Tag: Howard Beale

How Does This Movie End?

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Every day something crazier than the day before appears in the news.  It’s like the name of that old tv show. “Can You Top This?”  If Biden starts emptying out the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, then OPEC deducts two million barrels a day of oil from the market.  Ukraine stages a kamikaze assault on the Russian lines and Putin annexes the Russian provinces of Ukraine.  Italy elects a right-wing woman as prime minister and the EU threatens to withhold funding due to too much democracy.  The Germans warn they are running out of fuel so the United States sabotages the Nord Stream pipelines.

It seems that the only strategy anyone can think of is doubling and redoubling every time they lose a bet.  It feels like we’re at the “go for broke” table at some insane global casino.  Going all the way back to 2001 more and more bizarre actions by the US government has been the rule.  A disconnect between reality and events has occurred.  It’s like that road runner cartoon scene where Wiley Coyote has run off a cliff but keeps going in a straight-line walking on thin air.  And somehow gravity doesn’t catch up with him until he looks down and sees nothing under his feet but thin air.  Then he drops like a stone.  It feels like the whole world is that coyote running on air, running on empty.

The only question is, have we looked down yet?  I get the idea that it is beginning to unravel.  The first sign is the oil prices.  Joe ran us off the cliff by announcing that he was going to wean us off petroleum.  He poured a trillion dollar into the green new deal.  No more gas cars, no more natural gas to heat our homes and run our businesses.  No more pipelines, no more federal leases for exploration.  The only thing he forgot was windmills and solar panels aren’t real.

And what do you know.  The price of oil doubled.  So, he panics and starts drawing down the strategic reserve.  But that’s a temporary fix.  And now the Saudis and the Russians and the Iranians smell blood in the water so they’re gonna start torturing us.  Winter comes and oil becomes scarce and expensive.  But what is he going to do?  What new friends will he turn to?  He doesn’t have any left.

The economy is very weak.  The recession that American officials want to claim won’t happen is already in full bloom in Europe.  And the green new deal is already riling up the farmers in Europe and anyone who has to pay a fuel bill or a food bill.  In the words of Howard Beale, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.  …  We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy.”

So he’s driven us off a cliff and now he needs a nuclear war to distract us from being cold and hungry.  And who knows, maybe these sociopaths will do that too.  At this point I’ll be far from surprised.  I’ll be horrified but not surprised.  But for the sake of keeping this from becoming apocalyptic assume for a minute that the Russians don’t launch any nukes.  Then the way things are going, where does this all end up?  Assume that the Dems lose the House and the Senate.  What does Crazy Joe do for the next two years?  Does he tack to the middle?  Does he reverse his energy policy?  Or does he stay the course?

If he continues down this road, the recession is going to be very painful.  Millions of people will be out of work and that spells disaster for the presidential election in 2024.  He can arrest Donald Trump and anyone else he cares to.  But a recession in 2023 is a political disaster in 2024.  He’ll sink his party for sure if he lets that happen.  But that’s what the green new deal equals.  My guess is he stays the course.  Joe is just the front man for more important people.  And this is what they want to do.  This is what they will do!

So that brings me back to the original question.  How do this end?  The surprising answer is that they make this happen.  They crash the old system and keep the rest of us on life support while the Great Contraction whittles us down to nothing over time.

The only way it turns out otherwise is if someone steps forward and stops it.  Someone with the smarts and the stones to derail this plan and send us down an alternate path.  Is there such a man?  The answer to that question will tell you how this ends.  I’d guess it’s one chance in a hundred.

Howard Beale Was Right.  But We Still Don’t Know What to Do.

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In the 1976 movie Network, Peter Finch plays network news anchor Howard Beale.  And after a late-night voice in his head orders him to preach a revelation to his tv audience he makes the following speech on air.

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. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! 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!’

The audience responds in untold myriads by doing exactly what he says.  They stick their heads out the window and start screaming ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’

This scene in the movie is viscerally inspiring.  It struck a nerve in 1976 and it strikes maybe a more painful nerve today.  Everything that Howard Beale said in 1976 is even worse today.  Things are not just bad or crazy.  They’re demonic.  The government and the media and industry are actively conspiring, not just to ruin us but to exterminate us.

But in the next line Beale says, ’Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis.’

But guess what?  They never figured out what to do.  In the real world it had to wait until 1980 when America kicked Jimmy Carter out of the White House and Ronald Reagan began to address some of those things.  And we tried to do something similar in 2016 when we elected Donald Trump.

But guess what?  The Left got mad as hell and burned down America in the George Floyd riots and locked us in our shrinking homes during the COVID scamdemic.  Then they rigged the 2020 elections and we’re worse off than we were in 2016.

Maybe the only value in doing what Beale said to do is finding out we’re not alone.  Maybe that’s what the internet is, a giant street where everybody can stick their heads out the window and shout into the air.  But it doesn’t solve the real problem.  And that problem is that we’ve been dispossessed.  In the last forty-five years they took the country away from us.  All the levers of power are in their hands.  Fake news, fake elections, fake presidents, fake laws, fake government, fake religion, fake law, fake justice.

What it will take is someone, somewhere calling together a convention of whatever’s left of the Americans who don’t want to be harvested and deciding once and for all if we have what it takes to make a stand.  They will have to figure out what they can do that can’t be undone.  Then they’ll have to stick by their guns when the Left in all its manifestations comes for them.  If they’ve figured it correctly, they’ll have come up with a winning strategy that won’t be rolled back and use that as a foundation on which to increase their scope of control.  Suppose all the red states from South Carolina to Texas and north to Montana put together a platform of laws that will solve illegal immigration in all their states.  Think of the impact of that alone.  And what if they enact real welfare reform.  And how about ending urban gang violence?  With a united effort they could build their own law enforcement network like the FBI was supposed to be and make us free and put the bad guys away.

But before any of that happens someone with more guts and more power than anyone we’ve seen so far is going to have to say, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

And it’s beginning to look like that someone is going to have to be a Caesar.  Or it will be no one.