Harlan Ellison on 'The Mass'

[Substitute current politicians, current technologies, and current TV characters, and this 40-year-old article still perfectly applies to America in 2008.]

Walking the streets these days and nights are members of the Television Generation. Kids who were born with TV, were babysat by TV, were weaned on TV, dug TV and finally rejected TV. These kids are also, oddly enough, members of the first Peace Generation in history, members of the Revolution Generation that refuses to accept the possibility that if you don't use Nair on your legs you'll never get laid.

But their parents, the older folks, the ones who brought the world down whatever road it is that's put us in this place at this time -- they sit and watch situation comedies. Does this tell us something? Particularly in a week where prime-time was pre-empted for major political addresses by the gag-and-vomit boys, Humphrey and Nixon? It tells us that even in a year when the situation facing us is so politically bleak that optimists are readying their passports for Lichtenstein and pessimists are contemplating opening their veins, that the mass is still denying the facts of life. The mass is still living in a fairyland where occasionally a gripe or discouraging word is heard. The mass has packed its head with cotton. The mass has allowed its brains to be turned to lime jello. The mass sits and sucks its thumb and watches Lucy and Doris and Granny Clampett and the world burns around them.

It goes to something stronger than merely one's personal taste in television shows. It goes straight to the heart of an inescapable truth: if the world is going to be changed, gang, if we're going to find out where the eternal verities have gone, if we're going to rescue ourselves before the swine mass sends us unfeelingly and uncaringly down the trough to be slaughtered, we have to face it: they will not help us. They will applaud now that LBJ has stopped the bombing, but they see no inconsistency in having beaten and arrested all the clear-sighted protesters who said it three years ago, before how many thousands of innocent cats got their brains spilled? And now that what those protesters protested has come to pass, will they rise up and say free them, reinstate them, honor them?

We know the answer to that.

The answer is: they're too busy watching Gomer Pyle cavort around in a Marine Corps that never gets anywhere near jellied gasoline and burning babies.

Dear God, we must face the truth: for the mass in America today, the most powerful medium of education and information has become a surrogate of Linus's blue blanket.

A ghastly glass teat!


--Originally published in the Los Angeles Free Press, November 8, 1968, and later collected in the Ace edition (not the first, but the one I was still able to get a copy of) entitled The Glass Teat (1983)

Stephen King on The Difference Between Men and Boys

"Before drifting away entirely, he [Mark Petrie] found himself reflecting--not for the first time--on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

"In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys."

--From 'Salem's Lot (1975)