INSTALLMENT 47: 18 OCTOBER 82

 

Letters reprinted with permission from the L.A. Weekly

 

He has nothing to do with this, except for something he wrote. His name is Eric Hoffer, an ex-stevedore turned philosopher, and he set down these words: “What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.”

The quote drifted across my mind as I started this week’s advisement in terror. I thought about that ooze-dripping Thing from Carpenter’s recent film, and the sleek scorpion-tailed Alien, and all the other supernatural and extraterrestrial horrors we see on the big screen. And I smiled with something like a death rictus when I realized that they would seem street correct with the rest of the strolling pedestrians in Winifred, Montana.

Because in Winifred, Montana the monsters wear Levis and farmer straws, and their minds are more alien than the most bizarre tentacled visitor from some far galaxy. Don’t take my word for it: ask Kathy Merrick.

You’d like Kathy Merrick. She’s shy, and polite, and intelligent. She and her husband, Happy Jack Feder (that’s his name), are the sort of quiet country young folks you’d instantly call decent.

And she walked the streets of Winifred in 1976, never realizing she was surrounded by monstrosities. When the knowledge came, it shattered her life.

She was single then, and teaching junior and senior high school English. Fairly fresh from receiving her degree, in her first job, and blissful about opening intellectual doors for the children of that rural community. Innocent. Untenured and vulnerable.

I might never have heard of Kathy, and you would not be reading these words today, had she not been turned onto a fantasy I wrote titled “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” discovered by her younger brother in one of my books in 1970. Kathy read it, thought it would be exciting for her students, and proceeded to teach it in a sophomore English class.

When they refused to renew her contract, they told her it was because she was teaching godless pornography, and they cited my story as the chief example.

You won’t find a word of self-defense for that story in this column. It’s one of the ten most reprinted stories in the English language, and if you have never read “godless pornography” it’ll be easy enough for you to locate. Judge for yourself.

Because she is, and was, shy, polite and decent, Kathy Merrick was bewildered. She had never come up against the specter of censorship before. Still reeking of blood from the Spanish Inquisition, the Scopes Monkey Trial and McCarthyism, the specter threw its shadow over Winifred, Montana and, as always, its victim was someone too innocent to mount a counterattack as ruthless as the demented accusations leveled in the name of “Decency, God and Country.”

She appealed to the school board. The Billings, Montana papers picked it up. The Montana Association of Teachers of English tried to come to her aid, as did the Montana Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union. She wrote me, and I wanted to be on the next plane, to appear before the kangaroo court. But they sent word I would not be permitted to speak, nor were any of the amicus groups allowed to speak. So, like Peter Zenger and Galileo and Giordano Bruno and Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman before her, young Kathy Merrick made her appeal to the unfinished minds of the Winifred school board. To those God-fearing, bible-spouting, righteously sanctimonious church-goers, smugly swaddled in their Christian charity to the full measure of their nasty, mingy burnt-toast heathen souls.

Life is tightfisted when it comes to dispensing happy endings.

Kathy Merrick was fired. Her teaching credential was tainted in Montana. She was forced to move out of town. For six years a woman who wanted to open doors for children had to wait tables to support herself.

In 1980 she married Happy Jack and this year she gritted her teeth and decided she was not going to let the Pod People keep her from her true purposes. She and Happy Jack live in Fairfield, near Great Falls, and she is teaching again.

But her innocence is gone.

On Tuesday, October 5th, I was invited to a screening of a half-hour documentary on The Moral Majority, produced by People For The American Way, an organization I’ve mentioned in these pages previously as the only streetwise outfit, on-line in Washington, D.C., that is fighting back against these grim reapers. The film is called “Life and Liberty…For All Who Believe.”

It is one of the most terrifying half hours of television you will ever see. And see it you will, tomorrow night, Friday, October 22, 8:30 PM on Channel 11. It cost $35,692 to buy that half hour.

See children throwing books onto flaming pyres, singing and laughing and clapping their hands in glee. Hear their parents saying this isn’t desecration, it’s a celebration of God. See James Robinson, the video preacher, exhorting his congregation with the idea that The Moral Majority must raise up a tyrant to make us think as they do. Hear Falwell tell you that it doesn’t matter what the real majority of Americans want, that this is a holy war and the rest of us must be made to believe as they do. See it all, friends, the freak show of the beatific! The three-piece-suited manipulators who have had their way so completely with this country for the past eight years that Doubleday, a major New York textbook publisher, will issue this fall a biology text in which the word evolution does not appear. See school teachers who have been fired and their lives crippled because they said to kids, “Well, what is your opinion of…” The Moral Majority wants narrow teaching, by rote, and opinions are not permitted.

See it all, narrated by Burt Lancaster, long a champion of free speech, the shiny face of that coin which sports, on its obverse, tarnished and scarred, the visage of Charlton Heston.

As I stood there on that Tuesday night, trembling in horror—it’s that sort of film—I heard Norman Lear ask the wealthy assemblage to pledge monies to buy airtime in the expensive video markets across America. Paul Newman bought Cleveland for $12,078. Stanley Sheinbaum bought Medford, Oregon for $1032 and Lansing, Michigan, $7680. Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus bought Austin, Texas for $3468. Vice-Chairman of Warner Bros. Ted Ashley bought a run in New York for $29,351 and a second run in L.A. for $35,692. Music mogul Jerry Weintraub, manager for Sinatra and John Denver among others, gave you tomorrow night’s screening here in Los Angeles.

Goldie Hawn had just bought Baltimore.

And there I stood, with mostly dust in my pockets, readers, because I was way out of my financial league with those people, and I heard someone say, “I’ll buy Billings, Montana because a woman who taught one of my stories there was run out of town.”

And it was me. I did a lecture last week, out of state, and they paid me $1500, and I gave that $1500 to People For The American Way so they can buy a half hour to show this urgently needed program in the area where Kathy Merrick’s parade got pissed on.

Except, flustered and broke as I was when I said I’d take Billings, the area that services Winifred, Montana is not Billings, it’s the Missoula-Butte market, and it costs a mere $744…and I ain’t got no more to give.

But if you’d like to fight back against the 11% of far right fanatics who think they can order our lives for us, then please watch Channel 11 tomorrow night at 8:30. Burt Lancaster will give you 800 numbers to call to make a pledge.

Five bucks, ten, a big twenty-five…even in these times when none of us has escaped Reaganomics…it all adds up. And if you earmark it for the Missoula-Butte, Montana market, then Kathy Merrick can turn on her set one night very soon and know that someone out here gave a damn that her life was fucked up by the alien things walking the streets of God-fearing America.

Because, for God’s sake, we’ve got to start fighting back before they set up concentration camps for all the rest of us Hell-condemned heathens.

 

—————LETTERS—————

 

Gun Control

Dear Editor:

As a gun owner, I take offense at the ravings of Harlan Ellison [Sept. 24–30, 1982] on the subject of gun control. His slander of gun owners is unconscionable. The vast majority are reasonable and sane, not the right-wing Neanderthals he purports us to be.

The arguments against gun control, which he so often decries, “guns don’t kill, people kill” and “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will own guns,” may be old slogans, but they still ring true. I grew up in New York City, which has one of the toughest gun control laws in the country; so tough that it is virtually impossible to buy a handgun. But it is obscenely easy to purchase a cheap firearm from any dealer at the “midnight gun store.” This fact makes a farce of the law and of respect for it.

There are presently enough laws on the books to punish anyone using a handgun in a crime (a person who would, of course, run out and register his “job tool” as soon as the law is enacted), without imposing unreasonable burdens on responsible citizens.

One more slogan to think about: “The difference between a long gun and a handgun is a hacksaw.”

To ease Mr. Ellison’s conspiratorial mindset, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the NRA or any other “gun lobby.”

As a taxpayer and regular voter, I urge every free-thinking citizen to vote NO on Proposition 15 on Nov. 3. Your freedom is in your hands. Don’t give it up.

—BobBeberfall 
    West Hollywood

 

Prop. 15

Dear Editor:

I am sure Harlan Ellison [September 24–30] is well motivated; we would all like to see an end to violent crime. Yet it is not clear that legislation like Proposition 15 would help. Unfortunately, Harlan’s frantic diatribe does nothing to clarify the issues.

I do not own a gun, though I certainly want the right to: Ellison’s contention that anyone who might want to own a handgun is a raving lunatic from the fringes of the far right; a neo-Nazi, a Falwellian fanatic, a gun-racked NRA desperado, a supporter of James Watt; or worse, is a specious proposition that appeals to our desire for simple solutions and to our most bigoted fears.

The simple fact is, today’s criminals do not purchase handguns through legal channels! The convicted felon is not allowed to, and the as yet unconvicted one is not going to give his name, driver’s license and gun serial number to the police. Moreover, a felon cannot be charged for not registering a handgun, because it violates his fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination. Catch 22: Proposition 15 would only serve to create technical criminals—otherwise law obeying folks who own a gun.

Our own history has shown amply the futility of outlawing the things that people want. Prohibition created a booming black market in alcohol and a vast criminal infrastructure to support it. Ellison knows that many of his own readers are violaters of a different prohibition: “putting all that good dope down your neck…or freebasing or whatever…” Since a large peer group does not disapprove, many people in California use drugs. The laws against drugs exist, but does the flow of contraband cease? Hell no, and the people who support this black market (your friends and mine) are not nearly as determined to “score” as is the criminal seeking a gun.

So tell me, Harlan, how do you expect this law to stop criminals from getting guns? It will probably work as well as it has in other states, where it hasn’t done a thing to stop gun related crimes anywhere: not in Massachusetts, not in New York City, not in Washington, D.C. Why should it work in California?

Do we really need to create another large, expensive bureaucracy to administer this law? Perhaps those millions of dollars annually could be better spent, for instance, on more police, so that we might really have a chance at stopping all this crime.

Finally, our constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms. That right may sound a little dated in 1982, but let us not take this venerable document lightly; it has served us well. Perhaps the framers of the constitution knew a thing or two. Remember, there is gun control in Poland.

—Michael Lawler 
Los Angeles