It was my own fault, my error, and I deserved precisely what I got. Turning for the David Frost talk show on Channel 11, I hit 7, the phone rang, I turned around to answer it, and when I turned back, I was watching The King Family. Oh, my dear God. Can such things be!?!
There were a great many studiedly square-looking people of varying ages (slightly overweight suburban ladies with plastic hair dominated; the kind of chicks who tell their old men, no, I can’t fuck tonight, Fred, I had my hair done today), and they sorta sang.
I guess that’s what they were doing, when they weren’t being homey and cute.
Hincty songs so devoid of even that mystical “blue-eyed soul” that I had to dash to my music and lay on about forty minutes of Shakey Jake, The Dells and Richie Havens.
What kind of people dig The King Family? Can anyone tell me? Aside from wanting to ball three or four of the King Kousins, there was such a dearth of meritorious reasons for watching that show, I cannot fathom why various syndicates and networks keep thrusting the Kings before our already-squared eyeballs. For they seem to me to represent in totality a template of all that is fabricated, artificial, lowbrow and meretricious on the American Scene. They strive so massively to be cleancut that I suspect most of the men in the group have hernias.
How I would love to see a live King Family segment after someone had dumped specially-made acid in the water cooler. “And now, all you friendly folks out there in the Great American Heartland, something special! Right here, tonight, on our show, you’re going to see an authentic King Family orgy, with the King Kiddies and the King Kousins engaging in one hundred and thirty-five vile and noxious sexual perversions, all at once ... and while the King Sisters make it with (respectively) a St. Bernard, a Tibetan Yak, a Sumatran black panther and a sex-crazed chicken, Alvino Rey will play accompaniment on his talking electric tissue-paper-and-comb; his selection for tonight is the Love Theme From Marat/Sade. And for a once-in-a-lifetime showbiz thrill, we’ve even brought Granny King on tonight with her specialty number, wherein she machines-guns two hundred, assorted blackjack and slot machine losers from the six biggest casinos in Las Vegas! Okay, gang, everybody start rubbing on the Velveeta!”
The King Family is the Harold Robbins of music. More below the belt than that I cannot get.
* * * *
One of the commitments that kept me from writing this column for seven weeks was a stint as Guest Lecturer at the University of Colorado Writers Conference in the Rockies. I did two weeks in company with such eminent writers as Richard Gehman, George P. Elliott, Vance Bourjaily and Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Alan Dugan and Richard Eberhart.
On Friday, June 27th, I was hauled, along with Gehman and the incredible Dugan, into Denver, to do a talk show on KOA-TV.
The host of the show, a self-satisfied, rigid-minded gentleman named Bill Barker, cozied with the three of us before we taped (the show was to be aired the following Sunday night). He stressed one point: this was a freewheeling interview show in which he most sought a level of depth-analysis that would enrich the subject. He was not after cheap sensationalism or the sort of “controversy” Joe Pyne seeks. We felt relieved; Gehman, as one of the premier non-fiction magazine writers of the past thirty years, had a store of anecdotes and opinions to impart...and Dugan, who had won not only the Pulitzer for his brilliant poetry but also the National Book Award and the Prix de Rome, was an outspoken student of the passing scene. As for myself, I relished the opportunity to speak about the Writers Conference and what it was doing to bring forth young talent.
Yet I should have known better. Though milder in his approach than Pyne, Barker was no better, no more noble than any other cheapjack interviewer on the boondock stations. The show opened with Barker asking us what he considered to be the responsibility of the writer. It was a strangely-phrased question, foggy in its implications, but all three of us had done sufficient camera-time to re-parse it, knowing that to look confused or hesitant during an interview is to instantly invalidate anything you might say for a viewing audience. We began rapping about the writer’s responsibility to tell the truth, to keep au courant, to be committed, to pursue every facet of a subject till he could present a fully-rounded portrait.
Dugan—a tall, distinguished-looking, gentle man— made a side-comment, nothing more than that, that it was also necessary to reproduce the speech of people almost phonographically, even if it meant using obscenity. It was a casual remark, but Barker pounced on it like a vulture finding carrion.
It led us into an ugly, circuitous argument about the necessity of the creator using whatever language he felt was most necessary to making his point. Barker started laying that “why must you use filthy language” number on us. Dugan responded that if the word fuck appeared in the normal speech-patterns of someone in a story or poem, to substitute copulate or a similar euphemism would be to corrupt the veracity of the image. Barker got uptight and started saying Dugan was a child with a foul mouth, using the words for shock value. This, to a man whose credentials as an artist are unimpeachable.
Things went from bad to horrendous. Barker baited Dugan, who rose to the bait only inasmuch as he used more fucks and damns and shits, just to drive Barker up the wall; thereby proving that the words were loaded for Barker, and caused him pain; it also allowed me to point out that it was the responsibility of the artist to de-fang those poisonous words so their meanings, not their emotional impacts were what counted.
Barker refused to listen. He raved and screeched, and when the show was finished, it looked like fine old Belgian lace, so filled was it with bleeps.
I’d confronted the stultifying provincialism before. You may recall my report on the TV talk show I did in Texas. But it keynoted for me one of the timorous areas of television programming, one of the disastrous hypocrisies that render so much of television impotent and valueless.
I recalled one of the major networks’ broadcast of a filmed report on the President’s Commission Analysis of Violence, some months ago. It was told through the medium of interviews with people on the streets who had been interviewed for the Report, and interspersed with charts and quotes from the Report itself. Every time someone used an obscenity, it was bleeped. It made for a curiously comic program. Not merely because the viewer would substitute something far more offensive for the bleep, but because it was a flagrant example of television trying to protect its audience from that which it already knew.
Is there anyone in America over the age of six months who is not familiar with the vagaries of the vulgar, all the way from shucky-darn to cunt? Is there anyone who will not admit that these are mere words, that they bear no more de facto power than a soap bubble?
Then precisely what is it that makes them taboo? From whom are we keeping these words? From the fringe coocoos’ who are offended when an astronaut says damn or shit when something unpleasant has happened onboard his rocket? Are we to remain a nation of hypocrites, lumbered by our most provincial and hidebound elements? It is as valid a concept as writing every book on the level of Dick-and-Jane in order not to corrupt the minds of the young.
It becomes readily obvious, if one extrapolates, that more and louder use of these words would rapidly render them as meaningless and powerless as “where it’s at,” “do your thing,” “confrontation” and such similar jingoisms. And what would emerge from such a situation would be a need to speak better, more precise, more original and imaginative obscenities. Which could only enrich the language. So ... yours for bigger and better fucks ...
* * * *
36: 15 AUGUST 69
Commencing the middle of September, stay away from restaurants on Tuesday nights.
Because, if I’m correct in my evaluation of the dangers, of provincialism in the thinking of network programming, Tuesday night television is going to be so gawd-awful on NBC that everyone will flock out to eat, and you won’t be able to get seated for two hours.
I’ll work from the specific to the general on this one: hang on, it gets hairy.
September 16th is the Tuesday night season premiere on NBC. Let us consider what the top television network in the country has prepared for us:
7:30 ... I Dream of Jeannie
8:00 ... The Debbie Reynolds Show
8:30...Julia
9:00 ... Tuesday Night Movies, debuting in this fresh, bright, innovative 1969-70 season with Doris Day in The Ballad of Josie.
(About this last: one of the genuinely horrendous gut experiences of my recent past was finding myself crossing and re-crossing the continent via airplane several years ago, and being “treated” to The Ballad of Josie not once, twice or thrice, but four times in a month. Common decency forbids my explicating quite how bad the film is. Suffice it to say that it was the first time I ever considered leaving a movie in the middle, when I was 31,000 feet in the air; but until I solved the problem by locking myself in the plane’s toilet with a William Golding novel, death seemed a more desirable choice than sitting through Doris in the Wild West again.)
There is no need to dwell on the already-established and potentially-inevitable level of paucity proffered by these series. If it were not for the ingenuousness of Miss Barbara Eden—one of the surest comediennes going—and Larry Hagman’s herculean efforts at bringing some dignity to what is essentially a mindless enterprise, Tuesday night on NBC would be totally without light. And having given praise in the only quarter where it is deserved, I reluctantly address myself to considerations of ghastliness.
Bearing in the back of the mind the many paradigms of NBC’s other female-oriented shows, as well as those on other networks—Lucille Ball, Doris Day, Petticoat Junction, Mothers-ln-Law, Family Affair, That Girl, The Flying Nun, Bewitched (the one superlatively intelligent exception is The Ghost & Mrs. Muir)—one comes to a realization that Someone Up There is not only thirty years behind the times in terms of the Female Liberation Movement, but is easily thirty years behind in accepting reality. Even as blacks despise stereotypes of themselves in the mass media (though even the square Network Programmers are hip to how laughable it would be to try and get away with a Steppin Fetchit character), so do intelligent women, I’ve found. Dithering fumblefoots as portrayed by Lucille Ball or Mario Thomas are as repellent to women of dignity and pride as Julia is the black community as a whole. As I understand it, that is not precisely what Afro-Americans intend when they refer to “pride in black.” But I digress. We were rapping about women.
The Female Liberation Movement—and I have this on the best authority: a seven foot blonde who manages to combine sensual femininity with a don’t-fuck-with-me-self-assurance—is most lumbered by its own fifth column. Subversion from within. So many women have been brainwashed by the image of the happy little homemaker, birthing babies and cooing over the wonders of pre-soak Axion that it is virtually impossible to convince the mass of chicks that they are really truly emancipated, and don’t have to stagger about wearing a subservient facade.
And because of this fifth column, Network Programmers—who are 99% male, and what is worse 100% male chauvinist—keep playing to that image. Every season sees its share of Blondie-Doppelgangers. This coming season, Tuesday night on NBC will be surfeited with them.
Tossing aside the terminally damning obviousness that what they are dealing in are hoary clichés, the more serious indictment that can be laid on this kind of thinking is that it helps perpetuate an unrealistic view of an entire segment of the population. It aids and abets the dangerous gapping between reality and image in our society. When the ideal held up for a modern American woman to revere and emulate is no more demanding than Debbie Reynolds (as she plays it on her series), what can we expect but another generation of simpering female Dagwood Bumsteads? The only out the contemporary chick is offered in terms of TV images is Samantha (a witch), Jeannie (a genie), or Sister Bertrille (who can fly). The message is painfully clear; if you can’t wiggle your nose and make miracles, or hop into the sky and fly away, or flip your ponytail and change the world, girls, pack it in and settle for being some guy’s unpaid slavey. Because all those other women you see cavorting in phosphor-dot reality are inept, hampered with children, prone to execrable involvements or simply accident-prone.
Around us, we see women taking the reins more and more in a world seemingly bent on being cruel to itself. There is hope, we feel, in the more sensitive rationality of women—to stop wars, to give the underdog an even break, to clean up the messes we guys have made. Yet on TV if we see a Committed Woman, she is usually a housewife taking time off from making nesselrode pie to carry a placard for allowing school kids to put on their yearly musicale. And she’ll probably wind up in the slammer for it. But with funny. How does this compare with the women I’ve seen on protest marches and rallies, who’ve been beaten senseless by cops’ riotsticks? How does this compare with the women who went for a walk in 118° heat in the Imperial Valley, to support the grape boycott? How does this compare with the genuinely incredible women who ramrodded the Bradley campaign or fight for free speech, or went to Chicago and Washington and Selma?
This year we’re going to get doctors who are heroes, school teachers who are heroes, lawyers who are heroes, and of course cops who are heroes. None of them are female. (Peggy Lipton on Mod Squad doesn’t count. She isn’t strictly speaking a cop, she’s a noble fink for the fuzz, and besides, Pete and Linc usually wind up saving her attractive fanny.)
It’s another scintillant TV season of lies and unusually off-center representations of still one more social element. Except this time it’s a social element that is composed of half the population.
One can only wonder how much longer the birds are going to allow themselves to be used as consumer machines for pimple-disguiser, hair-remover, smell-deadener and uplift bras. How much longer before they start demanding some authentic portrayals of themselves as human beings?
Because, frankly, it’s about time they made their move. It shouldn’t have to fall to guys like me to tell them their shackles have been struck off. Or will they wake up only when guys like me demand our ribs back?
* * * *
37: 22 AUGUST 69
Oh my, no sooner am I back in town, back writing the column, promising it won’t be skipped again (after which, promptly, the very next week, it’s skipped, thereby doing a gaslight number on my poor head), than I’m in trouble once more. How do I seem to offend you all? It’s really uncanny! There’s no telling what casual comment will outrage some ethnic group. It’s enough to make a guy clam up and stay out of the line of fire. In fact, I can dig why all the scuttlefish refuse to “get involved” and speak out; hell, without even trying to piss someone off, you can have an entire social strata down sucking the marrow out of your bones.
This time it’s the WASPs in my readership who are properly annoyed, because with all the civil rights action going down, they’re the only group a commentator can bum-rap, without having himself protest-marched. Two weeks ago it seems I made sort of an offhand crack about the “alleged” existence of something the communications media call “blue-eyed soul.”
Sort of Ajax-clean nitty-gritty Fights Back. Or something.
It all seemed pretty funny to me—honkies trying to horn in on what is clearly a black product. I didn’t think anyone took it seriously. But here come de mail, here come de mail, and I get four letters from WASPs in Tuston, La Canada, Glendora and (this one I don’t even believe, it’s gotta be a made-up) the City of Industry, all of which accuse me of being a traitor to my pigmentation because I won’t credit Whitey with having soul. (Man, I was blown away! I didn’t even know those people out there had gotten shoes yet, much less learned to read! I mean, if they could read, then they must have seen there were other names on the ballot than Reagan or Nixon.)
So I’m all ready to drop a fragmentation item in this week’s edition about how those kindly folk out there should take not just this column, but the entire Freep—both sections—roll it into a tight funnel and jam it up their blue-eyed soul. Feeling very smug, was I. Until I bought Tony Joe White’s album, hoping some of the other cuts would be as heavy as Polk Salad Annie, and found out that down home voice was coming out of a good old boy who looked like a Florida redneck. Second biggest aural shock of my life. The first was finding out, about ten years ago, that Mose Allison was white.
So already I’m reeling, right?
Then I turned on the Johnny Carson thing a couple of weeks ago, August 5th to be precise, right after the column with that remark was published, and had my smug mind crinkled like Alcoa-Wrap. (You probably didn’t hear it, what with all the shrieking in the land from the NarkDepart moving its families here and there. Personally, I chuckle and gloat at the beautiful inhumanity of it. Let them know what it’s like to be naked and harassed. Don’t try and make me feel bad because the Freep pulled their covers and “inconvenienced” them. I can’t work up any sad about undercover finks having to move to new lairs and eyries, maybe sweating out a freako phone call or two. Now they know how the rest of us feel. We get the freako phone calls all the time. And worse. The “inconvenience” to the narco squad and their families doesn’t seem to me one one-millionth as inhumane as the years spent in reform schools, county jails, penitentiaries and other gaols by kids whose worst affront to their society was taking a toke of grass. When marijuana is legalized—as it most certainly will be when Liggett & Myers, et al, find they can’t advertise traditional cancer-sticks on TV; a certainty I gauge as inescapable when considered in the light of the information that L&M has copyrighted the words “Acapulco Gold”— when the powerful tobacco lobby in Washington gets behind grass in a sort of “joint effort” yuk yuk—who will repay all those kids for their ruined lives? Who will take their fingerprints out of the FBI files? Who will erase from their minds the memories of the smell of piss and disinfectant from how many lockups and drunk tanks? Who will put them back in college and make up the years they lost on the way to their B.A. or M.A.? Who will lobotomize the crime-data they picked up in the slammer? Who will apologize for witch-hunting them, and treating them like criminals for a “crime” no worse than that perpetrated by every member of our parent’s generation who sipped a teacup of Cosa Nostra bourbon in a speakeasy, 37 years ago? Who will pay reparations when pot is legal? Who? No one, that’s who the bloody hell who! So I conceive of the Freep’s publishing that secret list of nark addresses and phone numbers a courageous and significant gut-punch in the dirty war for justice. Beside that, dirty trick though it may be, the renting of new apartments for the secret police seems like a mere bagatelle. None of which has to do with the main topic of this week’s column, but I felt compelled to get on the record, particularly after I spoke to a student group at Cleveland High School, out in the Valley, last week, and was called to task for the Freep’s “inhumane act.” So now you know where it’s at for me. Back to the Johnny Carson Show, and blue-eyed soul, and what I started to say a while ago.)
There before me was one of the mythical creatures of all time—akin to dryads, hobbits, smoke ghosts and leprechauns—a chick with blue-eyed soul. This kid was called Elyse Weinberg, and she went about three points further toward gut-level than either Janis Ian or Buffy Sainte-Marie. She isn’t as funky as Janis Joplin, she isn’t as gothic-moded or genius’d as Laura Nyro, she isn’t as gravelly as Judy Henske, she isn’t as heavy or as gorgeous as Lotti Golden, but would you believe she puts Joan Baez and Judy Collins away proper?
So I had to re-gear my thinking—which is happening much too frequently these days for any security at all—and I had to wonder how and why such blue-eyed sisters as this Elyse chick and Laura Nyro and Lotti Golden and all the others suddenly came trumpeting on the scene. And naturally, I blamed TV for even this largesse: what else would you blame, in the Age of McLuhan, for everything from smog and violence to Elyse and the Dutch Elm Blight?
Where has this chick been? I asked me. And from the slag-heaps at the rear of my skull, a voice screamed, “You shmuck! Don Shain at Tetragrammaton Records told you this broad was dynamite two months ago, and he even sent you her record, and you stuck it up on the shelf because you were going out of town, so why don’t you take it down and listen to it?” So I did, and you know, high pressure Shain was right: she’s even heavier on records than she was on the tube. (The reason for that will close out this column and lead into the next, so bear it in mind.)
Where this chick had been, of course, was getting born. She didn’t spring full-blown with a voice like that out of nowhere, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. She was twenty years of shit-pop-music in the making. She is a natural reaction to Patti Page and Doris Day and even Jeri Southern. She and Lotti Golden and Janis Joplin and Laura Nyro are the female equivalents (coming on the scene a little later than their male counterparts) of Mose Allison, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and most recently Tony Joe White. They were the men who studied not Julius La Rosa or Buddy Greco or Tony Vale, they were the ones who listened to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Lemon Jefferson and B.B. King. They were the ones who understood that the true voice of American Music was not in the phony cabaret idiom, the big-cufilink-whiteonwhite-shirt idiom. It was the sound of the black man with passion and verve.
And they revolutionized the sound of today. Granted, they followed Otis Redding and James Brown and Wilson Pickett out of the ghetto into Motown and Staxmoney villas, but they laid down the highest tribute ... even the Britishers. They said this is the real sound. And now the women have done likewise.
Elyse Weinberg and her white sisters are paying the highest tribute to Big Maybelle and Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey. They are singing with the voice of the land. And they are saying to television that twenty years of proffering Dinah Shore and Lawrence Welk and Dean Martin is all they’re going to give. They are saying that the Lennon Sisters and the King Family don’t get it no more. They are saying that if there’s going to be truth in the land, it’s going to come first, as an example to others, in the songs and the singing.
Yet somehow television cannot comprehend the simple reality of such a situation. They still program prime-time hours of (such upcoming wowsers as) Leslie Uggams, the Lennons (presented, God help us, by Jimmy Durante!), the King Family, Dean Martin’s Goldiggers, all the Vegas lounge acts—though the supreme nadir was reached when Sandler & Young, two Mafia rejects with voices as compelling as fishmongers suffering Cheyne-Stokes breathing, were given their own summer hour. They manage to ignore the enormous purchasing power of the young, whose taste in music run more to Stevie Wonder than Glen Campbell; they still trot out those dyspeptic old firehorses, and wonder why they aren’t selling the depilatory and now-beverages.
But Lotti and Elyse and Janis and Laura are making all the waves, and the day is rapidly approaching when they will be freed from the slums of TV, the afternoon lip-synch dance shows, and will even put Diana Ross and her glitter scene to shame.
They will dominate. But not if they are treated the way Elyse Weinberg was treated on the Carson Show, hosted by Flip Wilson; which brings me to the lead-in for next week’s column. I’ll start with Wilson and the shameful manner in which Elyse was shunted on and offstage...and while I’m starting with Wilson, I’ll proceed onwards and downwards with some observations about, uh, er, nigger comedians. But you’ve gotta understand ... some of my best friends ...
* * * *
38: 29 AUGUST 69
So we’ll understand from the outset just where I stand in this terra incognita of racial identity, paddies and jigaboos being what they are, let me take you back back back through the veil of time to Chicago, 1961. Rainbow Beach. You probably never heard of it. Little shit strip of land on the scungy Lake Michigan shore. Landed gentry, all white, naturally, decided they were not going to follow suit with all the other beaches in Chicago, were not going to integrate. No black allowed. So, also naturally, the blacks decided to stage a swim-in. God only knows why anyone—black or white— would want to swim in that crud-infested water, but they did. (As a matter of fact, it might well have solved the entire race thing; no matter what color you were when you went in, you’d be green when you came out.)
The ancestors of the Blackstone Rangers came out on a Sunday with weapons, and were met by white street gangs. It was brutal. Nobody won. Lotta heads got dented.
The following week, everyone in Chicago knew there was going to be worse trouble on the Sunday coming. The South Side ghetto was an armed camp. Spade cab drivers rode around with loaded shotguns on their laps. White cops went in threes. Nobody in Highland Park wised-off to his Negro help. Lorraine Hansberry wrote a poem. James Baldwin got sent in by Time to cover it.
I went out on the beach. My sentiments went with black. I was there to aid and abet the swim-in. Riot started. Oh boy. Got my skull fractured by a black with a tire iron, got my rib cage sprung by a white with a length of chain. You see, the trouble was: I was gray.
Now you know where I’m at? Good. Just so long as we understand that your faithful columnist stands four-square for Justice, Decency, Equal Rights and All That Good Stuff.
Because what I want to rap about this week is, mainly, nigger comedians.
(I can just hear Lenny Bruce back there, affronted, saying, “Nigger? Nigger? What kind of a cheap hook is that? Jesus Christ, does he need cheap sensationalism to get their attention? Nigger!?! God, what bad taste!”
Okay, so you’ll call me a kike and we’ll call it even, and we’ll move on.)
What leads me into these observations is the tail-off from last week’s column, wherein I commented on the abominable treatment afforded singer Elyse Weinberg on The Johnny Carson Show, hosted by black comedian Flip Wilson. (No, scratch that. Knowing what comes next, let’s refer to Wilson as a mocha comedian. Black connotes strength, even in coffee. Mocha is diluted, weaker, softer, ameliorative. Yeah, that pins Wilson for me. A mocha comedian. Light tan, with three lumps.)
How it happened was this: Elyse had been scheduled for the week preceding, but Carson got to rapping with some banal ex-vaudevillian, and time ran out. So Elyse was promised for the next night. She never showed. They shunted her around like REA Express. The following week, with Carson on sabbatical, and Wilson doing the turn, Elyse was slotted.
On a show distinguished by its paucity of talent (even the incredible Joe Tex was gawdawful), Elyse was bucked back and back and back till they managed to squeeze her in between a couple of pimple commercials, She did one number, no backdrop, perched on a stool circa Andy Williams 1965, showed none of the fire or verve so handily available on her album, and with a smattering of applause (as much as due a trained seal act), she was blacked out. It was ruthless treatment of a skillful performer, and if anyone conceived of that shot as furthering a career—forget it. But, annoyed at having watched that entire dumbass show for three and a half hours, just to see Elyse, and having been short-shrifted, I did derive one benefit: it exposed Flip Wilson to my penetrating gaze for a protracted period.
And, Elyse now passed into obscurity and last week’s column, let me deal with the estimable Mr. Wilson, as a manifestation of his times.
For openers, he’s about as funny as a ruptured spleen. Now, I am by no means calling for a return to Amos n’ Andy—though they had the saving grace of being genuinely funny—but I’m observing jaundicedly that aside from Cosby and Dick Gregory, the last ten years of struggling for equal rights for blacks has produced a strain of handkerchief-head shuffling comics of the Flip Wilson/Scoey Mitchell sort that demeans the dues paid by millions of their brothers.
The genre comedians—Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley and others—still get denied prime-time exposure (unless you call Pigmeat slapping the Laugh-In cast with his famous pig bladder exposure), while the mocha comics slurp up the gravy with weak-wristed routines that present to the Honkie Mass a picture of the black man as litfle better than the good-natured, kinds dumb Uncle Tom was all recognize as thirty years out-of-date. Oh sure, every once in a while Wilson or Mitchell will make some fairly safe social comment about the Detroit Riots or looting or bigotry, but they are de-fanged comments, bearing none of the genuine rage we know lies in the world-view of every rational black man. They are the bought comedians. They are neither black nor white, but a colorless, emasculated something-else. They have opted for show biz, for the phony camaraderie of the klieg lights. They have copped-out on their people and their destiny.
I cannot watch Flip Wilson and his breed with anything but contempt, even though I understand the glittery appeal inherent in belonging to that select little circle of stars, superstars and semi-stars. Nonetheless, it’s a cheap in-group reward, a mess of pottage exchanged for dignity and responsibility to one’s own kind.
Hell, Lenny was white, and he took more risks with his material in defense of the black man than Wilson or Mitchell or even Nipsey Russell has ever taken.
How it must gall a guy like Dick Gregory, who can’t get booked on a major TV show, to see a hankie-top like Wilson hosting the top night-time talk show, playing the biggest clubs, working the lounges in Vegas, copping top bread for routines as simpering and approbation-seeking as the worst shuffle ever displayed. What must Gregory think, a man who lays it on the line as he does—for instance—in a new two-record set called Dick Gregory: The Light Side: The Dark Side? We hear the genuine humor of the black man thereon; we also hear his rage, his hatred, his frenzy, his demand for a better life ... not only for blacks, but for poor stupid rednecks and even the rest of us provincial, terrified scuttlefish who walk through Spanish Harlem after midnight
What does Cosby think of these others? He seems to be a man who has not deserted his people, who pours time and money and effort back into the black community. What does he think about those routines Wilson twinkles, in which the new cliche of the black man is tendered?
In Mario Puzo’s brilliant novel of the mafiosi, The Godfather (which I recommend to you unreservedly), the second- and third-generation Sicilian-Americans refer to the old-style caricature capos as “Moustache Petes.” What do the new blacks, the Clarence Williams and the Hari Rhodes, call the Flip Wilsons? What name is Scoey Mitchell given by Greg Morris? Does Otis Young identify with his soul brother Nipsey Russell?
How nauseating it is to realize that the cunning racist society in which we move has once more manipulated its opposition. If you can’t take the gun and the hate away from the black man, then buy him. Give him prime-time shots, give him Harry Cherry suits and good living, and he’ll prance around on the set telling the white community that the nigger is still impotent, kinda silly, and just downright grateful to be allowed to loot and pillage and bum every once in a while, in exchange for the amazing benefits of the Great Society.
Flip Wilson did a week on the Carson Show. I didn’t watch him more than once more, just to see if my perceptions were consistent. He did it the next night, too.
During WWII they had a name for guys who sold out. The informers were called Quislings.
I wonder if Dick Gregory knows that word. He might mention it to his black, er, his mocha brother, Flip. We honkies haven’t the right to say it. Shit, we haven’t even got the right to be disgusted by shmucks like Wilson. All we have the obligation to do is go out on Rainbow Beach and get our ribs banged in. Even for jerks like Wilson.
I’m getting angry. Forget it.
Next week, at long last, my Rio contact has managed to smuggle out that dope on dictatorship-ruled TV in Brazil. Watch for it next week.
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39: 19 SEPTEMBER 69
History refuses to allow me to keep my promises, which annoys not only me, but you readers as well. The promise: I wouldn’t miss any more columns. How broken: last week, no column. Cause: history. Explanation: I’d promised at long last to do that column on the state of television in Brazil, a column I’d been planning since my trip to Rio many months ago. It took this long to get the information smuggled out. And no sooner had I written the column, a week ago Monday, than all hell broke out in Brazil, as your other newspapers told you, and I pulled back the column to rewrite it, to get it up-to-date. And missed my deadline. I’m sorry. And here, totally revised, and quite a bit longer, is the column.
After I returned from Rio, after I’d had the time to let what I’d seen there sink in, I included some thoughts about it all in an introduction I did for my most recent book of short stories. I’d like to excerpt those sections from the introduction and present them here, as something of a preamble.
THE WAVES IN RIO
Standing in the hotel window staring out at the Atlantic Ocean, nightcrashing onto the Copacabana beach. Down in Brazil on a fool’s mission, talking to myself. Standing in the window of a stranger whom I suddenly know well, while down the Avenida Atlantica in another window, one I know well, who has suddenly become a stranger.
Watching the onyx waves rippling in toward shore, suddenly facing-out like green bottle glass, cresting white with lace, reaching, pawing toward shore, and spasming once finally, before vanishing into the sponge sand. I am a noble moron. I compose a poem.
My poem says, standing here, staring out across the works of man, wondering what the hell I’m doing here, an alien in a place he can never know...and there are the waves. Boiling across two thousand miles of emptiness in the terrible darkness, all alone, all the way from Lagos like the Gold Coast blacks who came, stacked belly-to-butt like spoons in the bellies and butts of alien ships. All that way, racing so far, to hurl themselves up on this alien beach, like me.
Now why in the name of reason would anyone, anything, travel that far ... just to be alone?
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Christ on the mountain looks down over Rio de Janeiro, arms spread, benediction silently flowing from stone lips. He was sculpted by an Italian, and brought to this mountain, staring off toward Sugar Loaf. There are lights hidden in Christ. Once a year—you know when—a remote switch is thrown at the other end of those lights, in the Vatican, and the Pope lights Cristo Redentor.
This is the Christ of the wealthy who live in the bauhaus apartments out along Leblon; the Christ of the blue carpet bettors at the Jockey Club; the Christ of those who dine on fondue orientale at the Swiss Chalet; the Christ of those who sail into Rio harbor on proud white yachts so proud and so white the sun blinds anyone staring directly at them. This is the Christ on the mountain.
Rio de Janeiro is a city of startling contrasts: from the yachts and the Jockey Club and the bauhaus apartments ... to the shanty villages glued to the sides of the hills, where the poor scrabble for existence in their tropic paradise. Favellas they are called. Down there below the big Christ, but above even the wealthy, the Gold Coast blacks have deposited their descendants, and the poor mestizos crowd one atop another in shanties built of corrugated shed roofing and wood slat that rots in the pulsing heat. They rise up in a crazy-quilt city above the city. And above them is a smaller hill. And on that hill they have erected another Christ. The Christ of the poor.
They are not noble morons. They are not writers who draw senseless parallels between the great white Christ on the mountain, and the little black Christ on the hill. They only know he is Christ the Redeemer. And though they have not enough cruzeiros to buy food for their rickety children, they have centavos to buy cheap tallow candles to set out on the altar of the street church. Christ will redeem them. They know it.
They are alone. In their own land, they are alone. Christ will never save them. Nor will men ever save them. They will spend their days like the waves from Africa, throwing themselves onto the beach of pitiless living.
They are no better than you or I.
It is only truth to tell you that as night approaches we are all aliens, down here on this alien Earth. To tell you that not Christ nor men nor the governments of men will save you. To tell you that we must all work and struggle and revolt against those who live in yesterday, before all our tomorrows are stolen away from us. To tell you no one will come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. God is within you. Save yourselves.
Otherwise, why would you have traveled all this way ... just to be alone?
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That was written in March. Two weeks ago, on Saturday, September 6th, the people of Brazil formalized their belief that God was, indeed, within them...that no one was coming down from any mountain to save them from the unspeakable dictatorship that rules Brazil as if it were a humid madhouse. Members of what the American establishment press call a “Castroite terrorist group” (the same kind of terrorist group to which Paul Revere belonged) kidnapped the U.S. Ambassador, C. Burke Elbrick. Two days later, with the release of fifteen political prisoners being held by the detestable military junta that had taken over Brazil, Elbrick was turned loose.
I will not go into any lengthy discussions of our part in the disgraceful treatment of an entire nation’s people—we’ve done it too often, in too many other places. Suffice it to say, the poetic justice inherent in the kidnapping of the Norteamericano Ambassador is sufficiently pellucid to delight even a Thomas Hardy.
We supported the dictatorship, with money and arms and trade pacts. Even when the people of Rio could not pass unmolested in their own streets—littered with tanks and armed soldiers—we expressed no concern.
So when they decided to break out, the National Liberation Action organization and their militant arm, MR-8, went for pay dirt. They didn’t kidnap Foreign Minister Jose Magalhaes Pinto or the Generals leading the First, Second or Third Armies—they copped Elbrick. They knew which side the bread was buttered on.
At long last, the Brazilians decided to take some concrete action against the level of poverty, illiteracy and degradation in which they’d been forced to exist. And they went for the money. They didn’t bother with the puppets, they went for the puppet master. And won the day. Yeah!
But what has all this to do with television? Well, it had a lot more to do with it in the unrevised column you might have been reading had not MR-8 slapped chloroform over Elbrick’s ambassadorial snout. Because, before September 6th, television (and to an even greater degree, radio) in Brazil was one of the most potent weapons used to keep the people happily mud-condemned. Before the Age of the Machine it was God and Religion that kept the poor blacks in America hardly content but certainly befuddled. In Brazil, in the Age of the Machine, it is God and Religion and clowns like Silvio Santos from Sao Paulo and Chacrinha from Rio.
The latter is a grossly boorish television star, cavorting about like a Saturday morning kiddie show emcee, hosting one of the most popular shows in Brazil. The former is Chacrinha’s counterpart from “more serious, sober Sao Paulo.” Some serious; some sober. His program consists of selecting the ugliest man in Brazil, the fattest man, the longest moustache, the most ridiculous name of an individual, and something called City Against City, in which the insipid rivalries of the cariocas (Rio residents) and the paulista (from Sao Paulo) are exploited. Under the guise of an amusing inter-city contest, the TV medium manages to keep alive and fiery a sectional hatred no more sensible than that of Catholics and Protestants in North Ireland. The name of the game is divide and keep subservient.