INSTALLMENT 28: 7 MAY 82

 

Last week I told some dude who wrote in telling me to go surfin’ and not to let the bad old nasty world get to me, that if he would accept just a smidge of the burden of the world, that I could knock off and have a vacation. The subtext, my blossoms, was that a teensy demonstration of courageous commitment would help detoxify my overweening need to get involved in so many “causes.” Courage and commitment are topical threads that run through these columns, have you noticed that?

Well, this week I offer you a painless way to put your suntanned carcasses on the line without danger. All it’ll take is two hours of your time next Monday night. Monday nights are dead, anyhow.

I won’t ask you to hike down through 120° heat to the Mexican border to support Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers. I won’t ask you to brave National Guard rifles legging it from Selma to Montgomery. I won’t ask you to mass in front of the Century Plaza Hotel to protest Johnson’s war in the Nam and risk getting a ’tac squad baton up your nose, like we did back in 1967.

All I’ll ask is that you join with hundreds—maybe thousands—of us who will be picketing in front of CBS Television City on the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Hollywood, between 9:00 and 11:00 at night, this coming Monday the 17th, to protest CBS’s cowardly cancellation of the Lou Grant series.

 

Photo: Gary Leonard

 

This protest is being jointly sponsored by Americans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union.

You will be in good company.

The company of those of us who understand that the ratings on Lou Grant was not the reason CBS canned what is, unarguably, one of the finest and most relevant shows ever to emerge from that charnel house of ashen cowardice and embalmed ideas known as the television industry. You will be in the company of those who can sweep away all the Uriah Heep disingenuousness of the spineless network executives who bowed to Falwell’s Moral Malignity and Wildmon’s pernicious Coalition for Redneck Television, and Reagan’s all-star hit squad of Chuck “El Cid” Heston and little Bobby Conrad, the town bully. You will be at one with those who are determined not to let the shadow legions take from us everything we prize by way of freedom of thought and speech, without one helluva fight.

Monday night the 17th. Nine o’clock to eleven, smack in the middle of that primetime window when we usually can rely on Asner and his co-stars to give us something to think about, as a brief respite from the profundities of those other, renewed, CBS winners—The Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum, P.I., Dallas, Simon & Simon and Knots Landing. Forget having your cat spayed; give a pass to washing your hair; shine on getting laid; definitely eschew a night of Coors and teevee. Be there or be square. You’re needed! All of you: the two-car split-level layabouts, the San Pedro bikers, the Hollywood Hills dilettantes, the Reseda shift-workers, the barrio hideaways, the Fairfax ghetto septuagenarians, the three-piece Beverly Hills gourmets, the UCLA frat rats and Powell Library bookworms, the Orange County crypto-liberals and all of you who bore the ass off your kaffee klatsch partners deploring the encroachment of the book-burners in our daily lives. All of you!

You’re so goddamned adroit at finding rat-hole rationalizations for not laying it on the line. This time there’s no out.

It’s not the loss of a television show that matters! It’s the reasons they did it! Kimberly-Clark pulls its spot ads from Lou Grant, Wildmon targets the show as evil, the White House sends out its yapping mouthpieces, and we are one step closer to the pit. Be there or be in peril of losing your mortal soul. Do I overdramatize? Sue me. But be there!

They were picketing at Fairfax and Beverly last Monday night, the 10th; there was a protest march in San Francisco; thousands have already begun deluging the President of Kimberly-Clark (whose products include Kleenex nose-wipe, Delsey ass-wipe, Kotex, New Freedom and Light Days feminine hygiene products, Huggies baby bottom wrappers and various other paper products from table napkins to cigarette papers employing the Kleenex trademark), Mr. Robert C. Ernest, with outraged postcards and letters advising him that Kimberly-Clark’s cowardly decision to abandon Lou Grant in the face of an idle boycott threat by the Falwell-Wildmon forces has infuriated them to the extent that they are refusing to buy Kleenex products.

An idle threat it is. Only the most fervid subscriber to Ronald Reagan’s oft-stated quote from Calvin Coolidge that “the business of America…is Business” is blind to the timidity and floating ethics of many great American corporations. (When Wildmon’s Coalition for Better Television linked up with the Falwell horde, and began threatening sponsor boycotts of shows the Fundamentalists considered “saturated with sex, violence and profanity,” such pillars of corporate mettle as Gillette, General Foods and Procter & Gamble caved in and ran scared before Wildmon had even released a list of targeted shows.) But an ABC-TV poll conducted last year produced the heartening statistic that as little as 1.3% of the total population would actually support boycotts of advertisers on shows they watched.

One would think that such monoliths of industry would just tell The Reverend Wildmon of Tupelo, Mississippi to go get stuffed. But they didn’t. They caved in and pulled their support from an array of series on all three networks. But they never copped to the reason they’d done it. It was always dissembling: “We feel our advertising dollars can be better spent elsewhere,” or “The ratings did not indicate we were reaching the desired demographic audience for our products.”

But Kimberly-Clark is the most flagrant case yet. They assault us night and day to buy their paper goods, but they won’t demonstrate any scrupulousness in the area of social conscience. They are forever taking out institutional ads advising us what models of probity they are, but they won’t even hang in there, in the face of empty threats from the fundaments called Fundamentalists, to support the First Amendment.

Why not join with the thousands already letting the Kleenex Krowd know you despise their craven behavior? Why not pause in the reading of this column to dash off a postcard or brief letter to Mr. Robert C. Ernest, President; Kimberly-Clark Corporation; North Lake Street; Neenah, Wisconsin 54956, to let him know that pulling his spot ads from Lou Grant permitted CBS to rationalize its cancellation of a show whose star had the courage to speak out against Administration policy. Why not do that, right now. It’ll take you three minutes.

I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you. If you’ll put down this column for three minutes to send such a telegram, or write such a postcard or letter, I’ll tell you a new joke I heard. It’s a terrific joke. How could anything be fairer?

Okay. Go do it. When you come back, I’ll be here humming to myself, and I’ll tell you a joke that’ll brighten your day.

Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm-dee-dee. Hmmm.

That was swell of you. Thank you. (I was humming Bizet’s L’Arlèsienne Suite No. 1 while you were away.) Here’s the joke.

God is taking a constitutional through Central Park in New York City, see. Just kind of a late evening stroll checking out the mugger population, and S/He passes this statue of Adam and Eve they have in Central Park. And S/He stops for a second, and looks at the statue thoughtfully, and S/He murmurs, “Why not?”

So God snaps the fingers and the statue comes to life.

“Look,” God says to the now flesh-and-blood Adam and Eve, “I’m going to give you an hour of life, since before everybody else was, you were, and now you ain’t but they are. You’ve got an hour, free and clear, to do what you want.”

So Adam, stark naked, looks at Eve, also starkers, and they both get all flustered and embarrassed and red in the face, and Adam says, very shyly, “Uh, er, you want to, uh, maybe go in the bushes and uh er…?”

And Eve, blushing furiously, says, “Uh-huh. That would be terrific.” So they rush off into the bushes and God stands there bemusedly, and in a moment S/He hears a thrashing and crashing and flailing of branches and uproar of such exertion that S/He smiles.

Half an hour later out come Adam and Eve, drenched in sweat, pink all over from their activities, grinning sheepishly and holding hands. So God looks at the Cosmic Digital S/He has on Her / His wrist, and S/He says, “But that was only half an hour. You’ve still got another thirty minutes to do anything you want.”

So naked Adam looks at naked Eve and he says, “You, uh, wanna go back and do it again?”

And Eve grins broadly and says, “Yeah, sure. Except this time you hold down the pigeons and I’ll piss on ’em!”

 

And on that note of jubilant pragmatism, I take my leave for another seven days and we will part smiling, and not be in contact again for another week unless you want to take a stand against the shadow legions and join me at 9:00 this Monday night, on the corner of Fairfax and Beverly Boulevard, in front of CBS, to carry a picket sign and let the spineless masters of tv’s fattest network know we think they suck runny eggs.

You can come up and say hi, if you like. You can’t miss me. I’ll be the angry guy wearing the Harlan Ellison cap, looking to see if the guy who told me to go surfin’ got back from Malibu in time to join us out there.