll live in filth and starve their kids, so long as they can drive a Cadillac. And they breed like rabbits, you know…”
I saw, on that program, militant students campaigning for civil and religious rights. And I saw the Irish cops using their truncheons the way Daley’s pigs used theirs. And why shouldn’t they? After all, weren’t they fighting god’s fight? Weren’t they carrying out the word of the Lord?
How they do believe it, all of them, all of us.
That the Lord speaks only to us, in Yiddish or Latin or Arabic. That god is on our side. Holy Wars, each of them. And will they never realize what they do?
Is it any wonder that kids today reject god?
How can they believe in such a god, who brings hatred and terror to his supplicants? Such a god must be totally mad. Living in a Heaven that is certainly Hell, and sending down messages of awfulness to be written in blood and treachery and bigotry.
Why do the churchmen wonder in confusion that their pews are empty Sunday after Sunday…is it beyond their ken that the young people want no more of this insanity? Can they not see that holding jazz masses and sending their pseudo-hip men of the cloth into the drug scene and into the ghettos only reveals them for the hypocrites they are?
No, wait a minute, I’ve gone too far. My friend Philly makes a good point. It isn’t religion, because religion is merely belief. If you believe in yourself, or you believe in people being kind to one another, or you believe in that fine chair over there, that’s religion. Being part of the universe is lovely: you breathe out carbon dioxide for the plants, and the plants breathe out oxygen for you, and when you see a falling star you know god is the Natural Order of things, and if you are a part of that Natural Order, then you are god, and I am god, and even that sorrowful, hating woman in Ulster is god. And that’s cool.
It’s organized religion. It’s religion with a label. That’s what stinks. It’s what keeps all those old Jewish men on Fairfax from having a nice bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. It’s what sends all those young girls into the ghoulish lives of nuns. (And did you dig the Saturday night movie several weeks ago, of Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story?—without even trying to put down the nun game, it was a petrifying picture of women who have “married Christ.” And if that isn’t theological necrophilia, I don’t know what is.) It’s what twists men’s minds.
If you ever had any doubts that was true, you only needed to see First Tuesday last week.
And having so positioned myself, I now await with clean hands and composure a bolt of lightning from Heaven to strike me in my atheistic spleen. If you find a column under my byline next week, it will mean god didn’t take too unkindly to my pulling the covers of those who say they serve him, but in fact serve another, more crimson master.
23: 14 MARCH 69
Darling, by the time you read this, I’ll be in Rio. Phoenix? Galveston? No thanks. I’ll take two lumps. I was once tossed up underneath the jail in Fort Worth. On a vag charge, hitchhiking with 17¢ in my kick. They whomped me. Twice. Two lumps. About seven years later, which was seven years ago, coming through Fort Worth again, I was in a car accident—fault of this snockered cowboy, one of the long-standing denizens of the Alcoholic Generation—and the local newspaper made a foofaraw about it. Seems I was a “c’lebrity” by that time. Ah-HAH! So, down comes the Sheriff of Fort Worth, big beautiful bull moose of a guy, name of Cato Hightower. Got me all squared away with a motel room, repaired my squashed typewriter, took me to dinner, lovely fellah. Never knew I was the same dude he’d tanked seven years before. That’s about all with Fort Worth, to which I was led, here, by way of Glen Campbell and Phoenix/Houston, because I needed the line from the song to let you know that while you crouch there smog-snigged, I’m down in gorgeous Brazil canyoudigit, attending the 2nd International Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro, at which they’re showing a tv segment of The Outer Limits for which I won a Writers Guild award a couple of years ago. They think it’s some sorta classic of fantasy in films, and I ain’t about to shatter their little bubble, because they paid all the expenses and do you have any idea how much loot it costs to go to Rio?
All of which bottom-lines to this: I’ll watch a little Brazilian tv while I’m down there, and though I don’t speak Portuguese, at least I can report on the Latin Ralph Williams or how a Biz commercial looks in bossa novalese. But using that line from the Glen Campbell song brings to mind that I’ve been meaning to mention him and his Good Time Hour for several weeks.
Glen is so clean, it hurts.
Now I am a real cleanliness freak. Friends and lovers of mine will attest to the fact that I am so neatsie I border on anal retentiveness. But Glen Campbell is so soft and pink and succulent looking, I have visions of the makeup man dusting him with ZBT Baby Powder before he goes onstage. And his show is nothing if not clean. Clean, clean, clean! His banjo-plonking buddy, John Hartford, got off a mildly blue remark last Sunday, about as innocuous as you can get and still evoke a titter from the basically prurient loons who attend these tapings, and Campbell got uptight so fast I thought his E-string was gonna snap.
What an irony. Here is immaculate Glen Campbell, hearing spirit messages through the telephone wires, digging Galveston’s sea-winds crashing, et al, a spinoff from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, obviously “making it” for the scuttlefish in Kankakee, while his mentors, the Smothers, are being assassinated during the Ides of March.
I’m sur
e you heard about the caper. For the last year or so, the local CBS outlets around the country, responding to affronted letters by the Fundamentalists in their locales, have been demanding advance tapes of the Smothers shows, to see if there was anything in them that was “offensive.” This, in effect, put censorship powers in the hands of timorous station executives. They had the clout to decide whether entire cities would or would not see the show. The odiousness of this cop-out on CBS’s part—acceding to such a despicable demand—sat not at all well with Dick and Tom. But they sorta shrugged and went with it. For a year. Couple of weeks ago they decided they’d had it. No, we ain’t gonna do it no more. So they didn’t send the tapes out. And CBS blanked them. They put on a rerun. (Ironically, Canada got the new show.) When that went down, the Smothers Duo decided they weren’t going to do the show next year. And at last report, CBS was still mumbling in its Ovaltine.
So if you haven’t responded overwhelmingly with letters as I suggested several weeks ago, for Christ’s sake, get off your ass and do it!
Otherwise we will have nothing to gaze upon but the baby-fat face of Glen Campbell. Clean. Clean. Clean.
On to other matters.
Many of you have written me letters, some demanding that I strike out against fluoridation, others suggesting I state just which political activist groups you should join, offering to service me sexually because we are apparently soulmates, enlisting my aid in placing your unfinished epic poem about the fall of the Great Wall of China with a publisher, and just a shitload of other etcetera.
Well, I don’t intend this as a shock to anyone’s nervous system, but honest, friends, I am a teevee critic. This column is intended to look at what’s happening around us, culturally and politically and esthetically, but in terms of what television is saying, and how they’re interpreting the passing scene. I frequently skitter off into the realm of serendipity, but that’s only because I happen to rap that way. My own personal beliefs are pretty obvious in what I write about, and the way I write about it, but if you feel the need to mount the barricades, don’t look to me to sound your specific clarion call. There are things that piss me off mightily, and I do what I can to bring them to the populace, but when it comes to individual activity, I am strictly a crawling-through-the-sewers-with-plastic-charges-strapped-to-my-back kind of guerrilla; and for that sort of scene, having True Believers underfoot is about as handy as being in a street fight with your girl friend pulling at your arm trying to stop the slaughter. A guy can get killed that way.
Final item for this week: several of you have asked when you’ll see the next installment of my diary of the script on which I’m working for The Name Of The Game. Well, this is it.
I got well into the treatment (for those of you who missed the first thrilling installment of this chronical, a “treatment” is the story-line you write for the producer and the network, before they tell you to go ahead with the script) on dissent at the university, and made the grievous error of watching some television shows myself.
After seeing Adam-12 and Tuesday Night At The Movies (a World Premiere done by Universal titled The Whole World Is Watching, a pilot movie for a next-season series) and Ironside, all of which dealt with dissent on campus, I realized that once again the gargoyles had taken over the cathedral.
They have now started to merchandise dissent, even as the fat burghers and the tummelers and the entrepreneurs merchandised the hippie culture when they moved into the Haight. And the effect is the same. They have killed the subject for any sensible and original attack. So I tore the twenty-five pages of unfinished treatment in half, tore it in fourths, threw it in the circular file, and called my producer, the beautiful George Eckstein—who is surely one of god’s great creatures—and told him the way I felt about it. He agreed, and asked what else I’d like to write about. I said, “How about pornography?” He said, “For or against?” I said, “For, naturally.” He said, “Starring Robert Stack?” There was a disbelieving quaver in his voice. I said, “Yeah.” A little slowly, but with fear of his own trust in me, he said, “Okay, take a crack at it.”
Friends, at the moment I am rushing to complete the treatment of a Name Of The Game segment I have titled Smut. It will be done before I go to Brazil, and by the time I flap back into town, both George and I—and you, shortly thereafter—will know whether I was able to write it in such a way that I could tell some truth and not scare off both the network and Mr. Stack.
I’ll keep you posted.
And if you don’t see a column here by me next week, don’t panic (he said, with faint hope). It’ll only mean I had too much getting-together to write two columns ahead.
Oh, and incidentally, as a reply to the nice ladies who offered to share carnal pleasures with me because they fancy my writings, I am currently deeply involved with a dynamite redhead named Leigh Chapman, herself a film and tv writer, who keeps a Huck Finn smile on my face. But the offers were appreciated. It’s a good life, sometimes, ain’t it, folks?
24: 21 MARCH 69
As tax-time hurtles inexorably down on us, a hungry carrion bird we must annually feed with our own flesh, the Aesop that television can sometimes become offers a fable that points a strong moral: there are no more willing boobs than those who remain boobs willingly.
In a year when we are compelled to pay taxes so the police can purchase tanks, so student dissenters can be more effectively muzzled, so the rich can get richer and the poor get poorer, so the new Attorney General can go into wiretapping in a big way, so the oil companies and the nighthawk land developers can more comfortably rape the victim earth—we are told the infamous 10% surtax will not be dropped as promised, but maintained another year. There are no more willing boobs than those who remain boobs willingly.
How we detest that war in Viet Nam! How we despise the inertia that keeps it fed with men and materiel and money needed so desperately in this country (for instance to alleviate the incredible hunger and poverty the Florida land-owners railed at the McGovern Commission did not exist, despite all the starving workers the Commission saw). How we detest having to pay such an enormous chunk of our taxes to keep the inertia in effect, to keep up the evil of Viet Nam! And how gently we sit, with folded hands, as Johnson’s Folly—a ten per cent overcharge on our taxes, earmarked specifically for a napalm and low-yield defoliation—is not dropped in one year as we were promised, but is slyly retained by our new Commissar. By Tricky Dicky, who, now having hyped 42% of the scuttlefish into voting him the clout, drops even the clown mask of trickiness, and out-front calls us boobs to our faces.
Some months ago, when (with incredulity) I heard the surtax would not be dropped as we had been promised, I swore I would not pay it. I swore I would go to jail first. Perhaps it will come to that. (Though the silly futility of the gesture became obvious to me last week when my CPA did up my taxes. I told him there would be no surtax paid by Ellison. I told him had they kept their promise, myself being a usually law-abiding boob, I would have paid it this once, felt had, but say no more. But when they flout their own promises, when they take relish in calling me a boob by insisting they’ll surtax me again next year, I draw the line. I make my stand here. I deny them the funds to kill. And my CPA shook his head sadly at my naïveté. Boob, he said politely, you won’t go to jail: they will attach your bank account. I will empty the bank account, I replied, knowing what hassles that would make for myself. Then they’ll attach your wages, he responded. Then I’ll—I stopped. It was hopeless. The marauders were everywhere. By the balls they had me. Not only a boob, but a helpless, futile, posturing boob.)
Yes, perhaps it will come to jail. Much as I hate the slammer, as ugly as the memories of jails are to me, I think I would much prefer incarceration to standing passively by as they grind away my ethics with a cheese grater.
And Aesop, the tv point-maker, showed me what boobs we really are:
Last Tuesday night, March the 18th, CBS presented its bi-monthly newsmagazine of the air, 60 Minutes, with Mike Wal
lace and Harry Reasoner. They juxtaposed two fifteen-minute sections about life in these United States that at once sickened, horrified and frustrated me.
Beginning with a brief documentary about people on welfare relief in Baltimore, they succinctly presented a living statistic, visual documentation of the two million Americans—mostly black—who live in a hell of deprivation and personal debasement amid the plenty of a nation that possesses 50% of the world’s total wealth, ten times the per capita wealth of any other nation!
Eighty-two per cent of those on relief are women and children. Mainly mothers with children, who make so little from the public dole that they cannot leave their kids and find work, thereby keeping them on the welfare treadmill. A spokesman for these women, a marvelously articulate, honest black mother of seven in a Baltimore ghetto, let it all hang out when she snapped back at the interviewer’s suggestion that she had had some of her kids merely to pick up an extra thirty-two dollars and change per month: “You crazy? You think I like goin’ down there to that welfare office and gettin’ treated like an animal the way they do? I want to get off the welfare. Ain’t nobody can live decent on what they give you. I only get forty-five dollar a month for each child—up to five children, after that they don’t give you no more noways—and that don’t ‘clude bus fare to school, or enough for supplies, nor nothin’!”
There was a personal strength in the woman that was difficult to ignore. Even in the ghastly plaster-falling cell where eight people crammed together for the barest essentials of life devoid of sunshine or hope, she was determined to make for her brood the best life she could. And later in the segment, when Governor Charles Percy told of how he and his family had been on relief during the Depression, how humiliated he’d felt when the food parcels had arrived, how he knew all the canards of the reactionaries that those on welfare were in toto loafers and ne’er-do-wells was so much bullshit…then I felt genuinely lost. Why had we not nominated a man like Percy for President? Why could we not have set in office a man with some humanity in him, a man who could understand that we don’t like being willing boobs?