The Trouble with Howard Beale

In the most famous sequence in 1976's Network, Howard Beale, nightly anchorman for a floundering broadcast network, finally loses his shit onscreen and goes on a live tirade. From the IMDb, this is the transcript:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.
[shouting] You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
[shouting]
'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:
[screaming at the top of his lungs] "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

That's pretty powerful, isn't it? It's a voice of active rebellion crying out for decency in a world of slothful madness. When I first saw Network in what was either 2005 or 2006, I felt the message may have lost its context but not its potency. I felt that this kind of righteous indignation was exactly what we needed. And, now that we have it, it turns out it's not. In fact, it's making things worse.

The modern incarnation of Beale's message is the Tea Party, and I take issue with it not because of what it stands for but for its almost total lack of organization. The tradeoff for decentralization and individuality is incoherence. This is how you end up with national marches of people with tea bags glued to their heads (Warning: link will probably offend you).

Across the country, people stood up and said whatever happened to be passing through their minds at the moment. People have to work together to actually stand for something. Being mad isn't enough anymore - and, as much as I hate to admit it, it never really was. First, you have to get mad - but then you have to think.

The Slow Disaster

This is something new. The mess that is even now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico is a very rare, very worrisome kind of trouble, the kind that end when the dust has settled. In a traditional disaster - and this includes both natural and man-made catastrophes - there are two stages: wreck and recovery.

What we face now is a slow disaster, the rarest and worst kind. This is not simply something we can react to - it is something we must get out ahead of. And, more than a week out, that hasn't happened yet.

When the Deepwater Horizon blew up on April 22, it looked like a typical tragedy - the kind that pass with such numbing speed across television screens across America. It seemed like nothing more than a different take on the mine collapse a few weeks earlier: a horrible human event, but nothing more.

That night, I was told by TV news that "they" didn't think that the platform would collapse. It occurred to me that they hadn't expected it to blow up, either. When it collapsed the next day, I wasn't surprised, although I find myself now a bit troubled by how nonplussed that seems. This was all overshadowed by the realization that oil was still coming out of the well far below. Oil that couldn't be stopped.

A month ago I read "Beyond Oil," an excellent book by ex-industry man Ken Deffeyes. Although most of the text was about a world that had already used up more than half of its allotted supply of oil, one interesting part covered the mechanics of how oil forms. One of the very interesting things about oil is that it's been trapped, hermetically, underground for many millions of years. Even the smallest of leaks would cause an oil field to drain out over the eons between the age of the dinosaurs and today. Oil fields, as a result, quite simply don't have these problems - any of the ones that did bled out long before the rise of humanity. The stuff we've been using has to be dug for.

And now we're in trouble. Real trouble.

This whole event has a tragic implausibility to it beyond even the assessed damage to lives, livelihoods and environment. This has simply never happened before - although the various components of the disaster are not unheard-of, this collection is new. If this were on land, it wouldn't be a problem (land oil rigs used to have a big problem in the way of fires, which were often managed though explosion. The act of blowing up a flaming well was enough to deprive it of oxygen and extinguish the blaze.) If this were in shallower water, known containment methods could be employed. But this is something altogether ghastly and new - something we have not yet seen the end of.

Push and Pull

Here's an interesting article. Darryl Cagle, the author, attempts to classify humor by political persuasion. In some cases it's direct, but I'm most fascinated by his deductive approach:

Jay Leno is a liberal humorist. Jay walks down the street and gives everyday folks the opportunity to demonstrate how stupid they are, while Jay laughs at them. David Letterman is a conservative humorist. Dave treats everyday folks with respect, giving them the opportunity to laugh at how silly Dave is, as he has fruit dropped from a rooftop, or when he visits his stoic neighbor, Rupert Jee, at "Hello Deli," with another goofy contest. Both Leno and Letterman are funny. Liberals and conservatives can both be funny, but it is easier to be funny by laughing at others, rather than laughing with others. Most humorists take the easy road.

What's interesting here is that I agree with his observations but not his conclusion. I see Jay Leno as conceited and easy-going; I see David Letterman as troubled and self-deprecating. Leno is the ring master, marshaling entertainment for the crowd; Letterman is still, psychologically, a weatherman on local TV:

To be totally honest, I don't think I could say how either man votes. The article was written in 2005, but both Leno and Letterman are every bit as inscrutable now as they were then. For people who talk so much, it's amazing how hard it is to tell what they think. The only thing I can say for sure is that both men want very much to be Johnny Carson, and now, late in their careers, they have to admit they aren't. Which makes one wonder who Johnny Carson wanted to be. Everybody wants to be somebody, to wear the cape or the crown.

In politics, it can be said that virtually everybody would like to be able to think like Abraham Lincoln, quite possibly our greatest president. But who did he look up to? George Washington? Then who did Washington look up to? It's turtles all the way down. I think we look to the past because the symbols are more powerful than the facts - not just because of fuzzy history, but because the circumstances now aren't what they were then.

Much of what both the "diagram" cartoons in Cagel's post say are correct, but the key is inflection and context. The liberal doesn't think "people should pay more taxes" so that the money can be dumped into a hole somewhere; he has a reason. Maybe he wants to know where the Republicans are going to get the money to repave the roads from.

Likewise, the Republican doesn't think that it's okay to expand government when you're a Republican just because you're a Republican; he just trusts Republicans to expand government when necessary, and for the right reasons - reasons he believes in.

The truth is that no ideology is going to be a cure-all, and both sides know it but they don't tell each other because they fear doing so would portray them as weak. As a result, the two sides are essentially wearing masks around each other - which reinforces their mistrust.

That leads us here. As Sean Munson attempts to show in a chart the lone commenter described as "pretty," bloggers tend to talk with people who think like them. In the age of the Internet, it's possible to narrow your focus market to a degree not possible before, for two reasons. One, it's cheaper to run a blog than anything else - Blogger, for instance, is free - and two, it's easier to search. At the very height of broadcast analog television, there were only 83 channels to go around, with each one confined to a market as large as the broadcast tower could reach.

This, in turn, led first to hegemony (due to cost, it was easier for local stations to ally themselves with either ABC, NBC or CBS than produce all of their own material) and then to neutrality, as each station tried to wring the maximum number of viewers from the people living inside the broadcast range of the transmitter. It was quite simply more cost-effective to try and appeal to both liberals and conservatives than to pick one side. And that, I think, is why Leno and Letterman are so opaque. They're zeitgeist jockeys, riding popular opinion from one day to the next. It's good business.

That's what troubles me about blogging. I can reach any computer with internet access anywhere in the world, for free, so I can say exactly what I think with no moderators at all.

That's not a power every human being should have. It may well not be a power I should have.

Modern Times

It is worth noting that sometimes something is viewed as a good idea, and then set in motion, and sometimes something is set in motion and not agreed upon until later. Whenever a fight flares up about something - either one of today's hot-button issues or any of the myriad unknowns which shall visit us in times to come - think with perspective and a grain of salt. Progress takes shape in either Creeping Normalcy or the Short Sharp Shock - or any combination of the two.

Said Mr. Jones in 1910:
"Women, subject yourselves to men."
Nineteen-Eleven heard him quote:
"They rule the world without the vote."
By Nineteen-Twelve, he would submit
"When all the women wanted it."
By Nineteen-Thirteen, looking glum,
He said that it was bound to come.
This year I heard him say with pride:
"No reasons on the other side!"
By Nineteen-Fifteen, he'll insist
He's always been a suffragist.
And what is really stranger, too,
He'll think that what he says is true.
-Alice Duer Miller

The right thing isn't always obvious, and when it is obvious to some it may well not be to all. No prescribed psychological nostrum can prepare us for every dilemma, and we must instead take the harder but more worthy route of considerate approach.

Interesting find from Slate

The key thing to remember, in whatever you do, is which way is true north. Lose your bearing and things become awkward:

Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She's been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she's preaching isn't how the American founders behaved. It's how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against.

(From Slate - read more)

For the record

I'd just like to state, for the record, that I like Barack Obama.

I like his approach to things. His job tasks him with situations that variously call for the iron fist or the velvet glove, or the fabled combination between the two, and I feel he has made a sincere and effective effort to make the best of any situation. He has cut deals and he has moved forward alone; he has had the vision to promise things and the honesty to try and deliver on those promises. I do not feel I have received everything I have been told I would get, but we are less than half way through his first (perhaps, let us be honest, only) term, and I feel that he is making good time. Not that I don't want everything, and now, but I understand that his are uphill battles. I can afford a modicum of patience.

Furthermore, I like him as a person. I feel his dealings with the American people and our allies and enemies abroad have been fair. It would be hard to say whether or not the American people are getting what they want, because different people want different things, but I feel that his promises of action and transparency are being met - though he does not necessarily deserve all the credit.

He has been charged with backroom deals in regards to the health care bill, but every aspect of that bill was always front and center in the national consciousness because the Republicans made sure of it. A little partisanship is not only good but crucial to democracy because it keeps the participants honest. That being said, I think we may have too much of a good thing these days - but sooner or later somebody is bound to figure out what really works and what doesn't.

I support Barack Obama. I support health care. And if I change my mind about both or either, I'll explain why.

A Case in Point

Here's an interesting story from the Associated Press:

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

You can read the rest here.

Two key questions to consider next time you talk politics with someone else:
1. Why is this viewed as a fight between the states and the federal government?

A key feature of the Boston Tea party (for which the current Tea Party movement is named) was that it was staged in protest of taxation without representation. This is not the case today, for any state. All states have representation in Washington. So,

2. Wouldn't it be better to work through, say, electoral means to get the desired end?

Rhetorical third bonus question:
3. Does anybody, anywhere actually make an attempt to agree without being disagreeable?

If not, who is at fault? In broad terms, the Republicans are being obstructionist and the president is trying to get things done his way, with them or without them. This is no way to run a country.