Issue of the Week: War, Human Rights, Economic Opportunity, Population, Environment, Hunger, Disease, Personal Growth
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Well, the “wow” over North Korea has tuned into a “whoa” today and tonight (early Friday now).
Great, the worst aspects of ditching the Iran deal may now play out with the worst things that can happen with North Korea. Or maybe all will still work out. Maybe the “established” way that all the wags promote that has never worked with North Korea now will. With Kim and Trump, good luck. The point is that the message of “nuke-up” all around the world just got a new push. We’d say good luck to all of us on that count, but if that happens, KYA goodbye.
Meanwhile, to underline our Issue and Message from May 10, the Kristof/Dowd doctrine could arguably now be declared proven science.
We may now be closer than ever to just blowing up the planet, but how did the TV news cover it?
ABC and CBS at least ran it as the headline story with some follow-through.
NBC, still making up for trying to silence Ronan Farrow before he won the Pulitzer Prize, ran the Weinstein looks like he drew the monopoly go straight to jail card (richly deserved) story as the lead. Was the idea to take a serious story and make it look like lurid entertainment before we all go up in nuclear flames? Related side stories about what celebrity goes on what show to talk about a related story–well, welcome once again to the vomitorium and why we got here, but we’re not going to go there. Did we say a network was making up for something? No the network that brought us the dumbed-down reality show that launched a presidency is just doing the normal thing entertainment owned news does–going for dollars.
PBS NewHour was the standout as usual. Lead story and in-depth on whether we’ll all be ashes soon.
The cable stations? As Kristoff and Dowd already pointed out in our May 10 post–Duh (re-posted below). The days Anderson Cooper was in the lead nightly taking us to all the real places and underlying stories on the planet about hungry children and child trafficking and genocide and wars taking countless lives and making millions of refugees with the likes of Kristof in tow are long gone. Just go back and read the May 10 post below. It was approximately half an hour in before prime time CNN shows talked about North Korea, and simiar fare on other cable stations, adjusted by ideological perspective per network for the money-paying audience. Bread and Circus.
For the crucial importance of what happened today, there is no better source than Nicholas Kristof. Scour his previous articles on North Korea as well. He’s been there, and all over this story for some time. Here’s his piece from today:
“Trump’s Relationship With North Korea Just Got More Dangerous.”
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, May 24, 2018
Now we enter a more dangerous period in relations with North Korea.
President Trump topped a particularly inept diplomatic period by canceling his meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. The previous policy of maximum economic pressure on North Korea may no longer be viable, so the risk is that Trump ends up reaching for the military toolbox.
As every president since Nixon — except for Trump — has realized, the military options are too dangerous to employ. That’s even more true today, when North Korea apparently has the capacity to use nuclear, chemical and biological weapons against Seoul, Tokyo and perhaps Los Angeles. Yet Pentagon officials seem deeply nervous that Trump doesn’t realize this and has a Kim-like appetite for brinkmanship in ways that create risks of a cataclysm.
It was at least a relief that Trump, in calling off the direct talks, didn’t slam the door on diplomacy. “I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting,” he wrote Kim in a letter, in a tone more of regret than of anger. He added, “Some day, I very much look forward to meeting you.”
He noted that South Korea and Japan were “ready should foolish or reckless acts be taken by North Korea.”
Trump apparently canceled both because of recent North Korean belligerent rhetoric, including denunciations of Vice President Mike Pence, and because it grew clear that North Korea wasn’t planning on giving up its nuclear weapons any time soon. There was some political risk that Trump would look foolish reaching a general agreement with North Korea that was much less significant and onerous than the one he tore up with Iran.
The Trump statement leaves open the possibility that South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who has been the crucial figure in the peace process, can put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so that a meeting could be held later this year. Indeed, if the cancellation now leads to working-level talks between American and North Korean officials, that would be progress.
The risk, though, is that we’re back to confrontation.
I hope that North Korea will respond to Trump’s letter in similarly measured, calm terms. But no one has ever made money betting on North Korean calmness.
North Korea could decide to create a new crisis, perhaps by conducting a missile test or an atmospheric nuclear test. If an atmospheric test were conducted in the northern Pacific, it could send radiation toward the U.S. and would be perceived in Washington as a great provocation.
Likewise, the U.S. could respond to new tensions by sending B-1 bombers off the coast of North Korea. If North Korea scrambled aircraft or fired antiaircraft missiles, we could very quickly have an enormous escalation. So look out. We may be headed for a game of chicken, with Trump and Kim at the wheel. And all the rest of us are in the back seat.
In any case, it will be difficult for Trump to return to his policy of strangling North Korea economically. China has already been quietly relaxing sanctions, and South Korea may not have the stomach for strong sanctions, either. Kim has met with the leaders of both China and South Korea in recent months, building ties and reducing his isolation, and I expect he’ll continue the outreach to both countries.
Some Republicans have praised Trump for his North Korea diplomacy, and there’s been talk about him winning a Nobel Peace Prize. That was always ludicrous, and his North Korea policy is in fact a fine example of ineptitude.
Here’s what actually happened.
Trump’s jingoistic rhetoric didn’t particularly intimidate North Korea, but it terrified South Korea, which feared it would be collateral damage in a new Korean War. So President Moon shrewdly used the Olympics to undertake a careful peace mission to bring the U.S. and North Korea together, flattering each side to make this happen (Moon is a world-class Trump flatterer, and other leaders around the world have noted his success). This was commendable on Moon’s part; he’s the one who genuinely did have a shot at the peace prize.
As I wrote at the time, however, it was a mistake when Trump rashly accepted the idea of a summit meeting without any careful preparations. The risk of starting a diplomatic process with a face-to-face session is that if talks collapse at the top, then it’s difficult to pick up at a lower level. That’s precisely what ended up happening, and this dynamic creates greater risk than ever of military conflict.
With different aides, Trump might have pulled it off. While Trump and his fans were always deluded about the possibility that North Korea would soon hand over its nuclear weapons, there was some possibility of a general statement about starting a dialogue about denuclearization. North Korea would destroy some intercontinental ballistic missiles, tensions would drop, and we’d all be better off even if denuclearization never actually happened. Yes, Trump would have been played, but the world would still have benefited from the peace process.
Yet John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, spoke up in ways calculated to unnerve the North Koreans, by talking about the Libya model. When you cite as a model a country whose leader ended up being executed by his own people, that’s not usually persuasive to another dictator. On my most recent visit to North Korea, in September, officials cited the Libyan experience as one reason they needed to hold on to their nuclear weapons.
North Korean leaders themselves responded to Bolton’s comments with harsh, over-the-top rhetoric, including the comment about Pence. This was a major miscalculation on their part, escalating the ineptitude and helping to kill plans for talks with Trump.
While the North Koreans didn’t get the summit meeting they wanted, they have managed the process quite well. They used the rush of diplomacy to rebuild ties with Beijing and start discussions about economic integration with South Korea, and to moderate their international image. They’ve also created something of a wedge between Washington and Seoul, as was apparent in the response to Trump’s cancellation by a South Korean government spokesman: “We are attempting to make sense of what, precisely, President Trump means.”
In weighing the risks ahead, commentators sometimes note that Kim is rational and doesn’t want to commit suicide. That’s true, but it doesn’t particularly encourage me. Rational actors regularly make awful decisions. Saddam Hussein wasn’t suicidal, and neither was George W. Bush, but they both acted in ways in Iraq that were catastrophic.
Both Trump and Kim would still like to make a summit happen. So I’m hoping for the best, but fearing for the worst.
5.10.17:
In the Sunday Review of The New York Times last Sunday, there was a double-barreled blast from two of the most well-known and widely-read op-ed columnists on the planet (and two of our favorites as all readers have seen for years on these pages), Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd.
Their blasts were at the media. As any long-time readers know, we’ve been blasting similarly for decades.
Here’s Kristof in “Our Addiction To Trump”:
“We in the commentariat complain about President Trump, but we’re locked in a symbiotic relationship with him.
News organizations, especially cable television channels, feed off Trump — like oxpeckers on a rhino’s back — for he is part of our business model in 2018. As long as our focus is on Trump, audiences follow.
It’s not optimal to have as president an authoritarian who denounces journalists as enemies of the people, but he has given us a sense of mission and a “Trump bump.” Every time he denounces us we get more subscriptions. …
In America today, it’s all Trump, all the time. We’re collectively addicted to him. The nonstop scandals and outrages suck us in; they amount to Trump porn.
As president, Trump is enormously important, but there’s so much else happening as well. Some 65,000 Americans will die this year of drug overdoses, American life expectancy has fallen for two years in a row, guns claim a life every 15 minutes and the number of uninsured is rising again even as a child in the U.S. is 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than one in other advanced nations. Those issues are rather more important than the question of whether Stormy Daniels slept with Trump.
Or look abroad. In Myanmar, the government is engaging in what many believe to be a genocide against the Rohingya minority. Gaza is erupting, and there’s heightened threat of a new war in the Middle East. The U.S. has been complicit in Saudi Arabian war crimes in Yemen. The carnage in Syria continues.
The world’s progress against malaria, which kills almost one person a minute, has stalled. A fifth of children under 5 worldwide are stunted from malnutrition. Bill Gates and others warn that one of our top risks is a pandemic for which we are ill prepared.
Progressive snobs like me bemoan Trump’s inattention to these global issues, but the truth is that we don’t pay attention, either. At cocktail parties, on cable television, at the dinner table, at the water cooler, all we talk about these days is Trump. So we complain about Trump being insular and parochial — but we’ve become insular and parochial as well. We’ve caught the contagion that we mock.”
Actually, to be more precise, they (the media) and we, and our society and all it’s ills created Trump, and other such reactions globally. The news media is not news, it’s been a corporate entertainment complex for years. If it were as simple as Trump being the issue, by the way, those in the media who most attack him have been serving effectively as agent provocateurs for his election and re-election, consciously or unconsciously in emotional-holic delirium, as Kristof more or less observes. The result is that his approval rating has risen to the highest he’s had, 44 percent. For those who don’t know, that’s where Obama was as he approached the mid-term election in his first term. Except he started much higher and kept going down–Trump started much lower and is going up. As he is fond of saying, “we’ll see” what’s next.
Now, here’s Maureen Dowd in “The Naked Truth About Trump”:
“…Michelle Wolf was right when she turned a gimlet eye on the media.
‘You guys are obsessed with Trump,’ the comedian said at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him.
‘I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. If you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.’
You know Donald Trump also believes that he is the best thing to ever happen to the media — and that he should be getting a cut of the action. There’s nothing he hates more than feeling that someone has profited off him, while he gets nothing. Remember when he proposed a $5 million ransom to show up at the CNN debate?
Donald Trump is damaging the country and civic discourse, and undermining the First Amendment. But this Batman cartoon villain with an uncanny gift for cliffhangers and lurid story lines is buoying journalism, giving us a reprieve while we figure out how to save ourselves in the digital age.
And he’s making journalists stars in a way they haven’t been since Watergate, inspiring documentaries and movies and helping them secure lucrative book and TV deals.
The most intense, toxic cat-and-mouse game in President Trump’s life is not with Robert Mueller. It’s with the press. (Besides, it’s not a cat-and-mouse game with Mueller; it’s just cat.)
Trump is an attention addict, and now he’s in a position to get all the attention in the world, as long as he keeps those sirens blaring. CNN has been on a constant Breaking News Alert for months. And we are Trump addicts, hooked on the hyperventilating rush of wild stories and all the great things that accrue from playing Beowulf to Trump’s Grendel.”
Once and a while, something has broken through the above everyday “bombshells”. Like two or three times since the election. Something like the threat of nuclear holocaust would break through, right?
Well, no.
Two days later Trump pulled the US out of the agreement with Iran and the rest of the world to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
But all the other “bombshells”, horrific pun intended, continued to dominate the media as every other day.
PBS NewsHour, the networks for a few minutes, the Times and The Washington Post at least headlined it.
How can one overstate the potential of nuclear proliferation to literally destroy life on earth and the centrality of the Iran deal in preventing it?
As we wrote in our 2016 reflection before the US election:
“We always have the threat of just blowing ourselves off the planet. The nuclear age has been one of many factors instructing that we have to unite at least to the point of basic rational rules of global governance being adopted or adhered to, and advanced, or die. The Middle East alone has increasingly presented this threat, and has made our humanity a disgrace once again as hundreds of thousands die and millions are made refugees, the most since World War Two. More could and should have been done. Avoid violence if at all possible, but as even King said, and as Bonhoeffer acted on, when it comes to the Hitlers, you have to fight. Never more, or less, than needed, as best as can be assessed. Not easy choices. And all really about the deeper issues, not the surface ones. Basic needs and rights for all.
One great moment of progress, at least for the moment, creating a lasting possibility, was the nuclear deal with Iran (we were more hopeful 8 years ago about developments in North Korea—but we’ll revisit that later). The alternative was a regional and worldwide end to any nonproliferation agreement and nukes everywhere—which means they go off for sure. Obama will have his legacy for this alone, if it works, and will deserve it. When he said it was a deal or war, it was no joke. Even his many national security staffers who disagreed with various actions or lack of actions in places such as Syria—to a person—have said unequivocally that if there was no deal he would have at the point needed struck hard militarily to stop the nuclear program in Iran (for a few years—then if no deal, again). Any president would have had to do this.”
One of the most important aspects of the Iran deal was that it was a global deal–every major nation on earth including those at each other’s throats in some ways were together on this. A crucial part of the grinding process to some minimal global governance and rules out of mutual survival interest. There are respectable people who never liked this deal–mainly because it allowed Iran to continue its horrid behavior in every other regard. But the entire point was to separate all other issues from the one that could obliterate the planet. Iran’s other bad behavior could and still has been confronted in conventional ways, effectively or not depending on policy decisions and other factors on the ground. And Iran isn’t exactly the only bad player in the picture–the only fully innocent victims being the civilians. What Trump has in effect done is to say–the deal is that we will hit you militarily if you start to nuke-up. And others in the area who stopped moving to nuke-up because of the deal are being told, you don’t need to, the US will cover you, just as it was the guarantor of the deal in the same way. But now we might get more leverage with new sanctions and being tougher on Iran’s other behavior in the region. But new sanctions aren’t going to happen from the rest of the world, which is what made them effective before. So again, as Trump likes to say, “We’ll see.”
Meanwhile, Iran attacks Israeli positions on the Golan Heights after Trump’s announcement (first time ever for such a direct attack) and Israel hits back massively in a war becoming more official between the Israeli-Saudi and allies side and the Iran-Syria (Assad) and allies side, involving of course the US and Russians, and everybody in sight. (One of many reasons the US would have been certain to strike militarily under Obama or any president without a deal–massively with the most powerful non-nuclear weapons in its arsenal–is that Israel would for certain otherwise.)
Although the underlying issue of economic equality and other issues of equality have been and will be paramount in human history and the question of survival, the issue of nuclear weapons has its own distinct place in the equation. Because since 1945, a blink of an eye ago, we have been more and more able to obliterate the planet in an instant for the first time in history.
Still with war breaking out even more dangerously in the Middle-East–a potential nuclear powder keg, the media continued more or less on the path in the US as Kristof and Dowd described. In the US in general, with some notable exceptions, you have to tune in to the BBC World Service to find out what’s actually happening in the world.
Then, a day after Trump scraps the nuclear deal with Iran, on the other, more pressing at the moment nuclear issue–North Korea–he pulls the next magic trick. Or diplomatic coup. American prisoners released by North Korea and sent home–greeted by him in Alaska. Now the media is there at the top of the news and stays on it, and the next day (today) the time and place for Trump and Kim to meet, in four weeks, is set.
To quote Bette Davis in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts.”
Iran, huh? North Korea, wow! As scattershot and contradictory as this all may seem, it may well not be. But such an extraordinarily dangerous and simultaneously potentially promising strategic game, if that’s what it is, while the positive potential may well be to Trump’s carrot and stick and who knows what’s in my hand behind my back credit, needs an extraordinarily cool hand and informed mind to ultimately pull off results, much less assess the longer-term impact of decisions.
One of the ironies is that Trump is getting tougher on Russia as the home-front investigations on Russian election-meddling, in no small part through the new social media empires, continue. The truth is that the same old story of the various empires of the haves (a few) and the have-nots (the many) underlie everything, with the haves competing over their addiction to power. As John Reed was portrayed to have said in the movie Reds to the Portland oligarchs who asked him what, as a reporter, he thought was the reason for World War One, his answer was, “Profits.” A reminder that the 200th birthday of Karl Marx just occurred on May 5. One of many historic events barely noticed these days. He certainly had the diagnosis right, though not so clear about solutions. He certainly didn’t envision Stalinism as an answer, and democratic Marxist parties have been elected and accomplished results in various places–mixing aspects of socialism and capitalism–just as Democrats and Republicans once both did in the US. Now there’s a reminder worth revisiting.
We’ve been revisiting the apex of that time in some ways with all the 1968 50-year anniversaries. The progressive Republicans under one Roosevelt and then the Democrats under another had led the way to increasing economic equality through the 20th century. Most Republicans eventually accepted the New Deal, bank regulations and high taxes for the rich as a given in American society, which created the most prosperous middle class for the great majority of Americans in human history. The critical remaining issues such as racism and sexism and homophobia and poverty were within reach of solving–and huge strides were taken in doing so, before regression set in. The most wide-ranging regression was the destruction of economic equality. Human progress grinds forward, is pushed back, explodes, moves forward, is pushed back and so on. Because we have reached a point in human history where we will soon be 9 to 10 billion on the planet who can destroy ourselves instantly with weaponry or near instantly with environmental catastrophe, disease and revolutionary chaos writ global as never before, we will either create a system of basic needs and rights guaranteed for all and global rules regarding weaponry and sustainability, or perish. Yes, we keep saying the same thing. Because when you have to change or die, time spent not focusing is not your friend.
Fifty years ago right now, a presidential campaign was occurring in the US which would alter the course of US and world history. Robert Kennedy was uniting left, right, center, black, white, young, old, rich and poor–demonstrably in who voted for him–at the threshold of the next step forward, or not. We highly recommend a new documentary series on Netflix, Bobby Kennedy for President. For those who weren’t there especially, it brings the experience home. As Jen Chaney’s review in Vulture put it, “Netflix’s Bobby Kennedy for President Will Break Your Heart.” And must be seen. Having someone who knew what it meant to face nuclear obliteration and stop it be running for president was useful. Who was uniting the country at the most divided time since the Civil War, as Ken Burn’s Vietnam episode titled Things Fall Apart quoting Kennedy showed. Having someone who quoted Yeats and Aeschylus as easily as breathing and did it in a manner that made hearts sore is a sight to behold. And someone who people and children of every background raced to see and touch.
We end now with an excerpt of a post from November 2016 just after the election in the US. It was part of a number of reflections on what had happened, what were and are the underlying issues, where we have been and where we are going as a species in this world.
Here it is:
11.29.16:
We will be commenting for some time on the US elections and various inter-related global events.
But let us start with this.
Everything has changed and nothing has changed. There will be basic human needs and basic human rights guaranteed for everyone or there will be hell to pay, as history has shown relentlessly. A small group of people and entities with the huge majority of wealth and power is not sustainable. Until the plight of the have-nots in needs and rights is addressed by universal equality as enshrined in the UN declaration of Human Rights at the end of World War Two, there will be chaos of varying kinds. The fact that its seems as if the post-war order is crumbling and there is nothing but tribalism on the horizon is partly true and partly not. Its the inevitable resistance the closer we get to the imperative of equality.
Right, left and center, capitalism and socialism and every combination have all betrayed at some point because the same masters of various kinds resist, the most successful of the combinations has rarely been implemented, when it has, it has been successful, but not completed, therefore it regresses–and democracy can only work if the citizens are fully participatory. Which means work and change and willingness to lay down everything for ideals. An evolution and choice for the ages both collectively and within each individual.
The fight between nothing changing and change continues, with the global stakes making more clear than ever that we will change or we will die. Tragically and disgracefully, many have and will suffer and die needlessly. However, although we may well not make it as a species for much longer, our view remains that out of the inevitable conflicts of various kinds, we will make it to the next evolutionary step. Besides, what’s the point of believing anything else and working with all we have to make it so?
We begin our observations on the US presidential election and many other seemingly inter-related global events leading-up to it in what may seem an odd way–by referencing a singular work of art imitating life–in its 40th anniversary year–the 1976 movie, “Network.”
It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won four, including for the late writer Paddy Chayefsky’s script. He was the only sole triple Oscar-winner screenwriter in history–who tragically died at 58. (The other three awards were for best actress, Faye Dunaway, best actor, Peter Finch, and best supporting actress, Beatrice Straight). Its hard to see a movie like this being made today as a mainstream studio financed film with a cast to die for, directed by Sidney Lumet. Much less one that was in the top-25 grossers in a year of movies such as “Rocky” and “All The President’s Men” to mention just two (an iconic movie year, to say the least.)
The late, great critic, Roger Ebert, wrote in a 2000 look-back at the film, which he gave his highest rating: “Seen a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy.”
“Network” satirized, parodied and lambasted television–but it went far beyond that. And if it was prophecy after a quarter-century, after 40 years in the context of the digital, internet and social media revolutions, it is like prophecy times something that we may, may, just be starting to understand.
And the point here is not that the truth-telling in “Network” represents some recently occurring events prophesied 40 years ago, but that it represents what was already happening then and has been increasingly in many ways for 40 years.
“Network” has a number of fascinating intertwined plot lines, morality plays and tales of the culture.
We focus here on famous excerpts from a central thread.
Peter Finch plays Howard Beal, who is the star of a kind of one-man commentary show–which after he has a revelation, becomes increasingly enlightening and bizarre. And Precisely because of this, ratings go through the roof.
Here’s Beal’s famed “Mad as Hell” speech to his audience:
“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 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 TVs 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, god-dammit! 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’”
Following much of New York and the nation doing just that, Beal in his next show delivers the “We Deal in Illusions – Turn Off Your Television Sets” Speech:
“Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was the Chairman of the Board of the Union Broadcasting Systems and he died at eleven o’clock this morning of a heart condition! And woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble! So, a rich little man with white hair died. What does that got to do with the price of rice, right? And why is that woe to us? Because you people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damn force in the whole godless world. And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people. And that’s why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died.
Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communication Corporation of America. There’s a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett sitting in Mr. Ruddy’s office on the 20th floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome, god-damn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what s–t will be peddled for truth on this network.
So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television’s a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the Truth, go to God! Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever gonna find any real truth. But, man, you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he’s gonna win. We’ll tell you any s–t you want to hear.
We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!”
During the next broadcast of “The Howard Beale Show,” the “mad prophet” Howard (as he was now known) criticized the growing economic take-over power of oil-rich Saudi Arabia which was causing economic ruin in the US because of oil prices. In fact, the conglomerate/corporation that owned Beale’s network was tied to Saudi interests:
“Now you listen to me. And listen carefully, because this is your goddamn life I’m talking about today. In this country, when one company wants to take over another company, they simply buy up a controlling share of the stock. But first, they have to file notice with the government. That’s how CCA took over the company that owns this network. But now somebody is buying up CCA. Somebody called the Western World Funding Corporation. They filed the notice this morning.
Well, just who in the hell is the Western World Funding Corporation? It is a consortium of banks and insurance companies who are not buying CCA for themselves but as agents for somebody else. And who is this somebody else? They won’t tell you. They won’t tell you, they won’t tell the Senate, they won’t tell the SEC, the FCC, they won’t tell the Justice Department, they won’t tell anybody. They say it’s none of our business. The hell it ain’t! I will tell you who they’re buying CCA for. They’re buying it for the Saudi-Arabian Investment Corporation. They’re buying it for the Arabs…
We all know that the Arabs control sixteen billion dollars in this country. They own a chunk of Fifth Avenue, twenty downtown pieces of Boston, a part of the port of New Orleans, an industrial park in Salt Lake City. They own big hunks of the Atlanta Hilton, the Arizona Land and Cattle Company, the Security National Bank in California, the Bank of the Commonwealth in Detroit. They control ARAMCO, so that puts them into Exxon, Texaco, and Mobil Oil. They’re all over – New Jersey, Louisville, St. Louis Missouri. And that’s only what we know about! There’s a hell of a lot more we don’t know about because all of the those Arab petro-dollars are washed through Switzerland and Canada and the biggest banks in this country.
For example, what we don’t know about is this CCA deal and all the other CCA deals. Right now, the Arabs have screwed us out of enough American dollars to come right back and with our own money, buy General Motors, IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, US Steel, and twenty other American companies. Hell, they already own half of England.
So listen to me. Listen to me, god-dammit! The Arabs are simply buying us. There’s only one thing that can stop them. You! You! So, I want you to get up now. I want you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the phone. I want you to get up from your chairs, go to the phone, get in your cars, drive into the Western Union offices in town. I want you to send a telegram to the White House. By midnight tonight, I want a million telegrams in the White House. I want them wading knee-deep in telegrams at the White House. I want you to get up right now and write a telegram to President Ford saying: ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore! I don’t want the banks selling my country to the Arabs! I want the CCA deal stopped now!’ I want the CCA deal stopped now.”
The deal got stopped, leading to one of the great film cameos of all time–and riveting speeches of all time on how the world in fact worked.
Angered UBS Chairman of the Board Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) summoned Beale into his imposing conference room (“Valhalla”). He nicely led him in and sat him down at one table-head, saying “They say I can sell anything. I’d like to try to sell something to you.”
He then strode to the opposite end, stood with his hands on the table, glaring at Beal, and boomed:
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear?! Do you think you’ve merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and You Will Atone!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state – Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.”
Beale asked:
“Why me?”
Jensen responded:
“Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.”
Beale, with a look of bewildered and terrified awe on his face said:
“I have seen the face of God.”
Jensen replied:
“You just might be right, Mr. Beale.”
Which leads us full circle to Beal’s pacification and de-humanizing of humanity speech.
Roger Ebert notes importantly in his 2000 retrospective: “One of Chayefsky’s key insights is that the bosses don’t much care what you say on TV, as long as you don’t threaten their profits. Howard Beale calls for outrage, he advises viewers to turn off their sets, his fans chant about how fed up they are–but he only gets in trouble when he reveals plans to sell the network’s parent company to Saudi Arabians. There’s a parallel here with “The Insider,” a 1999 film about CBS News, where “60 Minutes” can do just about anything it wants to, except materially threaten CBS profits.” (Note from the writers here, “The Insider”, critically acclaimed, is still one of the greatest films ever made, and one of the most important, about the worst single corporate killer in history–tobacco–and their exposure in the US by a whistleblower and journalist acting with integrity willing to take down his bosses. Our own work converged with this as we searched out and challenged any non-profit in our area of work that took money from Big Tobacco. It was a challenging time–we lost millions in potential revenue by refusing any funding directly or indirectly related to tobacco. Stress ran high, but its the stuff activism is made of, and all who challenged this evil were vindicated when CEOs of Big Tobacco got caught in the Big Lie in front of the US Congress and were forced into the biggest multi-billion dollar settlement of all time by attorneys general of combined US states. Still, today, the tobacco industry threatens to kill a billion people this century outside the US and the World Health Organization has called for radical measures to prevent this.)
As Beal began his next show, the narrator stated: “That evening, Howard Beale went on the air to preach the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen”:
“Last night I got up here and asked you people to stand up and fight for your heritage, and you did, and it was beautiful. Six million telegrams were received at the White House. The Arab takeover of CCA has been stopped. The people spoke, the people won. It was a radiant eruption of democracy. But I think that was it, fellas. That sort of thing is not likely to happen again. Because at the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick dying, decaying political concept, writhing in its final pain. I don’t mean that the United States is finished as a world power. The United States is the richest, the most powerful, the most advanced country in the world, light-years ahead of any other country. And I don’t mean the Communists are gonna take over the world, because the Communists are deader than we are.
What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.
Well, the time has come to say is ‘dehumanization’ such a bad word?’ Whether it’s good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren’t. The whole world, not just us. We’re just the most advanced country, so we’re getting there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things…”
That all folks, for now.
It is necessary to remind for those of us who saw the movie at the time, or to inform for those who did not, that activism for well over a decade, started by a few, had become a norm at that point in many ways (often adopted even by our parents generation to an extent)–we had stopped an ill-conceived war, that still, to date, killed by far the most Americans since World War Two, countless civilians, and at least assisted in bringing communist genocide to Cambodia and elsewhere, fought for (some died for) huge changes in civil rights laws and practices which had kept blacks oppressed even with slavery ended a hundred years before, run a constitution-threatening criminal president out of office, and had a Republican first lady at the forefront, among other things, of leading the way to what seemed the inevitable adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment gauranteeing women’s rights, the movement for LGBT equality was at its start, and the list goes on.
That’s right. We were closer by an indescribable factor to equality for all with the momentum to finish the job as never before–40 years ago. Bullets had stopped the momentum in many ways in 1968, and the lessons Bobby Kennedy should have taught us about how you win the votes of the white working class and the black underclass and everyone else appeared to go with him to the grave. Still, the ethos of the times was such that after the Nixon-Watergate trauma, Republican Betty Ford could make the White House feminist-central, and health care-central for women with breast cancer, and recovery-central for those with addictions and often co-disorders or underlying disorders of various kinds, leading to the idea that intervention must occur before people who are sick destroy themselves and other innocents, and who should be helped in treatment that addressed whatever was needed for mental health and trauma as well, increasingly understood with time. A long way to go in understanding and accomplishing all the above. But that’s where we were in 1976 watching “Network”.
For us, it brought no new or stunning revelations–it brought a new and stunning use of Hollywood to tell the truths we already knew–the ones we were fighting to change and confident we had on the run.
Whoops.
Doesn’t bring much solace 40 years later does it?
It isn’t meant to.
So let’s pull out a favorite we’ve used before, a quote from Aeschylus that Bobby Kennedy used the night of Martin Luther King, Jr’s death as he sought to comfort the afflicted in the Indianapolis Ghetto:
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus.
He once wrote, ‘And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”
One observation of courage and inspiration to end on. The activism hasn’t stopped, the movement forward hasn’t stopped. A barbaric law had been proposed in the Turkish Parliament to actually condone sexual assault of minors in some cases related to underage marriage. A story in-depth for another time. But thousands of the outraged did the politically impossible–they stopped the bill, right up to turning around the not-so-democratic leader of Turkey on the issue. It was a done deal, until growing thousands would not be turned back and would have no other answer to their demand to protect all children. We salute and thank these wonderful sisters and brothers. They are one of so many reasons we believe change is still a’comin. We said there would be more and more people in the streets on this issue. Children first. Its just getting started.