Now this is a real liberal! The great writer, Harlan Ellison

For those who don't know, Harlan Ellison is one of the great fantasy/essay writers of the last fourty years. He has one an amazing amount of awards for writing and he is responsible for the single best script of Star Trek ever, the wonderful, The City On The Edge Of Forever. He also wrote the story, Soldier, who's premise was later stolen by James Cameron, for the movie, Terminator. Harlan didn't win any money, in a court case against Cameron, but he hates that overrated director of Titanic ever since.

Harlan has a site, harlanellison.com that has a very smart, message board or very able people. Harlan himself makes regular appearances. If you like, see the board some time. But be careful, Harlan does not suffer fools. Dumb questions will suffer his wrath.

Way back when someone posted on his board about how he was a Republican and a conservative, and that NOTHING WOULD EVER CHANGE HIS MIND; not proof, evidence, nothing. Here is what Harlan wrote in response. Classic :

"FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, A MANIFESTO
STAN in OAKRIDGE, OREGON:

While I find your strong assertion that "I'm a Republican and a Conservative and NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND" a statement of profound sadness, a statement of blindered and concretized closemindedness -- Bernard Berenson: "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago" -- I assure you that what I say here would be identical in tone and passion to what I would say if someone had posted "I'm a Democrat and a Progressive and NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND."

Can you, in fact, perceive the intensity of my sincerity when I urge you to abandon that dead-end intellectual cul-de-sac? I truly do not give a hoot what you believe to your soul's depths, nor care what useless labels you attach to yourself -- realist, solipsist, republican, anarchist, democrat, liberal, socialist, libertarian, conservative, vegetarian -- because at one time or another we become each and every one of these labels ... AS WE LEARN, AS WE MATURE, AS WE GROW MORE INFORMED AND WISER ... labels so broad that they are as much gibberish as the catch-all categorization "science fiction," which means nothing, utterly nothing, save to people racking books at Barnes & Noble or at Borders.

My compassion for you addresses in NO WAY what you perceive your political stance to be, but only, solely and absolutely the tragic and harmful statement NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND.

Nothing? NOTHING?!!? No one thing that might cause you to question a regularly-accepted "truth"? You are that imbedded in amber, that tunnel-visioned, that cut off from thought and circumstance that you are beyond the reach of everyday Reality and the Niagara of new information, revisions, discoveries, lost data, reappraisals, confessions, scientific methods of proof, revelations that inundates us daily? Are you actually taking pride in, and puffing up like Custer at the Little Big Horn because of, your clarion call that NOTHING in this universe, now or hereafter known, for all of Eternity, can force you to open your mind to ratiocination, to refocus your eyes to examine new data, to do what homo sapiens has done since the discovery of fire and the wheel -- to reevaluate an opinion? (Incidentally, it now seems fairly clear, as an example of NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND, that Custer's "last stand" was not, in fact, at the Little Big Horn, but on what is called Custer's Hill, next to a holding area swall between that hill and the next one over, an area called the Keogh. Archaeologists have now almost absolutely verified this revision of "widely-held wisdom" that previously would never have been up for examination by anyone who would say NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND.) Are you, unbelievably, claiming hero status for being thick-headed? Because that's PRECISELY what your post claims: I know what I know, and neither god nor man can show me anything that will loosen my feet from the quagmire in which I'm trapped.

I truly hope you were only blowing off blowhard steam, trying to shame your fellow Webderlanders with a passive-aggressive, "You won't have good ole Oakridge Stan to kick aroun' no more, but even so, I stand tall onaccounta NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND!" Nothing, I tell you, through my bloodied lips, NOTHING!!

I'm not putting words or thoughts into your head, sir, I'm repeating WHAT YOU SAID.

And I find that no less than tragic; and I urge you, no, I BEG you to reconsider what you meant, truly meant, by those horrible words. And if you need an example of how dangerous such a stance is ... to YOU ... only to YOU ... not Society at large, nor gullible youths nor the body politic, but simply YOU ... consider this:

The concomitant of NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND is that (because it requires ignoring or rationalizing the aspects of Reality that don't gibe with your rock-hard world-view) anything you don't know, anything you don't understand, anything that thwarts you ... becomes twisted and redesigned by paranoia to fit INTO this System you've accepted wholly and without human question. And it has already happened to you.

How do I know this?

With only one posting to judge from?

Because your belief -- and NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE YOUR MIND -- and the System you live within, has twisted and redesigned the difficulty of breaking into the screenwriting business in Hollywood (something we ALL have to suffer with) not simply, logically, truly and actually as a little fiefdom just like the duchys of automaking, shipbuilding, state politics, working for comic companies, banking, real estate, lifeguarding, etc. etc. etc. but as part of a great, invisible, evil cabal, ostensibly run by malevolent Democrat/Liberal forces that spend most of their time preventing enormous talents such as yours from reaching their true destiny as an Oscar-winning scenarist.

Now if THAT ain't bullshit paranoia, kiddo, then nothing is. But it's where your NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND mind went, instantly. That is just one example of how you consistently and automatically distance yourself from the Reality of Your Potential, by wallowing in a pit of regurgitated status quo thinking. It is an instant reaction-formation that I would bet is banging against your melon right now! I tell you with all the fidelity I possess, sir, that indeed there is an inarticulate conspiracy of johnny/jane-come-latelies, semiliterates, poseuers, know-nothings, power-brokers and just plain idiots who rule Hollywood. But their politics don't enter into it. They would hire Idi Amin or the Anti-Christ Beast itself if one or the other could give them a script that could be made into a Bruckheimer bombshell. Consider: if "Liberals" in this secret alliance were determined to stop good, honest Republicans such as yourself from ever making a buck, how come Schwarzenegger has made billions as a staunch Conservative, and may be running for Governor of California, just as successfully before him did Ronald Reagan, who was the pride and joy of every Conservative in the nation? Do not these blatant contradictions of your paranoiac conception -- engendered by the fact that NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE MY MIND -- force you to stop and rethink what you said, to give you even a moment's pause before you twist and redesign demonstrable truths, these unarguable dollops of Reality, into another cobbled-up superimposed pre-continuum of conspiracies and shadowy assassins?

I WILL NEVER CHANGE MY MIND, I suggest, are the most tragic words any human being can utter. Worse for him, for you, sir, than for all around him.

Respectfully, Harlan Ellison"


Now that's the kind of liberal we need, not someone like wimpy Alan Colmes.

Even as a boy, when reading his SF stories, I knew the writer was
a lot more than your usual hack.
I've seen him a few times on TV and he says what needs to be said.
The man would have made a wonderful President even though the sheep
would have been shocked at hearing the truth about the world.

... is a long time favorite. Read his polemics against television, The Glass Teat. He is a great thinker of our times IMHO.

"George Bush cannot make a mistake in my eyes." These people have a cult-like mental defect. Their brains have been compromised.

Thanks for posting this and for the website. I haven't thought of Harlan in a long time.

He was out there on the picket lines during the writers' strike a few years ago and I had the chance to talk with him. WAY cool guy, and hugely profound thinker for our times.

Since I was a wee lad. Brilliant writer, great thinker. But, then I met him. It set in stone the gospel: "You don't really want to meet your heroes!"

Maybe he was having a bad day!

But he's still one of the great minds on this dirty, grey orb!!!

He has lots of bad days...lol..

But another great mind....

first read Deathbird when i was in 4th grade (yeah, probably a bit early) and was spellbound. it was probably the most mature book i read at the time, yet also one of the most intellectually challenging too. great stuff.

glad he's rising up. time to burst the bubble of anti-intellectualism.

seems like this political madness has invoked the wrath of a bevvy of national treasures of intellectiual and artistic spheres. the storm gathers... :evilgrin:

Grin.

Ellison was a frequent guest.. He's great..

Tom Snyder is another one I really miss.. Intelligent..great interviewer..and a really smart show.. No wonder they threw him overboard in favor of that Kilborn goof..

...involving a tall blonde and an elevator. Snopes claims it's not true, but Phil Klass, who told the story to me, claimed to have witnessed it.

http://www.snopes.com/risque/celebrit/ellison.htm