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.

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)

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.