The new series must either be constructed so one heavyweight actor dominates and is allowed to expand himself artistically—a la Ben Gazzarra and David Janssen—or the format must be so constructed that an integrated “team” of actors is needed to carry any one story-line. The most obviously successful rendering of this last is Mission: Impossible, whereas Here Come The Brides, The Big Valley, The Virginian and even Bonanza seem to me to be artificial versions of the same.
Creators of TV series must be ready to acknowledge the truth that what is needed to hook a viewer, and hold him for thirty weeks, is not “something for everyone” (an old man filled with wisdom for the septuagenarians, a young stud for the Now Generation, a middle-aged ex-star for the matrons) but a clearly defined personality whose week-to-week growth and involvement with people and the issues of the day has some substantial meaning for other individuals.
The TV audience may be referred to as a “mass,” even by me in my crankier moments, but when you pick it apart, the audience is still one-to-one, each person looking out of his own head for something to enrich and entertain him. Facelessness, homogeneity, a mass looking back at him can never provide an answer. Or enrichment.
N.B.: As you read this, I’ll be winding up a week in Texas, lecturing at Texas A&M. Next week I’ll tell you what the attitude toward TV is in the Lone Star State. Presupposing, of course, that someone doesn’t pick me off from a bell tower. In expectation of same, I’m wearing my plastic head to Houston, Bryan and Dallas.
S’long, y’awl.
* * * *
28: 9 MAY 69
Well fed, decently talcumed, ex-Los Angeles Police Chief Tom Reddin made his show biz debut Tuesday evening. First at five o’clock, then again in reprise at 10:00, Reddin held center-stage on KTLA Channel 5’s The Tom Reddin News.
How did he look? When I was very young, there was a popular song titled Penguin at the Waldorf, and all I remember of it is the line, “Penguin at the Waldorf, sitting in a big plus chair . . .” How strange that Reddin’s demeanor brought back that song, that image. That’s how he looked.
How did he sound? He sounded like the strident voice of the Establishment. But then, what did we expect: conscience compels admission that expectations were not high for Reddin in his new role as newscaster, but a desire to be fair forced at least this reviewer to compose himself before the set swearing honest reportage of Reddin’s initial outing. The tip-off should have been the station-break billboard flashed just before Reddin made his appearance. It was a screaming American eagle, rampant on a lurid shield of stars and stripes. It was no mere call-card: it was an escutcheon, a standard, a presager of what was to come in the first Reddin hour. Lord, how that eagle shrieked.
Twenty-eight years a cop—and thus heir to all the questions one must ask about the sort of mentality that finds succor in badge, gun and uniform—Reddin was quite obviously, and quite understandably, self-conscious as a public performer. Though rarely nervous, he was stiff, pedantic, well-rehearsed but somehow resembled a latter-day Clark Kent in search of a broom closet in which he could change to his alter-ego, Capt Charisma.
He opened with a personal statement of position, heavily larded with the word truth, flanked on all sides by words like “balance,” “candor” and “honesty.” Yet even girded to be fair to Reddin, it became apparent, early in the presentation, that once a cop ... always a cop. Though Reddin swore at length that he was not a voice for right or left, police or politicos, Ms personal views—expressed with plastic helmets and cans of mace in another incarnation—were so blatantly obvious that to call what he presented news would be as appropriate as calling what Eichmann did an attempt at solving the overpopulation problem.
Credentials for Reddin were presented at the outset in a fifteen minute segment during which testimonials were hurrah’d by everyone from Supervisor Warren Dorn, who presented Reddin with a plaque, through Yorty and Bradley and George Murphy, to Councilman Gilbert Lindsay; Lindsay performed so handsomely in the role of “show nigger,” declaring what a gentleman Reddin was, that his act could be termed with appropriateness, nothing less than a superlative Double Tom.
After the fifteen minutes of everyone vouchsafing what a joy and delight it was to have Capt. Charisma with us twice nightly, Tom actually got around to reporting some news: the overruling of the Navy court-martial in the case of the Pueblo’s Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher.
Reddin mispronounced Bucher’s name in at least three different ways.
Byew-ker. Boo-chur. Byew-chur.
In point of fact, Reddin didn’t actually report too much news. Other than the Bucher/Pueblo item, some chit-chat about how thrilled he was to be on the air, and “The Reddin Report,” an editorial about which more in a moment, Capt. Charisma was kept away from the heavyweight merchandise like Just Plain Bull In A China Shop. Experienced Hal Fishman got all the goodies: the Viet Nam report, the Israeli-Arab troubles, the Paris gold reserve drop, and a New York Times newsbreak (suspiciously passed over for all its import) about Nixon’s war plans on the occasion of the downing of the “flying Pueblo.”
Cheap thrills, however, were achieved when a Channel 2 camera crew and reporter broke onto the set just as Reddin concluded his first news item ... and interviewed him. It was one of those rare moments in television when the viewer feels as though he has plunged down a rabbit hole: the interviewer who is merely a shadow image, being treated like an authentic happening, being interviewed by other shadows. It was the head of the snake swallowing its own tail.
But for all these wonders, we had not yet reached, nor been treated to, the heartmeat of the Reddin mystique. We had not yet had unveiled before us the special fillip that was to validate that screaming eagle and its declaration of naked patriotism. But it was not long in coming.
Again, the shield and bird; and with voice over in a tone usually reserved for announcements of the Second Coming, we were told we were next to be treated to an editorial on matters of pressing public concern ... T*H*E*R*E*D*D*I*N*R*E*P*0*R*T!
What followed was a potpourri of all the hackneyed clichés employed by right-wing doom-criers since Nat Turner took on the white power structure. Reddin spewed forth a hateful little posture-reinforcer with no more than a nickel’s difference between it and a campaign speech on “law and order” by either George Wallace or Ronald Reagan. It was the party line, pure and exceedingly simple. After the obligatory nod to “righting wrongs” (none of which were mentioned in specific), Reddin went on to espouse the same hard line for “dissidents,” “trouble makers,” “anarchists” and “revolutionaries” that we have seen to work so charmingly on college campuses across the nation. “No deals, no amnesty,” Reddin declared.
(During the initial segment of laudits for Reddin, Robert Finch referred to Reddin as “compassionate.” His first Reddin Report was many things, but it was hardly compassionate. More accurately, it was drenched with brutal and unfeeling jingoism.)
It was the Reddin stand on opposing voices we had seen in his reactions to dissent during his tenure as Police Chief, changed not one whit. It offered nothing new, it expressed no degree of understanding or humanity, it merely reflected the tenor of violence that marked Reddin’s police rule of Los Angeles, and that of his predecessor, under whom he studied well.
It was “America: Love It or Leave it” without a warming or ameliorative trace of “America: Change It or Lose It.” One’s reaction to Reddin’s editorializing, viewed through his glass darkly, could only be “Reddin: Pick It and Stick It.” For it was George Putnam without genitalia. It was the same nauseous, superpatriotic baiting that has kept this nation divided and trembling for ten years. It was “I love America” without the wit or sense or decency to understand that there are terrors in men’s hearts today that cannot be quieted by pointing to our own children and calling them the enemy.
We might have expected something lucid and rational and impressive for a first editorial, something heavy-weight...but we were handed merely another Xerox copy of the standard voice-of-the-right platform. And God knows we have enough of that for one more to be the gas bubble that breaks the surface tension.
The editorial was reinforced by a patently rigged item from Long Beach State College, in which we were treated to riot scenes on the campus, as played for us by the hawk-faced oburstleutnant college security force. The item was introduced by an impartial, unslanted Reddin comment, “The militants usually have their way on campus, but I’m happy to report that today was an exception...” and it was epilogued by Reddin’s equally unbiased, “Militants have overreached, and the good people are being heard from . . .” It was as unprejudiced a bit of reportage as Joe Pyne’s displaying his hand-gun, on-camera, during the Watts Riots. And it proved to one and all the truth of Reddin’s opening assurances that he was not the voice of left or right, revolutionaries or reactionaries, etcetera, etcetera.
As a tapestry of the American Scene, as seen from the blind right, it was total, with the proper counterpoint being played to Reddin’s comments about American affluence by commercials that came in groups, clusters, hordes:
Use Bold to win points over your neighbors ... use Listerine to get ahead in your job ... use MacLean’s to get laid ... it was all a theremin background of corrupt values to Reddin’s naked gloating over SDS opposition. It was the essence of cheapjack, slanted yellow journalism.
What a delight it was, just a little later, to catch Cronkite and Severeid. What a return to sanity.
Rather than editorializing about Nixon’s instant reaction to the shooting down of our spy plane with retaliation ... rather than commenting on the systematic building of a Nixon Dynasty with daughter Trish dating Barry Goldwater, Jr. and daughter Julie married to David Eisenhower ... rather than trying to examine how and why our educational system is in the state it is . . . Reddin chose to indicate the thrust of his interests by further alarming the crazies who suspect every kid who wants a better education or voice in his own future, of Communist activity.
Well, we can take some small consolation in KTLA’s scheduling Capt. Charisma at five, when most people are en route from one place to another . . . and at ten, while the network prime shows are still on. It will cut down the audience he reaches.
Though I suspect the bottom line on Reddin is that he will genuinely speak only to those who heard his deadly message of mace in the streets and parks of Los Angeles. For a few days he will be a fad, like Shipwreck Kelly, like mah jongg, like hula hoops and Dagmar and the Twist. And like them, the boredom of repetition will drive him from public attention.
Because, again bottom line, Reddin is a dreadful bore. His manner of newscasting is stiff, undramatic, amateurish. His pronunciation is typified by an inability to call the city that employed him anything but “Luss Ann-uh-luss.” His gift for cliché is Promethean. (At one point he actually demonstrated his grasp of the nature of education by referring to universities as “think factories” and went on to insist that dissenters who keep throwing “monkey wrenches” into the factory machinery ... but, you know what I mean.)
When Reddin began the telecast with his introductory comments, he asked the audience to bear with him as he adjusts to his new role. Why should we? Intellectually, he affronts us with second-hand, non-viable red-baiting and hate. Artistically, we expect professionalism in our TV viewing fare, and should be impatient with anything less. Why should we bear with a stiff amateur, mouthing the same platitudes and nonsense we’ve heard from other more articulate charlatans? Merely so KTLA, in an obvious bid for some weatherworn publicity, can reap the dubious benefits accruing to the metamorphosis of a toad into a toad prince? Zero chance.
Good night, Chet. Good night. David. Sleep easy; you have nothing to fear from Capt. Charisma. Who can worry about a super-hero who vanishes when you change channels?
* * * *
29: 9 MAY 69
TEXAS: PART I
Hand-over-hand, head still whirling, I’ve returned from a week of lecturing at Texas A&M with some hell-visions to impart about TV-time, thoughts, frights, and passing scenes.
This will be the first of a two-part column about Texas. About living death in the Great American Heartland. About a week so inextricably intertwined with the reality of college life and preparing to enter the adult world ... and the unreality of television, the GOD TV, the great glowing glistening glass teat ... that it will take two columns merely to report what went down, and hope some sense and/or sensible conclusions emerge. Pay attention.
Under the guise of being a science fiction writer (working in a horde of genres has its advantages: totally divergent groups know my work in a compartmentalized way: one group knows me as a film and TV writer, another knows me as a speculative fiction writer, another knows me as a film or music critic, yet another knows only this column: and that’s cool... I get to cut across artificial barriers into allkinda other scenes), I was booked to give two one-hour lectures on succeeding nights. And to speak to an English class or two.
But Texas A&M is not UCLA. It is not Berkeley. It is not U. of Chicago. It is a grass roots school where, until a few years ago, there were no co-eds. (Until, oddly enough for this writer, the mother of the girl who heads up the A&M science fiction club sued the school, and won women the right to attend.) Now there are a few females walking the campus.
And until a few years ago, everyone at the school was in ROTC, better known as “the Corps” by the fish (freshmen), the pissheads (sophomores) and zips (seniors). Now, out of a 13,000-student community, only 3,000 wear the khaki. Yet they, and their little newspaper The Battalion, are a force on the campus.
I knew none of this when I was asked to speak to a class on science-and-literature. Nor did I know that the President of the university—a gentleman named “General” Rudder—and his Trustees had decreed there would be no political speakers at A&M. Not merely no Cleaver or Rap Brown, but Ronald Reagan (our very own wunderkind) and George Wallace had been denied speaking privileges on the campus. I had no way of knowing I was walking into a crazy-quilt hodge-podge of Fundamentalist religiosos, mock army troopers, underground “liberals” and people who believe everything they see on the television screen.
I knew none of this as I stood before that 8:00 ayem class, and instead of boring them to death with talk of science fiction, suddenly starting rapping on student dissent, the military, Viet Nam, political activism, racial unrest, the evils of religion, the new morality, life in the big cities, the fucked-up educational system, and other topics of a similarly hilarious nature.
Within three hours, the word got out. The classes to which I spoke swelled, the students cut their classes to come listen. My lectures grew from an hour to two and then almost three. They drank at me. They looked out of their eyes and begged to know all the things we take for granted in the pages of the Free Press.
There I stood in my striped bells, my floral double-barreled cuff shirts, my silk scarves, before these students in their pima cotton shirts and goat-roper boots, a creature from out there, from a place none of them seemed able to grasp as being real. They stared at me like a thing that had fallen off the moon.
And I rapped. For endless hours, day after day. Not merely one or two classes, but almost thirty classes in four days. Their hunger to hear was unbelievable. Their lack of awareness was staggering. Their willingness to accept whatever they were told by the mass media, even when patently false, was disheartening. But as the days went by, I began to see a change: in them, and in me.
In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God. I replied, “I don’t think so.” And then I proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs-Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone. I said I felt if “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them,” (Genesis 2:27, King James’s italics, not mine) then we were God. And when Man (my cap, not King James’s) in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most Godlike.
The student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God. I thanked him politely and told him I’d gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas.
He then accused me of being one of those heathens who had been in favor of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I agreed that I was, indeed, one of those heathens. And I asked for a show of hands (which I repeated in many classes) of how many had felt the Smothers Brothers had been in bad taste, had been seditious, had felt delighted when they’d been canceled. He was not alone in raising his hand.
In all conscience I must report that the majority of the students I asked had been saddened to see SmoBro go, but the tiny minority that raised hands were the vocal ones. They were not Nixon’s fabled Silent Majority, they were the Committed Few who knew there was a Heaven, there was a Hell, that God was a jealous people, and that the SmoBroShow was intended as a devious Communist plot to pollute the minds and precious bodily fluids of the Great American Viewing Public, which was not nearly mature enough to watch and make its own decisions.
I pointed out that if I—or any other viewer—did not dig the brand of pap being proffered by, say, The Good Guys or Green Acres or Mayberry RFD, we expressed our displeasure by turning that special knob. But we never mounted campaigns of outraged indignation to have those shows canceled. We were perfectly happy to let everyone watch or not watch as they chose. Yet he, and his ilk, not only wouldn’t watch the shows themselves, but they wanted no one to watch. I asked him what he was afraid we might find out. He had no answer. Yet he knew he was on the side of the angels.
That led us to censorship.
Taking off from a local Texas news item, reported on TV during my stay there, I presented them with a situation: it seems a 63-year-old man in the Land Office in the Texas state capitol, Austin, had decided women’s skirts were too short, and men’s sideburns were too long. He decreed, unilaterally, that 188 employees of the Land Office had to conform with women’s skirts to (or below) the knee, and men’s sideburns to the middle of the ear lobe, and no longer. (I, in my madness, instantly pictured a man with twelve-foot-long earlobes and flowing sideburns, but that’s another vision.) I asked the True Believer if he thought there was any parallel that could be drawn between the cancelation of SmoBro and that TV news item. He said yes, that the director of the Land Office had the right to do it, because the employees worked for him. He then said something that sounded suspiciously like, “America: Love It or Leave It.” In other words, that pregnant woman who was beaten at Century City deserved what she got, because she shouldn’t have been there. If the employees wanted to defy the decree, they could go work somewhere else.
And I suddenly began to realize that I was now in direct confrontation, vis-a-vis, with the very people to whom I have referred as “scuttlefish” in these columns.
This was the TV viewing audience.
And I began to probe at all the places they ached.
I discovered some obvious but disheartening things.
This was not the arteriosclerotic generation, the heavy-lidded drinkers and haters who lay bloated before their television sets like wheezing whales in shoal ... these were the Hope of Tomorrow. These were the younger generation, the ones who couldn’t trust me because I was on the verge of thirty-five. And they were content to allow themselves to be lock-stepped in khaki uniforms toward all the insane battlefields a misplaced patriotism would devise for them between now and age forty. They were content to be punched, stapled and cross-filed in readiness for the giant corporations. At A&M there would be no upset that Dow was recruiting. There would be no dissent that what they were getting in their classrooms—via the TV box visual aid— would be outdated and useless by the time they graduated. There would be no anger that they were being prepared not to lead outgoing lives of joy and grandeur, but were rather being processed like live meat to fit into the computer coding of great faceless business empires. I suggested this to them, and in one class a young girl justified the loss of her life by saying, “Well, somebody has to keep the wheels turning.” And silently I felt a leap of smugness: yeah, baby, you do it; you and all the others like you. Because as long as you’re willing to die through every day of your life, it leaves the world free for jokers like me. As long as you’ll till the fields, I can sing my songs and run loose.
But then it followed in the next thought that I was no better than the line-trooper who is momentarily relieved that the next man caught the bullet, rather than himself. And I started saying things like, “There has to be a better life for you. There has to be a way to taste all the pleasures and freedoms they tell you are yours, without consigning yourselves for half your waking hours to gray little boxes, doing the work of manufacturing death.”
They did not understand.
They were the older generation.
Trapped in the Great American Heartland, cut off from knowledge—truly!—and cut off from flexibility. They were the next generation to support a Viet Nam. And they could not understand how an obvious Commie fink revolutionary such as myself could be allowed to write for television.
I assured them it was hardly easy.
For TV, the one all-seeing-eye of our time that could have hipped them, could have liberated them, had lied to them. Had systematically lulled them into bovine complacency, into tacit acceptance of all the hideous wrongnesses that leprously fester on the soul of our country.
Perhaps crossing the line from here, from this place where kids lay their lives and their college careers and their beliefs on the line, to free them, there in Texas ... into that other country, had made me paranoid.
But with a sickening lurch I realized that I was perhaps the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
* * * *
texas part ii
In which your humble columnist, himself a man of peace, was pressed into unwitting service during a lecture tour at Texas A&M University as a spokesman for dissent, moral and intellectual freedom, awareness, and equality. You may recall some of this from part one of this two-part triptych through the Country of the TV Blinded.
After discussing the growing role of the black man in television—and noting Julia was only Julie Andrews with Man-Tan—I discussed some of the more blatant ways in which television had misrepresented the realities of the race/class struggle in America today. After I had done riffs all-too-familiar to readers of this newspaper, a young lady in the class raised her hand. All through the class lecture, this young woman had sat quietly, staring at me with that expressionless immobility night club comics fear. It means not only are you not hipping them, amusing them, stimulating them ... you are not even penetrating through the bone and flesh walls of their prejudices. When, earlier in the class, I’d asked her if she wanted to ask me anything, she informed me that she would listen, and then at the end of the period she would “make her comment.” I somehow felt I was going to be asked to take a test, but I didn’t know what notes to make.
So now, as I finished, she raised her hand, to make her summing-up comment. We all waited breathlessly. And this, approximately, is what she said:
“I live in Marion County, where there’s a lot of niger-ahs; I ride my horse in the woods there. We had a white girl raped by a nig-er-ah out there. And the other nig-er-ahs came to our house and told my mother and father I shouldn’t ride my horse there any more. I believe, that most nig-er-ahs are happy the way they are, that it’s only a trouble-making few who are causing all this trouble.”
I waited. Surely she would not fail to add that if the “nig-er-ahs” were given sufficient quantities of watermelon, were allowed to dance with their natural rhythm on “de lebee,” and were not whipped by “massa,” they would settle back into a pre-Confederacy happiness of idyllic cotton-plucking and baby-birthing.
There was no response possible to this gross theory. But I was overjoyed to hear the groans of disbelief from other members of the class, among whom this new-generation blind one had been sitting, without ever having previously revealed herself.
Yet how many others in that class, in that University, in that state, in this country, thought as she did? Were there still so many of them? Had we lulled ourselves, we who take black-as-noble as a matter of course? Or was the poison still being passed on by the dying old ones? As the dirt was being shoveled in over their faces, did they still reach up from the grave, in one final ghoulish act, and say, “Heah, mah child, take this heah wisdom with y’all... it’s mah legacy ...”?
Knowing this, as I sit here writing of that encounter, two weeks later, I am listening to Sly and the Family Stone singing Stand and Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey, and I know as sure as God made black’n’white that if the black man ceases pushing, young girls like that one will slip back into control. And rather would I see a thousand Watts’s than a return to that quiet, sinister evil. Can the inevitability of it be that unclear to the white power structure? Can it truly be beyond the grasp of a Reagan? Prayers won’t help. Someone needs to inform the ones on top. Why hasn’t television accepted this responsibility?
The why remains unanswered, but the manifestation of regional avoidance of the problem was demonstrated on a talk show I did from Bryan, Texas that same day. It was a “women’s show” called Town Talk, hosted by a rather pleasant but uninformed woman named Fern Hammond.
It was the traditional, chit-chat format every small town TV station offers. Miss Hammond began her program with an interminable reading of local flower shows, revival meetings, Kiwanis raffles and sodality picnics. Then she introduced me as a writer of scientific fiction, or fiction science, or somesuch. And within moments of that starting gambit, the troublemaker I had become since arriving in Texas asserted himself, and I was rapping about the lack of perceptivity of the people I’d met in Texas. The song was one of trust in the young, with a theme of being kind to one another, laced with melodies about not believing all the lies told nature of evil, and put forth the Pope’s encyclical as a concrete example of same in a world rapidly strangling on the waste products of its overpopulation. We got into the subject of allowing people to (forgive the phrase) do their own thing, as long as they stayed off other people’s toes. Fern opined that might not be such a hot idea.
I countered with an observation that she wore her skirt well above her knees, and that only a few years ago had she chosen to do so, she’d have been arrested for indecent exposure. I presented it as an example of how people fear to do what they want, until the mass accepts it. And that, I concluded, was denying one’s own soul.
The discussion got a tot hairy, at least on my part, as I pointed out that girls matured earlier today than they did even twenty years ago, because of diet, assault of information through the visual media, because of the mobility provided by cars-for-everyone. And I said if teen-aged girls wanted to have sex, that was cool, as long as the responsible media, such as Miss Hammond’s TV show, informed them The Pill was available. Miss Hammond was speechless (confidantes in the Bryan area informed me it was the first time they’d ever seen her so) and the cameraman got so nervous he let go of the elevation control on the camera, which proceeded to drift ceilingwards, giving everyone an unobstructed view of the lights and flies above us.
Now, mark this: what went down between Miss Hammond and myself was nothing startling, nor even terribly radical. By our standards. It was old hat in literature and even films ten years ago. But television, playing to some mythical audience of cretins and scuttle-fish, persists in maintaining lies and outdated postures that only serve to confuse and encyst the viewers.
Multiply Fern Hammond and the implicit lies of her chit-chat show by a thousand, for every TV station in every locality in America, and you understand, finally, why Richard Nixon won the Presidency; you understand why George Wallace cadged 14% of the vote; you understand why a large segment of the “straight” students on campuses band together—as they did at Long Beach State—to fight the very kids who are putting their educations, their futures and sometimes their lives on the line, to provide better facilities and more open discussion for all.
Fern Hammond is by no means an evil woman. Yet by her tacit acceptance of the status quo, by her abrogation of the responsibility of letting her viewers know what the real world is about, she serves the ends of evil in this country.
She is one with all the decaying corpses of bigotry who poured the poison into the ears of girls such as the one who rode her horse through Marion County. And until people as outspoken, passionate and caring as, say, Tom Smothers begin hosting shows like Town Talk, the greater portion of average citizens in this country will be kept in the dark. While their age-old prejudices and fears are played upon by craftsmen like George Putnam and Tom Reddin and Paul Harvey and Joe Pyne, all the Fern Hammonds of boondock TV will lull them into believing nothing is happening, that their world is merely a trifle dyspeptic, rather than helping to cure the cancer that will surely destroy us all without crystal awareness of just how imminent are the dangers.
It was that way all through the week in Texas. I found people who could by no stretch of the imagination be called evil, but who served the ends of the demons by having been lied to so engagingly by television, that anything outside the simple good-and-bad Disneyism of what they’d been programmed to understand, seemed destructive, seemed radical and deserving of death.
It was not difficult to understand how all those 13,000 A&M students could be lock-stepped toward the gray cubicles of the military or giant corporations. It was the end-result of a cultural pattern set in motion many years ago, whose aim it was to produce a mindless, unfeeling, basically hostile and subservient mass, fit for no better than serving the financial ends of the corporate behemoths.
What did I find in Texas, gentle readers?
I found a cheerless, empty Stonehenge of complacency, stupidity, desperation and amenity. I felt compassion for all of them. They suspect the rest of the country of being engaged in a monstrous plot to corrupt and kill them. They have been lied to, seduced, bludgeoned and hypnotized by the monster eye of television.
And if there is any saving them, it will have to be through a long, passionate war of re-education and freedom. Before I went to Texas, my gut had been with revolution, but I’d had reservations. Now I have none.
For I’ve seen what happens to the mass when the Reddins, the Putnams, the Pynes and the Harveys are allowed to disseminate their hideous view of reality without being opposed.
I tell you straight, friends, the lingering death is a far more hideous one than that postulated by those who fear fire and the storm.
The question thus becomes: who will send missionaries to underprivileged, emerging nations such as Texas?
* * * *