Over coffee with a friend this past Monday, we discussed the Donald Drumpf travelling road show. While we agree that Ted “the Canadian Imposter” Cruz is far scarier than the Donald, we disagree about the Drumpf phenomenon. While I feel the rhetoric of hate, bigotry, misogyny which spews from his lie-hole sets a dangerous tone, incites conflict and reduces the primary process to bullies on the playground, my friend thinks the Drumpfinator is merely stirring the pot. As we tossed ideas and arguments back and forth, the movie, “Network” came up. Suddenly, I realized that Drumpf might really be the Howard Beale of 2016. If you are not familiar with the movie, Howard Beale is an evening anchor on a fictional television network. He has been fired, but in the two weeks he has remaining, he decides to let loose and tell it like it is. As you can imagine, his ratings sore.
I’m going to slightly alter Beale’s rant from Paddy Chayefsky’s 1975 “Network” screenplay to show you what I mean. What I changed or added (only in one case) has been italicized.
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 just crooks, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, cops are gunning down children 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 smartphones while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes and a terrorist incident at home or abroad, 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's going crazy. So we don't go out any more. 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 smartphone and my HD and my twitter and my Instagram accounts, 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 riot. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to write your congressmen. 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 defense budget and the terrorists and crime in the street. All I know is first you got to get mad. You've got to say: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. I'm a human being, goddammit. 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 anymore!"
I hope you can see how closely this mirrors the rhetoric in today’s primary. And, if you believe I’m wrong, I woke up the other morning to hear an NPR pundit talking about Drumpf say, “the public are mad as hell and don’t want to take this anymore.
I don’t believe our system is completely broken, but it has been skewed and screwed by self-serving politicians on both sides. That is part of Drumpf’s message and perhaps what originally drew followers to him. Unfortunately, his message has become the antithesis of what makes America great, openness, our willingness to accept others, using their best to meld them into our population and make us better. So when I hear Drumpf say he will make our country great again, all I can say is, “I’m mad as hell and I don’t want to take this anymore.”