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!
That, of course, is from the famous "Howard Beale Mad as Hell rant" delivered by Peter Finch in his Academy Award winning performance in the 1976 movie "Network".
Apart from the eerily timeless quality of it (go ahead - read it again, but pretend it's 2010 instead of 1976), I would like to draw your attention to the line "... as if that's the way it's supposed to be!"
Now, I don't know about you, but whenever Mitch McConnell or John Boehner (this is hilarious - the Firefox spell checker is offering to replace Boehner with "boner"), or some other GOP "leader" utters the phrase "1/6th of the U.S economy", I want to jump out of my chair like Howard Beale told us to.
Why on earth aren't Democrats knocking that GOP talking right out of the park every time it's offered up? Couldn't a smart cookie like Andrew Weiner say something painfully obvious like: "The fact that healthcare represents 1/6th of the U.S. economy is exactly why we need to reform it - it should never have been allowed to get that large", or "If Canada can deliver quality healthcare to all of its citizens for about 10% of GDP, don't you think the U.S. should be able to?", or "It's only because of massive waste and unregulated profiteering that it represents 20% of our economy - do you know how many unnecessary tests and procedures are performed in the U.S. every day, or how much drug and insurance companies spend on advertising?"
Instead, what I usually hear are elliptical arguments about how spiraling healthcare costs are bad for the U.S. economy, or that reducing healthcare costs will (somehow) create jobs or result in pay raises, or some abstract phrase like "bending the cost curve".
The message of the movie "Network" is that television is systematically reducing our capacity for critical thought. And that was true even before the cable era and 24/7 ideological ghettos like Fox News and MSNBC.
Even more imperative that we keep the message simple - like Howard Beale did. Life in 2010, and particularly the state of healthcare in the U.S., is NOT the way things are supposed to be.