INSTALLMENT 30: 7 JUNE 82

 

The Spawn of Annenberg, Part I

Memories of being on Death Row at San Quentin twelve years ago rush back to me this week as I read TV Guide.

My then-attorney, pre-Henry Holmes, was Barry Bernstein. We were, and are, friends. He had smuggled me into Q in the guise of a law clerk. He thought I might like to write a column about a man whose appeal he was handling, who had been convicted of beating to death his common-law wife’s five-year-old son. I was fascinated, but I did not like it. Not a moment of it. That was in 1970. In 1973, for another newspaper than this one, I wrote two columns about that day in the joint. Between the visit and the writing of the columns, the judgment of Murder One was reversed; and in October of 1979 the man fulfilled the final requirements of his parole and, today, when I had these thoughts I will impart in a moment, I called Sacramento to find out from the state Parole Board what had happened to the man with whom I had visited on Death Row, before the Death Penalty had been outlawed. I was told the man was now totally free of jurisdiction of the Parole Board, that he had been fully rehabilitated, that he had paid his debt to society, and they had no idea where he was. I am not using his name. I don’t have the right to muck about with his new life.

Yet the memory of him there in that tiny interview cubicle, that day in September of 1970, of what he revealed of himself, still frightens me. I sat and listened to a creature human in form, but utterly alien in nature. I hope to God he has been thoroughly rehabilitated—as I am told the wife who now appears on television speaking out against child abuse has been rehabilitated—but the clear memory of him persists, and knowing he is out there somewhere…still frightens me.

Most frightening, most non-human, was the moment when he manifested what penologists and psychiatrists refer to as Ganser’s Syndrome.

I said to him (it’s been twelve years and I have to approximate this), “The trial record says you kicked the boy to death. Is that true?” And he replied, “I always wear tennis shoes. They’re not hard shoes, you know.”

Ganser’s Syndrome (first described by the German psychiatrist Sigbert Ganser [1853–1931]) is a relatively rare reaction pattern also known as “the syndrome of approximate answers.” It occurs primarily in prisoners awaiting criminal trial, and secondarily in patients under examination for commitment to mental institutions. The answers these individuals give are always related to the question, but at the same time are absurd or beside the point. Authorities disagree as to whether Ganser’s Syndrome is a psychosis, a psychoneurosis, or the result of low mentality. That it has a psychotic flavor cannot be denied, and some investigators suggest that the loss of rationality is an unconscious attempt to reject the total self and its life history.

Ganser’s Syndrome is a variety of what is generically termed paralogia. False, illogical thinking, found particularly in schizophrenic reactions. That conversation on Death Row came back to me as I read TV Guide’s June 5–11 issue. Paralogia. We go step-by-step. Follow me, if you will.

I quote from THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR: “Paralogical thinking may take many forms. A subject who is preoccupied with his own subjective thoughts and fantasies may give answers that reflect his interests and attention narrowed to a point where his thinking becomes restricted and unrealistic. Some subjects draw false inferences to protect themselves from the truth. In one case a schizophrenic patient learned that his girl friend, with whom he had never had intercourse, had become pregnant. He immediately concluded that the conception was immaculate, that the girl was the Virgin Mary, and that he himself was God. Paralogia may also take the form of distorting reality to conform to personal desires or delusional ideas. If a nurse smiles at a schizophrenic patient it may be enough to convince him that she is his mistress. If a paranoid sees two people looking his way while conversing, he is apt to conclude that they are talking about him, to his detriment. Paralogical thinking is sometimes described as prelogical or paleological thinking, since the thought processes are similar to those found in children and primitive man.”

Accepting this theory, paralogia represents a regression to the stage in human development when the mind was dominated by feeling and perception rather than by logic and reasoning.

Remember that. By the end of all this it will tie in with the horrors of the Me Decade, est and Lifespring and transactional analysis and Scientology and Skinnerian behavior modification. But most of all with Walter Annenberg, Ronald Reagan, anti-intellectualism and the insidious, omnipresent, socially corrosive indoctrinaire power of TV Guide in aid of reactionary attitudes for the past thirty years.

What we have this installment is an attempt at rational thought—not my natural tongue—as opposed to hysterical screed, in the latter of which, some of you have suggested, it is that I indulge too frequently in it, which. That. Let’s see how well you respond to painstaking ratiocination.

Back to paralogia. As exemplified by a letter from one of this column’s readers, who pilloried me for my attack on Brian De Palma’s films, featuring gratuitous and graphic brutality against women, on the grounds that The French Connection was a film filled with violence, where a cop commandeers a car from an innocent motorist, chases a criminal through the streets of New York, smashes other cars en route, almost runs down a plethora of pedestrians, and then wrecks the guy’s car. Paralogia. What the one film has to do with the others, I do not know. There is no approval (or even mention) of The French Connection in my essays; the appropriation of a car in the heat of pursuit bears no relation to sticking an icepick in a woman; paralogical thinking strikes again.

A similar reordering of reality manifested itself in TV Guide June 5–11. On page A-2 of the Los Angeles Metropolitan edition we find the usual editorial “As We See It.” While it was very likely not written by the President of Triangle Publications, Inc., publishers of TV Guide, the honorable Walter H. Annenberg, it damned well straight reflects his thinking, and has done so for three decades. Let me quote, in part, from that editorial.

“Ed Asner, the outspoken actor who stars as tough-talking editor Lou Grant, recently denounced, with soapbox bombast, CBS’s cancellation of his series. ‘…I find it shallow that the network wouldn’t have exerted itself on behalf of the show, especially so that the yahoos of the world couldn’t claim another victory in their attempt to abridge free speech.’ Whoa, let’s back up there a minute, Ed…Lou Grant, good as it once was…in 45th place is where you were likely to find Asner’s series…As for the ‘yahoos,’ Asner obviously meant those poor, misguided souls who had the temerity to object to, among other things, his pledge to raise $1 million to buy medical supplies for leftist guerrillas in El Salvador.

“More recently, Asner has even accused the White House of putting political pressure on CBS to cancel his series. Asner must be suffering delusions of grandeur if he thinks this Nation’s leaders have no more important matters to worry about than a foundering series or its egotistical star…. This, Ed, makes you the biggest yahoo of them all.”

Before I take you to the very next page of that issue of TV Guide to tie the paralogical knot, let us examine the suppositions presented as fact in that little snippet of editorial. First, the yahoos of whom Asner spoke are clearly and obviously the minions of Falwell, Wildmon and the other cadres of the Repressive Fundamentalist Right. The Moral Majority yahoos who’ve been so busy attenuating freedom of speech all across the board, from pushing creationism to pulling books from public libraries to having schoolteachers fired for dissenting views. Second, the souls who objected to Asner’s humanitarian efforts are neither poor nor misguided. They are powerful corporations like Kimberly-Clark, the Kleenex sponsor that withdrew its spots from Lou Grant, one can properly conjecture, because it operates a large factory in El Salvador. And third, how outrageously paranoid is it for stupid, uninformed, egotistical Ed Asner to suspect that “this Nation’s leaders” spend their spare time harassing those who speak out. How foolish of him to think that the chivvying of Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman or Marlon Brando might preshadow what’s happened to him. How egomaniacal of him to think that the government’s smear campaign of Jean Seberg, that drove her to suicide, might indicate a capacity for malice on the part of this Nation’s leaders. How self-centered of him to remember all the people blacklisted during the HUAC and Joe McCarthy eras. How shallow of him to think that this Nation’s leaders, knowing of J. Edgar Hoover’s endless harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., no doubt creating a climate in which the likes of a James Earl Ray would pull the trigger, and doing nothing to stop it, might suggest a Nation’s leaders who are capable of sicking the dogs on an actor who has the temerity to exercise his First Amendment right to speak out. Yeah, what a paranoid, ego-crazed yahoo Ed Asner is.

And what a horrifying example to the rest of us. We smaller fish are supposed to be scared shitless. If they can wound someone as securely positioned as an Asner, what the hell chance have we minnows got? The chance of a snail in a bucket of salt. The chance of a snowball in a cyclotron. That is called terrorization by example.

And the example is brought home to us forcibly by TV Guide, Mr. Annenberg’s mouthpiece with a circulation of 17 million weekly, the largest selling magazine in America…where paralogia rears its cockeyed head on page A-3, chockablock with the editorial telling Ed Asner that he’s a yahoo because he thinks his show was cancelled by this Nation’s leaders, when it is obvious that the show was cancelled because it was in 45th place out of 108 programs in the Nielsen ratings.

On page A-3 the New York bureau chief of TV Guide, Neil Hickey, trumpets as follows: “Taxi lives! The Emmy-award-winning series that ABC recently cancelled has been retrieved from the ash heap by NBC, dusted off and will grace that network’s lineup with freshly minted segments sometime next season…Taxi’s fans were desolate when ABC dumped the series, which has generally gotten high marks from critics as one of primetime television’s less banal offerings. But its numbers slumped to 26 percent of the audience last season, and the show ended up in 53rd place…”

Do you perceive the manifestation of paralogical thinking? On the left-hand page Lou Grant was cancelled because it was in 45th place, and it serves the dumb CommieSymp Asner right for shooting off his big bazoo…and on the right-hand page Taxi has been “retrieved from the ash heap,” “dusted off,” and “will grace” with “freshly minted segments” next season’s primetime viewing. But Taxi was in 53rd place!

Now I think Taxi deserves to be saved, as well as does Lou Grant. Both are series of merit. I make no quibble with the good sense of NBC in restoring it to the air, though NBC’s decision not to pick up Lou Grant may also say something about the overall situation.

You see, TV Guide on the right-hand page goes into panegyrics about how Emmy-winning has been Taxi’s history, but on the left-hand page they ignore Lou Grant’s honors in that area.

The simple fact is that each of the shows has won exactly the same number of Emmys. Twelve each.

And TV Guide doesn’t exactly tell the truth when it says “45th place is where you were likely to find Asner’s series.” Here are some Nielsen ratings. Beginning with the week of 6 January, and ending with the week of 23 May, the Nielsen standings of Lou Grant were as follows: 17/43/53/36/53/21/56/58/53/41/37/41/42/39/31/48. What you may not know, however, though these standings are about on a par with what Taxi was doing, and noticeably better most weeks of that period, is that Lou Grant does spectacularly well in the rerun months, ending up last year at something like 17th out of 108.

So hurray for Taxi at 53, but fuck you Asner with Lou Grant at 45. I couldn’t have stomped that kid to death: I wear tennis shoes.

So why, we might well ask ourselves, dealing rationally and not emotionally, does TV Guide go out of its way to fudge the facts to make Ed Asner look like what it is the White House has been telling us he is, a dangerous subversive who should not be afforded a public platform from which to spout his “soapbox bombast?”

Well, when I continue this long and step-logical series of observations next week, I will suggest some answers. Dealing with Mr. Annenberg and his chum Mr. Reagan, dealing with those of us who have survived the Me Decade, dealing with intellect as opposed to emotion, and dealing with TV Guide as a tool of the anti-intellectual worshippers of the Common Man in their heroic and unceasing crusade to keep us stupid and malleable.

But I promise I won’t get all hysterical about it.