Okay, maybe making reference to the film “Network” (and the trademark catchphrase-rant of its apocalyptic news anchor Howard Beale) isn’t the most ingenuous (or original) lead-in to today’s blog entry, but it fits so well that I’ll stay with it.In case you missed it, “Network” was a dark evocation of mass media’s effects on our culture: The triumph of entertainment over information, image over imagination, fear over freedom.
The film ostensibly focuses on Howard Beale’s dismissal from his anchor position with a hypothetical fourth broadcast news network, UBS (Are you listening Katie Couric?), due to plummeting ratings.
As Beale contemplates his own jobless future, he begins a journey into madness—not necessarily insanity (although the clarity of the revelations he experiences and bespeaks are certainly tinged with delusion), but definitely into angriness, and that of an extremely bitter nature.
After an interrupted newcast, during which he announces his firing and declares to viewers his intention to commit suicide on-air as a ratings-boosting swan song, Beale is eventually allowed a second chance to say goodbye on his own terms and explain his earlier meltdown.
Take a look at what the fictional Howard Beale said in 1976 and see if it doesn't seem every bit as apt today:
Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression.That’s what came to my mind earlier, as I checked the morning cable news shows and watched the anchors and correspondents tut-tut over Barack Obama’s comments last week that Pennsylvanians (like voters elsewhere) are “bitter” at the state of America’s political debate and looming economic collapse: The word “bitter” is too mild a term to convey what I, myself (and millions of other Americans) feel as we see the campaign distracted from life-and-death issues of war and peace abroad and prosperity and peril at home by the slice-and-dice tactics of the Clinton campaign.
Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; 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 all know things are bad—worse than bad: They're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're 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 going to 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. You've got to say: “I'm a human being, goddammit! 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:
“I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”
That’s when I logged onto www.BarackObama.com, clicked a link to a video of a speech that Barack delivered in Indiana over the weekend where he described the frustrations of folks in Pennsylvania and everywhere else—even my hometown of Decatur, Illinois—at the erosion of virtually everything, in recent decades, that we hold dear: education and environment, investment in our common future via a fair, shared tax code, and economic opportunity and prosperity for all Americans.
After viewing the video, I was invited—as every other viewer is—to share my feelings about the hysterical, ridiculous turn the campaign has taken since Mrs. Clinton’s advisors have latched onto Barack’s use of the word “bitter” (ironically, in a campaign she has pledged to wage to the bitter end), as evidence that Senator Obama is somehow more “elitist” and “out of touch” with blue-collar voters than her megamillionaire self.
Here’s what I wrote then:
I’ve been frustrated and, yes, embittered by Hillary Clinton’s “scorched-earth,” politics-as-usual, “kitchen-sink” campaign style. She has failed to recognize the transformational mood of the electorate during this election cycle and has thus attempted to mis-characterize and otherwise call into question every aspect of Barack Obama's appeal to voters throughout the primary season.That’s why I’m posting this entry now: To encourage us all to remember the words of Howard Beale and take them one giant, effective step further.
I’m also embittered by the continuing failure of leadership in Washington to address the critical issues that confront our nation: The ongoing, economically-ruinous war in Iraq, catastrophic national debt and trade imbalances, tax cuts for the wealthiest members of our society, a health-care system that leaves far too many children (and their parents) behind, soaring costs for everything from food to fuel (but not the products made in China by virtual slaves), and our crumbling, obsolescent infrastructure and educational system.
In fact, “bitter” may be too kind a characterization for my feelings on the state of the American political system; “disgusted” and “repelled” seem closer to the truth.
That’s why I'm flying to Pittsburgh tomorrow—and to Indianapolis, after that: To do everything in my power to ensure the success of the most transformational, empowering political candidacy since Robert F. Kennedy.
That way, perhaps, my daughter—and her children and grandchildren, after her—might live in an America that represents, and redeems, its promise and potential: What Abraham Lincoln recognized so long ago, when he declared a truly united (and rededicated) United States to be “the last best hope of earth.”
Go ahead: Get mad. But don’t run to your window and start screaming like a madman. (That’s Hillary’s turf, anyway.)
Instead, get busy. Do all you can, whenever you can. Go to Pennsylvania to help get out the vote. Make calls. Mobilize. Donate. Speak out. Act.
Recognize the moral imperative that Martin Luther King described as “the fierce urgency of now.”
Then consider how well labor organizer Joe Hill’s last words still apply today, and can inform and inspire us all during a month when we commemorate the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination: “Don’t mourn me. Organize.”
