In discussing this matter with friends, I’ve been reminded of the Viet Cong Massacre during the Tet Offensive, in which four thousand men, women and children were dumped into shallow graves and then clubbed or shot to death. Understand something: I do not carry VC flags. I am no lover of killers, be they Oriental or Caucasoid or Negroid. Hell, yes, they are vermin for the act. And not even saying they were murdering their own people is an excuse. What makes you think I have an answer? Love thy neighbor? That doesn’t work either. History certainly gives us enough proof of it. But these are our guys. These are the direct lineal descendants of Robert Taylor and John Garfield and Victor McLaglin and Humphrey Bogart on Bataan and Corregidor and Iwo Jima and Kiska and Attu. These are our guys, godammit! Not those evil little yellow men with the sibilant hisses and the bamboo shoots under the fingernails. These are Johnny and Billy and Gus from Trenton and Denver and Cleveland. They aren’t supposed to be infanticides.
So now we learn the truth we always knew. We are as rotten as them. Violence knows no color barrier. Those who ball their fists keep going until they slaughter children. Now America has to face it.
No, Spiro, we can’t let you silence the news media. We need to know the truth. Unpleasant as it may be, we have to have the truth now.
There isn’t enough blood or time left in the world to permit your kind of dissembling, Spiro.
Hey ... Spiro ... you know what you are, man? You’re the guy who greased that Lieutenant’s trigger-finger.
* * * *
50: 2 JANUARY 70
POISONED BY THE FANGS OF SPIRO: PART I
Ugly, baby. Just righteously ugly. Dayton, Ohio, I mean. (Yeah, that’s why my column’s been absent for the last few weeks. I went to Dayton to deliver a lecture, and what happened there was such a bummer, such a downer, such a shitter, that I didn’t even have the stuff to write a column. I’ll tell you all about it. Might take three columns, but I’ll lay it all on you, because it has to do with the power of fear generated by one of the great TV stars of our times, Spiro T. Agnew.)
I come to you, bloody and slightly bowed. To be perfectly honest, friends, I feel like Peter Fonda, AKA Captain America, living a real-life version of Easy Rider.
The hero of Easy Rider comes up against the violent fear and insanity of midcentury America, and gets his head blown off for his trouble. I didn’t get my head blown off, merely got my mouth closed, but the background is much the same, and from the encounter I’ve drawn some inescapable conclusions, the first of which is:
AMERICA IS ENTERING A PERIOD OF REPRESSION AND WITCH-HUNTING THAT WILL MAKE THE TERROR TIMES OF THE MCCARTHY ERA SEEM LIKE THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT.
I will now proceed, through the fascinating relating of my travails, to document my thesis. Pax.
Early in September, I was contacted by the Dayton Living Arts Center, in the person of Barbara Benham, its Creative Writing Director. She wanted me to come to Ohio in the capacity of a “Guest Artist” to both work with the students in the science fiction writing course, and to deliver an evening lecture to adults and college level students. We started negotiations.
(The Living Arts Center itself is a groove. It is a Federally-funded operational Project to Advance Creativity in Education—PACE—financed under Title in of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Its purposes are to “identify, nurture, and evaluate the creative potential of youngsters whose interests lie in the Fine Arts—creative writing, dance, drama, music and the visual arts.” The participating students number from eight to twelve hundred, in grades 5 to 12, who show up at the Center after school and on weekends. The programs are varied and the faculty is top level. I lay all of this in, in front, in an effort to establish that the Center itself, and the faculty, are dynamite. Whatever horrors came down, they were by no means the fault of the Center and its instructors. Administration is another matter, and we’ll get to that shortly. But if you see parallels between the Center and what has happened at colleges all across America, you will understand that it is not necessarily the faculty or the institution itself that is repressive, it is almost always the politicians, the “educators” in their little suits and ties, the Administration that takes its stand for censorship, control, rules®s, guidelines, and a brutal maintaining of the no-waves status quo ... usually at the expense of the very kids they prattle about “serving”)
Through Barbara Benham, negotiations for my three days attendance (December 15, 16 and 17) were completed on the 22nd of October, and contracts were signed by myself and the Administrative Director, Jack A. DeVelbiss. His is not the name most properly to bear in mind. The name with which we will deal is Glenn Ray, a dude I will not soon forget. Nor, if I have my way, will he soon forget me.
Now understand something: Dayton was my 152nd speaking appearance in the last five years. I’ve spoken to all levels of audience, from junior high school crowds through college level groups to adult audiences. With the exception of a horrendous situation that arose last Labor Day at the World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis, I’ve never had any trouble. In fact, I’ve been asked back to speak second and even third times at some of the universities. I did not anticipate any trouble in Dayton, though my encounters in the Great American Heartland these last two years have hipped me to the growing tensions and tendencies to shy away from anyone bearing news of unrest from the outside world.
In a letter dated September 25th, Miss Benham tried—in a delicate way—to forewarn me of the tenor of Dayton thinking. She wrote, in part:
“As the Center depends on public support for its continuation, deliberate provocation is dangerous for us. I hope that, without being untrue to yourself, you can focus mainly on literature (from any angle, including its role in revolution) as opposed to politics.”
I replied, on September 29th, “It is my intention to win them, not alienate them. I will not, repeat NOT provoke anyone. If you want a rabble-rouser, get someone else. I try to tell some truth in the course of my discussions of writing and the place of the committed writer in our society, and that occasionally upsets a few people who are locked into socio-economic or religious boxes, but in the main it is my intention to bring light, not darkness.
“As to my subject matter—you seem concerned I’ll deliver a Julian Bond/Rap Brown diatribe—being literature rather than politics, yes, of course. I’m a writer. That’s what I do, and it’s what I know. But since I conceive of the role of the creator in our Times as inextricably involved with the world through which he moves, it is inevitable that my discourses will slop over into human behavior, the state of the world, the effect of committed writing on the tenor of the Times, honesty and ethic in writing, et cetera.
“If any or all of these unnerve you, or lead you to believe I’ll be doing your program more harm than good, I suggest again that you reconsider hiring me. The only guarantees I can offer are predicated on my past experiences with groups similar to the one for which I presume I’ll be speaking (straight, middle-class, white mid-America folk who seem disturbed at the changes happening around them): they seem to relate to me, seem to appreciate someone telling them things straight out, and the leavening of humor I include inclines them to hang in there for the entire set. I’ve never had a riot or an insurrection.”
Not till Dayton, that is.
We pause at this point to refresh your memories about the philosophical line all this history is taking: Spiro Agnew, the first vice-president of the United States to suffer from terminal foot-in-mouth disease; the power of TV in mass communicating instantly to an entire nation a gagging fear and horror of change; the use of the mass media to convince a middle-class white population that too much knowledge in the hands of longhaired freaks and natural-haired niggers is a deadly thing; the reassurances of dangerous slayers like Spiro that the final grasp for repressive power by the old order is, in reality, a rallying around the flag by a mythical “silent majority” of God-Fearing Good Solid Americans. And outside, peace on earth ...
That’s what we’re talking about here, not a minor incident in Dayton, Ohio ... good will to men ...
Meanwhile, back at the story ...
My duties during the three days at the Living Arts Center were as follows: four meetings with the science fiction workshop, under the direction of John Baskin, who turned out to be a hero in more ways than one; an adult lecture; three lectures for specially-selected students of local high schools, brought to the Center for that purpose. The tab for the three days was fourteen hundred dollars, including expenses.
I arrived by TWA on the evening of Sunday, December 14th. Dayton looked like all the rest of Ohio ... a state in which I’d been born ... a state I’d left many years before, perhaps with that sense of premonition known only to the young who sense this land in which they stand will never change, will never yield up treasures great enough for them. I had left and gone other places and found now, upon returning, that my heart and mind retained images of mid-America that were part childhood pains and joys, part cultural myth, part sadness at seeing smog and pollution and Big Boy hamburger stands ... and part triumph at returning to execute AN EVENING WITH HARLAN ELLISON.
It was a dream. If you basket-case a dream, it flops over as nightmare. Peace on earth ...
John Baskin and Barbara Benham picked me up at the airport and took me to the apartment she had vacated for my use while in town. She was staying elsewhere. It was a gesture of considerable hospitality, intended to save me the cost and loneliness of a hotel room. It was to be used later, against her, by the Administration, to whose eyes propriety is easily set awry.
The next morning they came for me, and I was taken to the Center. It was a converted warehouse, the facility having been handsomely renovated to accommodate work shops and a large theater and a dance studio and talk areas and God knows what all else. It was very impressive, very real, and held within its walls (even early in the day, childless) the sense and scent of life. Young minds came here to find direction, came here to taste joy and beauty. It looked lived in. I wanted very much to do for them.
What I did not know was that the following had occurred in Dayton:
1) There was a concerted program afoot to quash “freaks” in the city.
2) The school finance levy had been soundly defeated a few days before I’d arrived. This forced the Center to have to scramble for a quarter of a million dollars to keep running. So the Center could not afford to offend anyone. (Why Mr. DeVelbiss had not used the three years gravy time, during which the Center had been running on Federal funds, to make provisions for such an eventuality, was a question I heard asked many times during my brief stay in Dayton.)
3) A black educator named Art Thomas was in the process of losing his job because, in the course of averting a riot, he had used the word “pig” when speaking to a cop. It was a railroad kangaroo court scene, with every “liberal” in Dayton up-in-arms because his hearing was being held before the very people who had relieved him of his position—and everyone knew he was going to be set down. The case was big news and promised to go to the Supreme Court.
4) The Center had had mild troubles with other “Guest Artists” in the recent past. Pianist Lorin Hollander (who had charmed everyone during his first appearance at the Center) upset the Administration by returning with long hair and sideburns, hip clothing, and a program that was divided between music and political opinion. Square, suited and silent his first time there, Hollander had become “involved” in the world in the interim, and his frankly expressed concern for America and the world unsettled the Program Director, Glenn Ray. I was given to believe, in no uncertain terms, that Mr. Hollander would not be invited to return.
5) An appearance of a puppet theater at the Center had brought—for some inexplicable reason—shrieks of protest from parents who had attended an evening performance. Something about, “What are you liberals teaching our kids down there at that freak palace?”
6) Fear of “making waves” was high in the Administration of the Center, in the school board, in the city.
And here came I.
Innocent, starry-eyed, dew-bedazzled little me. Set to be cast in the role of insurgent dissident revolutionary. Ready to be typed outside agitator, corrupter of the young, agent provocateur, trouble-making wave-creator.
This has been the background. The cast of characters, the action, the incredible denouement—all of this in the next two week’s blistering, scathing, uncompromising installments.
Can you bear to wait!?! The suspense is killing! You know, sometimes my life flashes before my eyes ... and frankly, it ain’t worth living a second time.
* * * *
51: 9 JANUARY 70
POISONED BY THE FANGS OF SPIRO: PART II
If you think the hope for tomorrow lies solely in the young—as did I—be advised the poison has seeped down through the veins of the society to them as well. If you keep reassuring yourself that as soon as the present generation of bigots, morons, haters and blue star mothers (who take open pride in having sent their sons off to die) kick off things will be better ... start worrying again. Because they’ve already gotten to the mass of kids, out there in the Great American Heartland. Even as they’ve been planted, those good mommies and daddies have reached skeletal hands out of the graves to clutch their children and intone, “If you want to honor my memory, if you don’t want me to have died in vain, remember: niggers are evil, they all want to rape your women; Jews secretly run the world and they’ll steal everything you have; Communists roam everywhere; sex is dirty; don’t let them Ivory Tower liberals corrupt you; trust in hate!” And then the dirt is shoveled in on them and they go to that big Klavern in the sky, leaving behind them the butchered minds and closed-off potentialities of the next generation.
I went to Dayton to talk writing, to talk science fiction, to talk about what I felt should be the role of the committed writer in Our Times, what he could do to reshape the world through his writing. My first encounter was with a class of seniors from Wilbur Wright High School. I’d been briefed that they were “white Appalachian kids.” Whatever that was supposed to mean, or to tell me. I figured they were like San Fernando Valley kids, middle-class, somewhat sleepy but wake-able if you prodded them and started them questioning. I was wrong. Lord, I was wrong. They were touched by the grave-bone hands of their parents. And they had been poisoned by the fangs of Spiro.
They were marched in by two pleasant-enough-looking little old ladies with white hair tightly iron-curled (they looked like an advertisement out of a 1930’s issue of Liberty Magazine, reading time: 1 minute 32 seconds).
It was cold in Dayton, in the mid-twenties, and they were bundled in heavy jackets or overcoats. Perhaps thirty of them, sitting terribly erect in four rows of straight-back chairs. Barbara Benham introduced me, and against a backdrop of two enormous posters (one of me, the other of the Eniwetok mushroom) I climbed up onto a tall stool. I grinned at them and said, “My name’s Ellison. I’m a writer. How many of you have ever read anything I’ve written?”
Glen Ray sat in the back of the room, arms folded, watching me carefully.
There was silence from the audience.
It wasn’t unusual. I’m under no illusions about the minority of Americans who read anything, much less me. But it’s a hook with which to begin.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s try it this way: how many of you are interested in writing, about a career in writing, about what it’s like to be a writer, his life ... that sort of thing?”
Nothing. An oil painting. Mount Rushmore. Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln. Dead eyes. Slack jaws. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. Not a tremble.
“Oh boy,” I murmured sotto voce, “I really am in the Great American Heartland, aren’t I?” Glenn Ray crossed his legs uncomfortably. Big Brother was watching. “Well look, troops, you got hauled out of your class and drug over here to listen to some dude you never met before rap about a lot of dull stuff. So what should we talk about? The world situation? How about the Art Thomas case?”
Nothing. But off to the left, in the rear, someone said, “Art Who?” (In the first installment of this Dayton Diatribe I mentioned that Art Thomas had been making headlines in Dayton. A black educator who had been railroaded out of his job because he had avoided a cops-and-kids confrontation by relating to the kids and getting them to back off, but in the process he had called a cop a pig.)
I couldn’t believe they didn’t know about it. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I said. “This is the biggest thing to happen in Dayton in years. It may go to the Supreme Court as a test case ... and you people haven’t even heard about it? Okay, how about the My Lai massacre? You’ve been reading about that, haven’t you?”
Television faces stared back at me. No, gentle readers, they had not heard about it. Or if they had, they didn’t remember. Or if they remembered, they weren’t sufficiently involved to even nod a yes at me. I was looking at the result of hours before the glass teat, passively suckling the distant images of dead bodies piled on top each other.
What do you do?
I did something.
What I did was wrong or right, depending on what you conceive to be the role of a guest artist brought in to impart information about a scene of the world different from that through which they move. I freely cop to culpability in what I did next. I could have accepted my intuition about those kids and where they were at. I could have said to myself, Ellison ... back off. Let them continue the way they’re going. Let them think it’s all somewhere off in the distance, has nothing to do with them. Let them think you’re a sweet guy, kind of dumb, and kind of boring, and let them go back at the end of the hour to Wilbur Wright High School, having heard nothing more visceral than the nonsense those two little old ladies feed them every day. I could have said that.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I raised my tone of voice considerably and demanded, “What the hell is with you, people? What are you learning in school? My generation and all the ones that went before have left you a garbage dump, a cesspool: you’re the ones who have to clean it up. Do you want another fifty years of war? Do you want the land and the air and the water to become so intolerably polluted they won’t support life of any kind? Not just for your great-grandchildren, but for you and me? Chances are good if they don’t slaughter us all first, we won’t live for another fifty years. You see, there are these things in the ocean called diatoms, and they produce seventy per cent of our oxygen, and we’ve polluted the water so much the plankton that feeds on the diatoms is vanishing, and that means—”
And I was off. Running fast. Up and down and around. “What the hell are you people training yourselves to be? Redemption stamp center clerks?”
Then I read them one of my stories, Shattered Like A Glass Goblin, which—depending where your head is at—-is either a pro- or an anti-dope story. I wrote it as an anti. And when I got finished, Glenn Ray was even unhappier. It had some sex in it, and some cursing, and some dope, and some violence.
Then one of the kids raised his hand. It was the first sign of mobility in the crowd. I wanted to rush over and play Monte Hall: for raising your hand, sir, I will make a deal with you! You can have your choice of a revolution, an all-expense-paid rejuvenated America, or a six-pack of groupies. But I’d forgotten for a moment that I was in Dayton.
“Are you telling us to smoke marijuana?” he asked. “Don’t you know that it’s against God’s Covenant? Don’t you know that marijuana leads to Hard Stuff that makes people want to go out and rob and kill to get the Hard Stuff?”
“Hold it, hold it,” I said, dazed. “That was an anti-dope story I just read to you. But I think you’re old enough to know the difference between Hard Stuff and marijuana. Either way, it’s your life. I don’t use, and if anyone asks me my opinion, I’d say forget it. But it’s your life, baby, and if you want to mess it over with drugs, that’s your prerogative. Kindly don’t try and push me into a corner where I have to defend pot, because that doesn’t happen to be my crusade.”
It went on that way for the better part of an hour. Punching, punching, trying to get through, trying to tell them they were our last, best hope, and if they sat there with prognathous jaws and Little Orphan Annie eyeballs the whole country was doomed.
I’m afraid I said Spiro Agnew was an asshole.
And when the hour was up, the two little old ladies rose, and said, in their best Louisa May Alcott manner, “We’d like to thank you, Mr. Ellison, for your—uh— enthusiasm. But our bus driver is waiting for us to hurry back to school, so—uh—thank you and goodbye.”
The kids, a mite dazed by the mixmaster into which they’d stumbled, were led docilely back to the Halls of Academe where they would be told to ignore that strangely-garbed hippie with the decadent ideas and the inexcusable profanity.
They were given “evaluation sheets” on which they were to record their opinions of the hour.
Glenn Ray looked like a man who has just learned Santa Claus takes bribes.
Barbara Benham looked disturbed. She didn’t say anything. But an hour later, we got word Mr. Ray wanted to see us. He came down to Miss Benham’s classroom, and he said, “You’d better stick to talking about writing.”
I asked him pointedly if that meant I was not allowed to talk about the world or politics or any of the other subjects on which I’d dwelled in the Wilbur Wright class. He hurriedly assured me he meant no such thing ... just that I was a writer and should deal with these topics from that position. It seemed a reasonable request, and I said I would. When he left, Barbara Benham looked even more disturbed.
“Anything wrong?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said, and bit her thumb.
Later that day I had a get-together with students from the Living Arts Center itself, rather than a specially-bussed-in crowd. It was called the “Let’s Talk” session, and . these were an entirely different breed of kids than the Wilbur Wright zombies. These kids— ages 12 to 17—were sharp, inquisitive, irreverent, uncompromising, alert. We got to rapping about all sorts of things love/hate, war/peace, truth/shucks, power/subservience—and the only bad moment I can recall was when a boy in the back asked, non sequitur, “What’s Barbra Streisand like?” Everyone did a take. It had absolutely nothing to do with anything that had gone down in the dialogue, but I said simply that I didn’t know her, but from what I’d heard around the studios, she was a royal pain in the ass to work with. The kid burst into tears later, I learned, telling Mr. Ray and others, “Why’d he have to say that about a great star like Miss Streisand?”
I won’t say it was the greatest rapport in the history of Western Man, that afternoon session, but there is a photo on page 23 of the December 16th edition of the Dayton Daily News showing me surrounded by kids, laying an anecdote on them, and their heads are thrown back in laughter, their mouths open with joy; they are having a good time.
You see, we related. Remember that... it comes up later.
But: in the back of the group, Glenn Ray sat watching. This is a Watchbird watching you. He particularly didn’t like my reading of the two Glass Teat columns dealing with The Common Man—a hobby horse I’m currently riding. He didn’t like me saying the greatest danger to freedom and liberty in our country was the stupidity of the masses, the passive acceptance of all the poison spurted from the fangs of Spiro.
Later that night I had my first meeting with the science fiction workshop kids. And we grooved. They were like the other Living Arts kids: bright, into it, curious.
Things were going well. I thought.
(What I did not know was that calls were coming in from the parents of those Wilbur Wright students. One man showed up at the Center and wanted to “look around” and see what this here now Center was all about. Glenn Ray was being drawn uptight. Waves were appearing on the placid surface of his little frog pond.)
Next morning came the pivotal scene, I feel. I was to meet my second bussed-in group. Black journalism students from Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School.
The instant I walked into the classroom, I felt it. A difference. The biggest difference. Life surged in that room. Thirty-some kids, all black, with a male, white teacher. They were slumped in the seats, eyes watching. Yeah. That’s where it’s at, friends. None of that “here I sit, docilely waiting for your effulgent intelligence, great white teacher” jive. These kids had had all the shit thrown at them. They were wide awake and wanted the dude up in front to prove he was worth listening to.
And that, Establishment, is the attitude all school kids should have. They should demand their teachers be interesting and on top of it and stimulating.
The difference was like, uh, black and white.
Glenn Ray sat in the back, watching.
We started out, and for the first ten minutes I was being tested. There was no hype possible with these kids. I was white, and that was a strike or two right there. And I was fancied-up with what looked (to them) like new clothes, and that was another couple of strikes. And I was in a position of authority, and that was strikes five and six. So I proceeded to put what I had in front of them. And that entailed doing precisely what Art Thomas had done: talk to them the way they talked to each other. And that meant the words motherfucker and dumbshit and pile of crap were exchanged. Broke through. Read them a fantasy I’d written about an extraterrestrial who was passing as a human to illuminate the arid emotionalism of a black girl passing as white. They dug it. And we got to really rapping. Good things. Truths and fears and humor and some mutual affection were passed around. (“You know,” I said to one black kid who’d asked a dumb question, “you are a dumb shit man.” And he replied, “Thass okay. You just an envious Jew, baby.”)
When the hour was over, they didn’t want to leave. The bus driver had to come in and practically drag them to the bus. Their teacher shook my hand and said it was a fine hour. He said he wished the time had been longer. Three of the students hung back. They wanted to have their picture taken with me. I dug it. One of their buddies cranked off a few snaps of us all together, and we made nice on each other and they split. I wasn’t worried about their evaluation sheets.
I looked at Glenn Ray.
I’ve grown sensitive to the look of hate these last few years. I looked at Glenn Ray. He hated me.
The Program Director of the Dayton Living Arts Center hated me. I didn’t know why, but later, talking to a member of the faculty (and for the benefit of Mr. Ray and Mr. DeVelbiss, who insist they don’t want to fire Miss Benham for having had the wretched judgment to bring me in as a guest artist, despite the prevalent fears of everyone at the Center that that was precisely what they wanted to do, it is not Miss Benham to whom I refer here), I was told that Mr. Ray, even though he is the man most directly responsible for what happens to the kids, relates poorly to them. I was also told I made Ray angry, and that I’d capped it by getting along so well with the black kids. Though a Negro himself, it seems Mr. Ray can’t talk to blacks the way I did.
I didn’t think it mattered. Not till later that day, only a few hours before I was to deliver the public lecture for adults and college students that had been advertised for weeks. It was at that point that Glenn Ray’s fear of “wave-making” melded with his hatred of your gentle columnist, and he pulled the plug. Spiro Agnew bit Glenn Ray and ...
He canceled my speech.
And that’s when it hit the fan, friends.
* * * *
POISONED BY THE FANGS OF SPIRO: CONCLUSION
A wound neither as deep as a Chicago Conspiracy Trial nor as wide as two US Army sergeants being removed from their Armed Forces Radio posts when they told their audience that they were being censored and could not tell the troops what was really happening in the War. Neither as final as the silencing of Lenny Bruce ... nor as significant as the attempted whitewash of My Lai before the evidence piled up so high it couldn’t be denied (though Time reported last week that 54% of the American people still refuse to believe it happened); neither as painful as the police moving in on a recent Allen Ginsburg reading and first cutting off his mike, then putting on Muzak so he could not be heard ... nor as destructive as a Century City Riot; neither as debilitating as cancelling Joyce Miller’s Encounter from KPFK because she was sniping at the Administration ... nor as horrendous as the Smothers Brothers being flushed out of sight; neither as permanent as the silencing of Seale, Cleaver, King, Malcolm X, JFK, RFK or George Lincoln Rockwell ... nor as ghastly as court-martialing soldiers who protest. But when Glenn Ray panicked at the two or three phone calls he’d gotten from parents of students to whom I’d spoken, parents who didn’t want their kids to hear any opinions but ones approved by the Good Housekeeping seal ... when he grew terrified that his petty sinecure at the Center was in danger ... when he realized that after the defeat of the school bond levy he was in a vulnerable position ... when push came to shove and he had to suddenly stand behind the free speech and dissent he had so liberally championed to all those kids .... the poison from the fangs of Spiro took effect, and he canceled me out.
What happened next happened so fast, some of it may have been rumor, some of it may have been nightmare, some of it may have been reality, and some of it will stick with those kids for the rest of their lives.
I was in a workshop session with John Baskin’s science fiction writing class when Barbara Benham— the creative writing director who’d hired me—stuck her head in and asked me to step into the hall. “Glenn Ray canceled your speech for tonight,” she said.
I grew very calm. Two thousand years of racial memory of pogroms took over and I grew very calm.
“Well, let’s just go talk to Mr. Ray and see what’s happening,” I said.
The kids spilled out into the hall behind us. “What’s happening?” they asked. “What’s going on?”
“Go on back inside,” I said. “Glenn Ray canceled the lecture tonight. We’re going to go to his office and see if we can straighten it out. I’ll come back and tell you what went down.” They looked startled, uncertain and—unless you’ve seen it in the eyes of kids 12 to 16 years old you won’t know how it can chew on your heart—frightened.
“He can’t do that?!” yelled one girl.
I smiled my best Robert-Culp-going-into-combat smile. Little baby, you have no idea how easily he can do that
We went to Ray’s office, Miss Benham and myself.
He was sitting behind his desk. Jack DeVelbiss, the Administrative Director, was conveniently out of town or hiding out or comatose, God only knew what. So this was Ray’s play, all by his lonesome. There was no love lost between us (and all this in two days). He had openly implied to other faculty members that despite the fact that Miss Benham was living elsewhere while I used her apartment for my stay in Dayton, there was something seedy and clandestine about it. Mr. Ray was lucky he never said that in front of her boy friend, John Baskin, who could separate Mr. Ray’s tibia and fibula like a chicken leg without too much effort. He had evinced dislike for me that stemmed—I was told by another faculty member—from my “weird” clothes, my constant talk of sex, my seeming refusal to deal with him as an authority figure, and because of that strange class (strange to him, that is) in which I’d been able to relate to, and communicate with, black kids though Ray, nominally Negro, could not. So there we were, nose-to-nose.
What he said and what he meant were studies in the art of lying rationally, justifying evil in the name of good, and otherwise burning down the Reichstag himself so Spiro Hitler could acquire the reins of power.
“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked him.
“I’m canceling the balance of your contract here.”
“Oh, really? How come?”
“I’ve decided you don’t have the best interests of the Center at heart,” is what he said. I’ve decided you are making waves, saying things that will get the parents looking at us more closely, is what he thought.
“You aren’t relating to the children,” is what he said. You’re getting through to them and they’re going back home and asking questions and I’m getting phone calls, is what he thought.
“You’re turning a lot of them off,” is what he said. You’re turning me off, is what he thought.
“You’re not fulfilling the role of a guest artist here,” is what he said. You weren’t supposed to talk politics or start trouble, is what he thought.
“I can’t take a chance on your delivering a talk tonight that will cause the Center trouble. Our position is very uncertain right now,” is what he said. I’m scared shitless you’ll offend the Middle Americans and I’ll lose my job, is what he thought.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes; frankly, you have a foul mouth. It doesn’t offend me, you understand, but it has turned off some of the children.”
I quote to you now from an article in the Dayton Journal Herald dated 17 December 69, headlined ARTS CENTER CANCELS WRITER (pars. 8 & 9). “Students who were with Ellison at the center yesterday said his blunt language might have been interpreted by Ray as offensive.
“ ‘He used a couple of beauties,’” a student said regarding Ellison’s speech, “but it didn’t bother anyone.’”
What Ray said to me, and what he meant, were light-years apart.
“We’ll pay you the balance of your fee,” Ray said. He had to. We had a contract. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll accept it,” I answered. “Just my expenses will do.”
“Great,” grinned Ray. “We can use the money.”
I suddenly had the feeling my ethics had made me a patsy. Even so, I suggested to him that he was being hasty, and that if he felt the night’s lecture was going to be a debacle, I’d show him the material I’d prepared: an essay on creativity, a short story in the form of a fantasy about returning to one’s childhood, and some anecdotes. “My mind is made up,” he said.
“You don’t want any facts to get in the way, is that it?” I asked.
“You’re turning the children off,” he said.
It was the one thing that could stop me cold. I bit on it, despite that photo in the Dayton Daily News of the session at which the kids were rocking with laughter. What I didn’t know was that in the Evaluation Sheets that had been given out to the black students from Dunbar High School and their teacher, I’d been lauded as having delivered a wild, groovy hour talk, and they wanted to come back again. Had I known that, I would not have acquiesced so quietly.
But after all, he was the Director, wasn’t he? He knew what went down with the kids. Didn’t he? Sure he did.
So I went back to John Baskin’s class, and told him and the kids what had happened.
The next thing I knew, there was a children’s crusade.
(Bear in mind, these are not seasoned dissenters of whom I write. They are kids from twelve years old on up to maybe sixteen, middle-class mid-American, never been in a protest scene, never been beaten on by police clubs.)
They stormed Glenn Ray’s office.
“You can’t talk like a liberal and then cop out!” one girl shrieked.
“If this is the way you’re gonna live up to what you tell us, you can take your Center and shove it up your ass!” howled a boy of fifteen, then he turned so we wouldn’t see him crying, and stormed out of the building.
Little Nancy Henry, not yet in her teens, daughter of a Dayton policeman, began weeping, trying to get her voice high enough to yell, “You can’t do this! You can’t! We won’t let you!”
One black kid summed it up, to Ray. “Man, you talk the talk, but you don’t walk the walk.”
I didn’t want a bad scene, and I heard Barbara Benham urging them to go back to the classroom, to wait for their protest. Some did, some didn’t. Many hung around outside Glenn Ray’s office. At this point my mind went away, and so did my lust for reportorial accuracy.
Did they throw Glenn Ray out of his office and take it over? Did Ray call the police on the little kids? I’ve got three different stories, all of them culminating in a riot. I went back to Benham’s apartment and later that night a mass of people who had come in from Antioch and Columbus and other cities came and sat around on the floor and looked woebegone. They all kept telling me, “This isn’t what Dayton’s like ... honest!”
But it is, friends. It is also what College Station, Texas’s like and Altoona, Pennsylvania and Madeira Beach, Florida and Seattle, Washington and Wheatland, Wyoming. It is the time of the Middle Americans, friends. It is the day of the Silent Majority.
And we are moving into a period of repression that will make the McCarthy era seem like the Age of Enlightenment. I said that was the theme of this three-parter way back at the beginning of this outpouring, and as soon as I give you a few more loose ends on Dayton I’ll deal with Spiro, TV, the wave of fear that’s backlashing us, and try to pry some sense out of the rubble.
That night, after the mourners left, John Baskin, Barbara Benham and I sat and talked. We talked about John’s fury at what had happened, and how he had used the riotous scene to make some strong points with the kids about liberalism meaning nothing if you fold when the pressure’s on. We talked about Ray’s intentions of getting Barbara fired, and how it had been that, more than anything, that had kept me from putting Ray against the wall. We talked about the sudden appearance at the evening’s wake of Hugh McDiarmid, City Editor of the Journal Herald, and his amazing remark: “I wanted to meet you, Ellison. My God, you’re awfully small to have caused all this trouble.” We talked about my speaking to the final session of the science fiction workshop the next day ... in the Benham apartment.
The next day there was even more talk. But it all went on at the Center, with DeVelbiss and Ray talking to the faculty, talking to Barbara Benham, talking to the newspapers (the headline reads LIVING ARTS GUEST ‘DIDN’T FULFILL ROLE’), talking to each other and very probably talking to themselves.
Finally, I got a delayed case of being pissed-off. Here were these two “administrators,” down there at the Center, bumrapping me and telling the world their idiotic position was justified because I was a moral leper. I decided to really make waves. But when I finally confronted Ray and DeVelbiss in the Center, it was apparent if I pursued my plan—to insist they pay me the full fourteen hundred dollar fee, and use it to hire Asher Bogen, Dayton’s best attorney, and sue them for defamation of character and anything else I could think of—they would fire Barbara Benham out of serendipitous vengefulness. I backed off. In fact, I offered to stay on, at my own expense, and provide them with an opportunity to get off the hook by doing the evening lecture two days later, from material I would submit for their scrutiny.
But their position was so inflexible, they were unable to back off; thereby demonstrating the most debilitating aspect of educational confrontations: inability to mediate, refusal to deal, concretization of posture because of a need to preserve ego and authority.
So we made a deal, of sorts, after the following conversation:
ELLISON: I’ll take my money.
DeVELBISS: You turned it down when it was offered.
ELLISON: I changed my mind. I have a use for it now.
DeVELBISS: I don’t have to pay someone fourteen hundred dollars to come in here and curse and cause trouble. If I want to do that, I can do it myself, for free.
ELLISON: Yeah, but you were dumb enough to hire me to do it.
There was quite a lot more, and some threats, and some Raymond Chandler hardnosing, in which Mr. Ray understood that after I broke every bone in his body (though on reappraisal I realize if I’d broken him open, all I’d have gotten would have been jelly on my hands) I would sue him. Not the Center, but him, personally, so he’d have no Board of Education money behind him. And after that I’d speak to a friend of mine quite high in the Health, Education and Welfare Department, and I’d make sure that they cut back the funds of the Center just enough to have to dispense with him...nothing else, just him. So they paid me.
And they promised they wouldn’t fire Barbara Benham.
And, of course, they are honorable men. “So are they all, all honourable men—”
And so, I left Dayton.
* * * *
Neither as significant as the mass of current attempts to stifle dissent ... nor as permanent as the crimes committed against those who have spoken out, my Dayton foray was one with the terrors of these new times. What came out of those three days in mid-December? Only this:
John Baskin, who taught the sf class, who stood up and told the administration they were wrong, who tried to pursue the matter in articles for his newspaper, the Dayton Daily News, who inspired his class kids with discussions of just what freedom of expression means— John Baskin was fired from the newspaper. Perhaps there’s no connection. But . . .
Barbara Benham, who taught classes on revolution and the joys of being a “free spirit”—Barbara Benham has been cowed. Something has been stolen from her, at the precise moment it fell to her (as it falls to each of us) to discover whether she had enough courage to lose everything for that in which she believed ... she found she did not.
The kids no longer trust Glenn Ray or the administration of the Center. They have been blunted once again with the knowledge that those who prattle about serving them, opening them, helping them—are merely exploiting them for their own personal aggrandizement. Those kids will be a trifle more cynical and bitter now.
What came out of those three days was ugliness, cupidity, irrationality and, in microcosm, provide a key to the days into which we are moving.
* * * *
Time picked the Middle Americans as their man and woman of the year. It picked them because Spiro Agnew and television have forged out of the fears are prejudices and know-nothing provincialism of the mass of middle-class Americans an army of dupes, to be used to destroy the very freedoms those people say they most respect. Repression, in the name of platitudes, is what destroyed half of Europe in the Thirties and Forties. It is what gave Joseph McCarthy his power. It is what has kept us fighting a senseless war for half a decade. It is the systematic terrorization of those who—like Barbara Benham—have found it is easier to be a little bit frightened all the time, to acquiesce, to survive, than to ask the right questions, take the right chances, and discover for themselves that they are stronger than their puppet masters.
I watched William Buckley last Sunday, talking to three bright young men concerned with Our Times. He was glib, he was clever, and he made them look silly. But he dealt only with words. To hear him tell it, everything they chose to worry about—pollution, prejudice, repression, duplicity on the part of governments, censorship—all these were in their minds. It was merely a matter of using the right words. Even as Glenn Ray and Jack DeVelbiss and the man who fired John Baskin use words. They say we are “not doing the job,” or we are “foul-mouthed,” or we “don’t have the best interests of the Center at heart,” but these are just syntax. They are obfuscations. They are the eyewash used by men of weak will and frightened demeanor to keep the status quo free of waves.
And through the use of the greatest propaganda medium the world has ever known, television, the puppet masters are duping an entire nation. The thousands of letters in support of Spiro Agnew and his denunciation of newscasters who report any news but that which the Administration finds balming to its ego is eloquent testimony to the success of the hoodwinking.
It is significant, I think, that on December 3rd the Writers Guild took a gutsy stand against Agnew and his pronouncements. Their press release said, in part:
“The Writers Guild of America, West, viewed with abhorrence the attacks of Vice President Agnew on the right of news and editorial media freely to analyze and criticize statements and policies of the administration.
“We found it shocking that the second officer of the nation dared to suggest that the Constitutional guarantee of the First Amendment, embodying the fundamental right of free speech, may not apply to TV commentators and should perhaps be abridged in the press as well.
“We are concerned that the President himself has not repudiated this assault on spoken and written opinion.
“We are aware of the curiously coordinated chorus of support for these attacks by three cabinet officers, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and other office-holders. This kind of concerted pressure by Government on organs of public expression, and against individuals singled out by name, is exactly what we have condemned in our enemies.
“As writers who have faced censorship in many forms, we are not lulled by disclaimers that no censorship was implied, and condemn as repugnant and sinister any attack on the basic right of free expression. That right was meant to be exercised by Americans at any and all times, for or against any administration, policy or issue. That right was not meant to be altered or suspended following a particular speech, nor is it subject to any delays or qualifications imposed from above.”
I find the above curiously parallel to my situation in Dayton. And I find it significant that it was the writers who said it.
When I began writing this column, little over a year ago, my first column dealt with what I called “the illiterate conspiracy against dissent.” The war on counter-opinion. At that time I conceded that the attack was an unarticulated one, that no cabal of men actually sat down in a room and said this week we silence this one, and next week we get that one.
But even in one year the times have changed drastically. Faster than I’d thought possible. The conspiracy is open now. It comes down from the top. And because of its blatancy, men who were middle-of-the-road have been pushed to their left, have become Liberals. Liberals have been jammed over into being Activists. The Activists have, against their will, become Militants ... and the Militants, who saw what this year would become, have now hideously, horribly, without their wanting it... been crammed all the way over into the Revolutionary Blood and Death position.
Television has given Agnew and his ilk the platform from which to martial the fear and stupidity of the masses. And those of us who began the year with sanity and hope for change, now see the Middle Americans totemized as the epitome of rationality and patriotism. Now we find ourselves on the edge of a darkling plain, looking out across a time in this country when weak men like Glenn Ray and Jack DeVelbiss will conscience any degradation of their ethics and morality in the name of not being singled-out as The Enemy.
And the strong men will be picked off, one by one.
They will be gagged and tried and salted away. And the darkness will creep across this land.
Friends, you may not know it, but the war is on. The big war, and possibly the last war. It had a tiny skirmish in Dayton, and we lost it.
The puppet masters in Dayton are not evil men, they are merely weak men. And it is that weakness that will kill us. The fangs of Spiro bite deep.
* * * *
AFTERWORD: 30 JANUARY 70
ADDENDUM TO DAYTON
I was wrong. At least in one very important matter. After almost 10,000 words of copy relating what went on down in Dayton, Ohio during my two-day lecture/lynching, I’d thought I’d said it all.
But there is one more final fillip to be added to the confection. One that humbles me. Because, if you recall, I began part two of “Poisoned By The Fangs of “Spiro” with the comment that even the kids might not be able to save this country, because the poison of repression had seeped down into them, too. Whew! That’s what happens, friends. It gets so damned depressing, coming up against the cultural hari-kiri we keep committing, that cynicism becomes the only supportable attitude. And then the kids prove they’ve got it. Even I, anxious to give them every possible point, begin to suspect the rot goes from top to bottom, young and old alike. And then the kids do me in. They come up with solid gold, and make me feel like the idiot I certainly am, on occasion.
What I’m talking about is this: you recall I spoke to two high school groups in Dayton. One was a class of kids from Dunbar High. All black. They were hip, into it, really exciting kids to rap with. The other group was all white, middle to lower-middle class Appalachian kids. I reported they were deadheads, were offended by my manner and my language and my choice of lecture material. I reported they were responsible for inflaming their parents sufficiently at the “freak” who’d talked to them, to get those parents on the muscle against the Dayton Living Arts Center, which resulted in my being canceled.
That was incorrect reportage.
Barbara Benham of the Center has sent me a salient bit of information. Straight from the mouths of the kids.
Each of the classes was presented with “Student Evaluation Sheets” which were to be filled in with a) whether or not they enjoyed the presentation, b) whether or not they’d care to see similar presentations in the future and c) remarks on the lecturer’s performance.
I expected the Dunbar kids to rate me high. We’d done okay together. We’d related. But I also expected the kids from Wilbur Wright High School, the ones with whom I’d gotten nowhere, to really put me down. I present here the results of the two Evaluations.
DUNBAR STUDENTS: 17 evaluations received.
ENJOYED THE PROGRAM: 17
DID NOT ENJOY THE PROGRAM: 0
WOULD LIKE TO SEE A SIMILAR PROGRAM AGAIN: 17
WOULD NOT LIKE TO SEE A SIMILAR PROGRAM: 0
SOME REMARKS: “It’s something refreshing for the mind.” “He talked the same talk we talk.” “With him we could really get down and express our feelings.” “I enjoyed it because he told what he thought and because he showed you don’t have to go to college to learn things.” “Liked it because he talked on my level and tried to get everyone to talk.”
Yeah, great. But what about those Wilbur Wright kids whom I knew despised me and refused to even speak? How about them?
WILBUR WRIGHT STUDENTS: 22 evaluations received.
ENJOYED THE PROGRAM: 21
DID NOT ENJOY THE PROGRAM: 1 317
WOULD LIKE TO SEE A SIMILAR PROGRAM AGAIN: 22
WOULD NOT LIKE TO SEE A SIMILAR PROGRAM: 0
SOME REMARKS: “Enables one to meet someone from another walk of life. A few moments with an interesting person like him is worth a lifetime with a dull one.” “. . . He made all students think about the institutions . . .” “I enjoyed the program from the aspect of Mr. Ellison’s ideas, but I believe many of his thoughts were of a Utopian essence and I think the world the way he wishes it is somewhat hard to imagine. I was surprised that an association joined with the Board of Education would bring a person like Mr. Ellison to the Living Arts Center. His profanity during the program was uncalled for. To me, it seems that he was ... contradicting himself.” “I think that he was a good speaker, not because of his language but for his knowledge and experience.” “It really wasn’t long enough and each person could not talk to him privately.” “The speaker was certainly different from most. He was much freer, easy to speak with, and very frank .. .” “He was very open with us which I liked.” “I liked Ellison’s approach. He tried to get everyone involved. We didn’t talk anything about writing and that was our main objective. He did convey good ideas to me, though.” “Ellison told it like it was.” “He was frank and outspoken, but was an intelligent man who told things from experience. I could have listened to him all day! A marvelous person with a fantastic outlook on life.” “I liked it because it was not formal and the talking was open. There was nothing I didn’t like about the performance.” “... Programs like this are very valuable to high schoolers because we are preparing to take our place in society and we must realize what society is really like.” “If Mr. Ellison is going to be the speaker I wouldn’t care to attend any other program concerning any topic ...”
You know, I actually went for the okeydoke Glenn Ray laid on me, that I’d turned the kids off and hadn’t related to them. Which—added to my thoroughly misjudging and ignorantly putting-down those kids—goes to prove how muddied grow one’s perceptions, the longer on the firing line. And it even seems I managed to convey in my ham-handed fashion that Barbara Benham was a culprit. Not so. A victim, like all of us, yeah sure; and frightened, like all of us, yeah that too. But a bad guy ... no.
I owe apologies, herewith tendered. To Miss Benham, and to the kids of Wilbur Wright, who are infinitely wiser and groovier than any California mush-head come to tell them “where it’s at.” Once again, troops, you have showed me there is still hope, and you make it easier to fight the battles, big and small. Jesus, I feel good today.