Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed: Essays by Ellison Harlan

Author:Ellison, Harlan [Ellison, Harlan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497604353
Amazon: 1497604354
Goodreads: 21846070
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1984-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

FEAR NOT YOUR ENEMIES

This argument for gun control, written shortly after the December, 1980 murder of John Lennon, appeared in the adult fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, which is referenced several times within the piece.

John Lennon’s on the menu. The worms are having him for dinner.

It’s a fucking banquet: Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Luke Easter, Sarai Ribicoff, Stella Walsh, Lyman Bostock, Michael Halberstam, and one hundred and fifty assorted nonentities slaughtered each week, every week, here in our macho democracy. Nonentities, that is, to all but the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children, lovers and friends to whom each of those nonentities meant something.

I’d have included JFK in that list, but we all know that executive ticket-punch was part of a giant conspiracy.

And I don’t want to bother with pitiful little conspiracies that include only maybe the CIA, the Mafia, the FBI, the Dallas police, Communists and anti-Castro terrorists. That kind of conspiracy is shirred eggs and squashed potatoes. What I like dealing with is the big conspiracy, the one you’re part of.

Thought we didn’t know you were high up in the order of the big cabal, didn’t you? Thought we didn’t notice, right? Well, we noticed; so don’t go slobbering over the loss of John Lennon, you cowardly punk. Don’t beat your breast as you stand out there in the cold behind the NYPD sawhorses across the street from the Dakota, kiddo. We’re on to you, and as far as I’m concerned you’re as guilty as Mark David Chapman of pumping those four shots into Lennon’s back.

You didn’t cry for 69-year-old ex-Olympic star Stella Walsh on December 4th when some sonofabitch left her face-down in the parking lot of a discount department store on Cleveland’s near East side, wiping out the 65 track records she set in her extremely worthy lifetime. You didn’t cry when Luke Easter was blown away on March 29, 1979 outside the Cleveland Trust; probably because you didn’t give a shit that that old black man hit twenty-five homeruns in two months in 1949 and played a lot of first base for the Indians. You didn’t cry for twenty-three year old Sarai Ribicoff, senselessly shot to death in the course of a petty holdup outside Chez Helene in LA’s Venice section; most likely because she was Senator Abe Ribicoff’s niece and a Jew and a newspaper reporter and hell, that’s three strikes right there; no pity for the rich, the powerful, the vocal and the members of the International Money Conspiracy. And you’re probably only wailing over Lennon because it’s in the air and gives you a chance to vent some of your fear and frustration. But you belong to the big cabal, chum, and we see through your disingenuous sorrow.

You started your membership sucking up the BB gun ads in copies of The Incredible Hulk and Batman comics. You paid dues every time you sat in a movie theater and watched the fever-sick violence dreams of Dressed To Kill or The Texas Chain

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