Today's Howard Beale Reminder

Paddy Chayefsky was a brilliant playwright and screenwriter whose early 1970s satires were amazingly prescient. His script for the movie Network predicted the rise of infotainment (gossip, astrology, and yellow journalism) as a replacement for actual network news. His script for the movie The Hospital predicted the triumph of business concerns over medicine in health care. I strongly urge anyone who hasn't seen these movies to check them out.

Howard Beale was a character in the movie Network. He was a news anchor who had a mental breakdown and . . . started telling the truth on the air. Here's some of what Mr. Chayefsky told everyone through Howard Beale over 30 years ago:

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 streets, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air's unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our teevees while some local newscaster tell us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be . . .

. . . So we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is, please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my teevee and my hair dryer 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 know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the street. All I know is first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a human being, God_______. My life has value.' So I want you to get up now. I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!'

The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Screenplays, pgs. 173-174. At this point in the movie, the camera pans as people stick their heads outside their windows across the city and start screaming into the rain.

Here's my impression of Howard Beale:

You already know What's Wrong. You really don't need me, or anybody else, to tell you What Has Gone Wrong. Some of us might know a few more details about particular Things That Have Gone Wrong, but we all know the broad outlines of What's Wrong. You also don't need permission from me or anybody else to do something about it. Stop waiting for people to organize you, or mobilize you, to do something about What's Wrong.

I don't want you to get angry and vent. We've all been there, done that, got the t-shirt. It's long past time to move beyond empty venting. It's time for each of us to do something about What's Wrong. It doesn't have to be some heroic action. Just doing one little thing today about part of What's Wrong will make a difference.

That is all for now. Thank you for your attention.