The Mad Howard Beale

Published April 8, 1987 in the Lawrence Eagle Tribune.

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!

Howard Beale, the crazed TV anchorman in the movie Network, touched a national nerve with those words back in 1976.  The network allowed Howard's televised ravings to continue because the more outrageous he was, the more the jaded populace liked it.

But when Howard's ratings declined, as all prime-time ratings eventually must, the network saw fit to kill the show by literally killing Howard – on camera.  Nothing personal, you understand.  It was strictly a business decision.

Today, many people would not understand exactly what Howard Beale was mad as hell about.  Inflation is down, interest rates are down, unemployment is down, and the stock market is positively dizzy with delight.  Supply-side economics seems to have worked its promised miracle.  Maybe what is good for General Motors is good for the country, after all.

When inflation was rampant and unemployment was in double numbers, the American people were all over Jimmy Carter like banshees.  Had Carter, during his presidency, been caught in a botched attempt to swap arms for the hostages then being held in Iran, the public outcry would have been frightening.  Today, Ronald Reagan has been caught making that swap, but where is the public outcry?  Today, our president's best defense in the Iran/Contra affair is "I wasn't aware," "I don't remember," "I wasn't fully in control."  Where is the public outcry?

...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!

Despite the Tower Commission report and despite our halfhearted assertions to the contrary, we seem determined not to hold this president accountable.   But the economy is another matter.  Whether today's robust economy is due to the policies of Reaganomics or the fall of oil prices or the relative position of the sun, moon, and stars, Americans do credit Ronald Reagan fully for that. 

The glory of the Reagan economic formula is its disarming simplicity – less government spending and less taxes equal more jobs and more wealth.  It is the classic come-on of our consumer society – get more for less – and we buy it every time.

Howard Beale might have had something to say about the other side of this economic miracle, however – how social and medical programs are being hurt by funding cuts, how independent farmers do not seem to be sharing in the fun, how a monster deficit threatens to gobble us up, and how more and more Americans are being laid off and forced into lower-paying jobs, or forced to take pay cuts in their current jobs, due to corporate "adjustments" (nothing personal, you understand).  But such talk is the stuff of a misfit, a mad Howard Beale.  After all, this is Ronald Reagan's America, the land where obtaining fabulous wealth is as easy as winning a lottery or threatening a buyout of Gillette.

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 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. 

Sorry, Howard.  Very few people are angry today.  Ronald Reagan has restored complacency and the American self-image to levels not seen since the days before the rude '60s.  No matter what problems we do have, no matter what errors we make or what realities confront us, Ronald Reagan knows how to make us feel good about America.  It is what he does best.  Not that there is anything wrong with feeling good about America. It is wrong only if the feeling is pushed upon us like a drug – one that clouds our ability to think clearly and critically about a version of reality being presented to us – and we do not have the will to push back.

President Reagan ended his January State of the Union address by invoking dreamy images of "we the people."  We the people.  The refrain might have scraped on Howard Beale's nerves like a cruel taunt.  We the people.  After all, just who was Howard Beale mad as hell at?  Who holds the real power in America?  Not the politicians.  Not big business.  Not the military or the NSC or the CIA.

We the people.