(NOTE: Ah-kah-sohm zape is “The Glass Teat” in Kiowa.)
And finally, here is a list of things Indians find offensive about portrayals of themselves on tv…quite apart from the outstanding gripe that Indians seldom play Indians, as mentioned at length last week.
One: Indians were not ruled by hereditary chiefs. The right of chief was won by contest, the most able and capable man becoming chief. Very few shows do this correctly; the only one that pops to mind immediately, god help us, was a segment of Superman.
Two: Indians did walk ten paces in front of their wives, but only because they carried the weapons and the wife was safer from attack if she walked behind her husband.
Three: Most tribes were not patriarchal, but rather were ruled by both a men’s and a women’s council. Some, in fact, could not make any decisions without the consent of the women. Female Liberationists please note.
Four: Indians had no qualms about attacking at night.
Five: One film depicted some very definitive Kiowa tortures which were exquisitely painful. Wrong. The Kiowas never tortured at all.
Six: Scalp-hunting was not native to the Amerinds. They learned it from, get ready, white bounty hunters, who were paid per scalp they produced.
Generally, tv and movies depict Indians anachronistically or completely incorrectly in language and dress, or hodgepodge it, using bits and pieces of entirely different tribes, many of whom never met one another save on reservations decades later. You see Sioux trappings on Kiowas, Comanches, Caddoes, Apaches, Utes, Wichitas, Navajos, etc. The same goes for languages. (One fink feature, Garden of Evil—starring Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, and Susan Hayward—had Yaquis all nicely Mohawked and done up in Eastern forest Indian costumes, though the locale of the story was supposed to have been Arizona and Mexico.)
None of this should surprise us too much. I’ve received letters from nurses and med students telling me how inaccurate most medical series tend to be; the column on hot lines last year conveyed the fears of real-life hot-line people about what the Matt Lincoln series would do to their image; why should the Indians be exempt from the hurried and inaccurate procedures of television production? Tv producers and network execs tend to dismiss this sort of complaint as simply beneath their notice.
After all, they say, we have x hours of primetime to fill. We can’t be bothered with trivialities.
Even as most middle-class whites can’t be bothered with the constant shrill complaints of blacks or Chicanos or Amerinds. It is just an enormous pain in the ass, and an imposition on their time.
On the other hand, which is more of an imposition: going to the trouble to tell it (forgive the phrase) as it was and is, or getting a tomahawk in the head or a coup stick in the front yard?
Or, as Russell Bates would put it:
Gya-poy-dah.
Which means Peace.
Yeah. Sure.
95: 12 FEBRUARY 71
HOW I CAME TO LOVE PEGGY LIPTON: Part One
It occurs to me belatedly, just seven weeks away from this column’s demise, that though I have imparted in the past three years the most intimate details of my private life (and though I know I’ll get at least half the specifics in this wrong, it reminds me of Alexander Woollcott’s [or Wolcott Gibbs’s or H. L. Mencken’s] review of a book about snails [or ants or tortoises or something] in which he said, “The author told me almost more than I cared to know about snails.”), I have somehow failed to mention Ms. Eusona Parker. The remarkable, magical Eusona Parker.
Ms. Parker and I have been together for going on eight years, maybe going on nine, who’s counting? Eusona is my housekeeper. I never make the mistake of saying, “Eusona has been with me…” or of calling her my maid. A guest of dubious quality, at a party I threw a while back, made the error of taking Ms. Parker for a “maid,” and of asking her for a glass of something or other, and was frozen solid in her tracks by Eusona’s sweetly poisonous suggestion that she just go off and find the drink herself, honey, “I’m a guest here myself.” Uh-uh, Eusona is nobody’s maid. She is my partner and I’d damned well better not forget it.
At the risk of doing one of those nice Jewish lady numbers about how much a part of the family is the Negro nanny, and how much she loves the children, just as if they were her own, I must state flatly that I love, respect, and admire Eusona Parker more than all but one of the deadbeats to whom I am related by blood. She has saved my sanity more than once, and the only time she ever deserted me was during my 45-day marriage quite a few years ago to the carnivorous plant who was briefly but disastrously my third wife. Eusona refused to enter the same house with that creature, which should have been an instant tip-off to me. But then, as the world knows, I ain’t terribly bright sometimes.
Quite apart from keeping the slovenliness of my nature from suffocating me in dust and dirty laundry, Ms. Parker is my gazette. She reads everything—including periodicals like National Review and the Free Press, for which I have neither the time nor the stomach—and clips pertinent data For My Eyes Only. She also listens to the radio a lot. (In point of fact, for the first three years of our relationship, I thought Eusona was hard of hearing, because she went about her work with an earplug jammed into her head. It was only when it slipped out one day, and I heard the tinny tones of a Dodgers’ ball game, that I realized she was hooked into a transistor radio, nestling in her apron pocket.)
Thus, because of the incredible amount of information she has laid on me, I find it amazing that only now should I reveal her to you as a pivotal member of my “staff.” But because of The Thunderbolt that oversight has been corrected, thereby providing the one and only justification for that racist newspaper’s existence in my world.
You see, Eusona brought me a copy of The Thunderbolt a couple of weeks ago, and in it I found the meat for this week’s column. That her act of information-dissemination would result in a column, I’m sure Eusona had no doubt; but that the column would preamble with comments about her, she could not have suspected. Thereby, for the first time in eight or nine years, putting me one up on Eusona Parker. It is a heady feeling, and one I expect to last only until she reads this column and rearranges every damned thing in the kitchen so I can’t locate colander or cookware, once again effectively putting me in my place.
Ah, but till then! Till then, I will tell you about The Thunderbolt and the wonders contained therein.
You see, The Thunderbolt is a “White Man’s Paper” out of Savannah, Georgia. Its masthead proclaims it as The White Man’s Viewpoint and further states the paper contains: The News Suppressed by the Daily Press. Now, since we all know the daily press suppresses the left position on most news happenings, I was all aflutter to encounter this additional underground proof that it also suppresses the right position. (Thereby, naturally, leaving no position at all, if we are to give in to our multifarious paranoias.)
I’ll avoid listing all the exposés of Zionist conspiracies The Thunderbolt has unearthed—from a subversive attempt on the part of the Synagogue Council of America to get Jewish kids exempt from the draft on religious grounds, to a senses-shattering study of Israel’s secret espionage network—on the grounds that I feel slighted: what I mean is, I’m a Jew, see, and if the universe is really being run (as The Thunderbolt assures us) by an International Kike-Zionist Jew-Commie Money Conspiracy, they must be playing favorites, because nobody’s let me in on the deal, and I’m pissed off. I want my share!
So we’ll move right on to the other deadly menace The Thunderbolt perceives so clearly.
The niggers.
(A philosophical aside, first, however. If one is a supporter of the views of The Thunderbolt, I guess it is rational to think of everything in terms of black/Jew takeovers, just as it would be rational, if one were a maggot, to conceive of the limits of the world being the inside of a rancid garbage bucket.)
On page 5 of the issue at hand (issue #131, November 1970), there is a wonderful scientific article pillorying public schools for not teachin
g racial differences, and the article is supported with visual documentation of the differences between darkies and The White Man. Such lovelies as diagrams of the facial angle of skulls, from which we learn that the angle of a gorilla’s skull is 60 degrees, a Negro’s is 70 degrees and a Whiteman’s [sic] is 82 degrees. And the legend under these diagrams reports, “Intelligence can be guaged [sic] by the percentage angle of the frontal brain [sic]. In the Negro, the fore brain is restricted.”
Well, sir!
To the right of this inescapable evidence of Negro inferiority is the (clearly retouched) photo of an African native—tribe not mentioned—wearing a short-sleeved pima cotton shirt, undistinguished slacks rolled to mid-shin, and nothing else (though there is a black line around the left wrist that looks suspiciously like a watchband, thereby giving the lie to the bold inference that this is an aborigine). The retouching seems to be in the area of the bare feet, which look like fishtails. The legend under the badly printed picture reads:
A rare photo of one of the two-toed tribesmen.
They can run like the wind.
(Note archaic facial features, clothing was loaned
for photo, animal skins are regularly worn.)
And on the same page there is an illustrated item about “sacral spots” on newborn children, attempting to prove that Negro babies and monkeys have such spots in common.
As you can see, this is a tasty little newssheet.
Logically, at this point, those of you who know I do my utmost to tie these columns in with what comes over the tube must be asking, “Where does tv come into it?” Well, it does, and I’ll get to that in a moment, in plenty of good time, friends, but let me set the milieu for you just a trifle more solidly:
Page 7 is a letters page, and smack in the center of the five-column sheet is a letter with the headline: Race Survival at Stake, and it goes like so:
“As time rapidly passes the situation grows increasingly worse. This situation of interracial mixture! Does no one give a damn about the young and the poor!
“Our White working class is falling into a plague of miscegenation!
“Our youth is also in the same situation!
“The mixing is not so much as with Negroes as with Mongolians.
“There are 1,000,000 Asians and almost 9,000,000 colored Mexicans, several thousand other, plus new colored immigrants pouring into the U.S.
“They marry our youth, our poorer, middle classes and spread to the rich masses and masses of little brown ones come into being, but no one cares!
“This is legalized Genocide, it is death of Whites. It’s extermination of the Goyim: according to the Protocols of the learned elders of Zion!
“Do something! Do something! This is more important than anything that’s ever happened, we are being murdered!
“These mixed marriages must be prevented, there must be inexpensive literature, which will break the ideas of ‘Equal’ Social ‘Dances,’ immorality, expose the enemy working which are destroying us. These Jews, U.N., sick Liberals are our enemies.
“Do something, we are dying.
“C.W., Savannah, Georgia.”
Apart from the illiterate punctuation and syntax (which I trust the sick liberal typesetters of the Freep have not corrected as all such enemies of the Whiteman persist in so doing), this is the healthiest item in The Thunderbolt. It is merely moronic and uninformed and cataclysmically paranoid.
(You won’t believe the letter on page 6 headlined: 15 Yr. Old Pasadena Girl Tells of School Terror, in which a tenth-grade Blair High School girl who signs herself “Miss K.S.” tells how “last year my seventeen year old brother was beaten by a mob of wild Niggers, when he did not give them money,” or this heroic child’s struggle against having her precious bodily fluids polluted by the physical education department that insisted she swim in the school pool where—echh!—niggruhs had swum. “I would never go into a swimming pool where there has been or are Niggers in it. I refused to take swimming for that reason. My mother phoned the Board of Education and stated as such. They could not understand such a thing as they said no one had ever refused to take swimming for that purpose. My mother told them she was proud that I was the first one to refuse, but she prayed I wouldn’t be the last…The next day I was told by the head physical education teacher that ‘the Niggers are the same as the Whites, and the skin was the only difference!’ I told her maybe they were as good as her, but they sure were not as good as I am!” It goes on like that for a full column, and the strongest wish I had after reading it was not that this idiot child’s playmates whip her as soundly as her brother got whipped, but that her dear old mother should need a transfusion that could only be supplied with a black man’s blood. After which I’d make a hegira to Pasadena to offer the sweet woman a bucket of chitlins. But…I grow vicious. Onward.)
How all this plugs into the nipple of the great glass teat is in two featured articles dealing with miscegenation and the Jew Conspiracy on television.
I offer these items here in an attempt to give a fully rounded view of tv as seen by not merely my sick liberal Jew conspirator enemy eyeballs, but by the sane and rational world of the Whiteman that lies out there between Ellay and N’yawk.
96: 19 FEBRUARY 71
HOW I CAME TO LOVE PEGGY LIPTON: Part Two
SYNOPSIS OF THE THRILLING PART ONE: Mortally wounded by the henchmen of the murderous Baron Von Strycker, our noble hero, Harlan the Good, managed to introduce his readers to his housekeeper, an amazing woman named Eusona Parker. Ms. Parker, a power behind the throne, then gave Ellison the magic talisman The Thunderbolt, a white racist newspaper out of Savannah, Georgia. Ellison, bleeding profusely from the death-bolt attack of the Baron, segued from a character sketch of Ms. Parker into an analysis of The Thunderbolt dealing chiefly with that rag’s world-view of everything wrong in this country being the result of a Jewish-Liberal Money Conspiracy or a Nigger Takeover. Still not having tied it all in to tv, Ellison cited extensively from the newspaper, quoting paranoid racist letters and articles. His last words, bubbled out through bloody lips, were:
“I offer these items here in an attempt to give a fully rounded view of tv as seen by not merely my sick liberal Jew conspirator enemy eyeballs, but by the sane and rational world of the Whiteman that lies out there between Ellay and N’Yawk.”
All of this, amazingly, without once mentioning Peggy Lipton! The question burning on everyone’s lips is: What the hell is that moron Ellison up to now?
For the stunning answer to this and other unasked questions, not the least of which might be Whatever Happened to Baby Leroy? or How Many Cases of Shelled Walnuts Were in the Hull of the Andrea Doria When It Sank? go on to the SENSES-SHATTERING SECOND INSTALLMENT (ohgodohgodohgodohgod)!
Two outstanding articles of unbiased reportage from The Thunderbolt rivet our video attention and justify this column.
Article the first, on page 1 of TT, concerns itself with the refusal of the Federal Communications Commission—heretofore a singularly weak-willed operation—to renew licenses for far-right racist clergymen Dr. Carl McIntire (you remember him, the fathead who tried to bring Premier Ky over from Vietnam to propagandize at a monster rally in New York, till Nixon told him to stop making waves and, frankly, to fuck off) and Dr. Bob Jones of “Bob Jones University.”
(Note carefully, fellow readers, how bigots confuse the issue by taking their racist stands in the name of Patriotism.)
McIntire’s WXUR underwent a nine-month series of hearings and the examiner approved the application for renewal, despite outraged cries of dozens of different organizations on the Left and Right, reporting he had found “only isolated infractions” of biased programming of right-wing and racist opinions; but he was reversed (as The Thunderbolt puts it, in a snit of pique) “almost overnight by the FCC who found Dr. McIntire in violation of the ‘fairness doctrine’ [The Thunderbolt’s outraged italics, not mine] in not broadcasting both sides of the political issues discussed.”
A
fter divesting ourselves of huzzahs for this finally meaningful stance by the FCC, consider the quote by The Thunderbolt, and file it under the heading impartial reportage, Savannah Division: “Your editors do not know of any cases in which leftist owned radio and tv stations have granted equal time to Patriots to answer all the slanted news, editorial comments and slanted views they continuously spew forth.”
Earlier in the article TT bleats, “While there has been this wholesale purging of Rightists from the air waves, the left wing has become more blatant in their [sic] use of this media [sic] to spread poison against [I think they mean on, sic again] American traditions and heritages. Even openly pro-communist stations such as the ‘Pacifica Network’ has [sic] not been subjected to any similar threats to their licenses.”
It goes on and on, of course, pleading the hideous fates that have befallen such Men of God as McIntire and Jones, a pair of latter-day Elmer Gantrys whose mixture of redneck Oral Roberts harangue and sump water bigotry has netted them millions in dollar contributions from weak-minded little old ladies and Minutemen mired down in the Great American Swampland. To quote further would only serve to boggle the mind more and make the gorge become more buoyant when one realizes that poor, ineffectual, gagged, and handcuffed Carl McIntire is the same chinless purveyor of prejudice who bought Canaveral, Florida—lock, stock, and Hilton—for something between $23 and $40 million. Somehow I cannot work up The Thunderbolt’s outrage that this slimy imbecile has been denied at least one outlet for his verbal hysterics.
As for Dr. Bob Jones, “the renown [sic] Christian minister,” the loss of two licenses last May 7 of stations he owned makes me love the FCC just a little more. (Jones was scuttled, incidentally, by two “Black militants in Mississippi, Aaron Henry and Rev. Robert L. T. Smith,” who got Jones’s WLBT-TV license canceled on appeal to the Supreme Court. And get this comment by TT, fellow left-wing Commiesymp conspirators: “Nixon’s phony ‘conservative’ appointee, Chief Justice Warren Burger headed the three judge panel hearing the appeal. Burger actually reprimanded the lower board which approved the license for ‘placing the burden of proof on the citizens who accused the station of promoting segregation.’”