Network- There is no democracy.

Run time: 08:31 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzSj1yNZdY8   Posted on YouTube: December 02, 2007 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: June 03, 2009 By DU Member: bushmeister0 Views on DU: 1418

 
All the news today, GM's demise; the selling of the Hummer line to the Chinese; the Chinese laughing out loud during a speech in Beijing by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that Chinese assets were secure in America; Obama's trip to Saudi Arabia; got me to thinking about this scene in Network.

Paddy Chayefsky wrote our epitaph 33 years, ago. We're just late for our own funeral, apparently.

Setup:

TV prophet and madman Howard Beale used his Bully Pulpit to get the American people up in arms about the take over of his Network by the Saudis; Network stands to lose lots of money; Network CEO convinces Beale to retract his opposition to the deal by convincing him there is no such thing as democracy.

Transcript:

Arthur Jensen: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians.

There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, Yen, Rubles, Pounds, and Shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx?

They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Network_(film)

Pretty heady stuff and all totally true.

How's that world of perfect economic justice working out? Just as well for the Russians and their Communist Dream as it did for Ken Lay and his Enron Dream.

The network chairman perfectly represented the mind of businessmen. Especially during Reagan's years, businessmen wore identical blue-striped suits (male and female), all of them had to own fax machines and they all believed in the inevitable triumph of the service economy over the making of actual goods.

Meanwhile, while laborers grew closer to reality - their real income and purchasing power disappearing day by day - the decision of their bosses grew delusional. Only now, with the empty stores in strip malls, the housing projects nobody can afford to buy, and the growing mobs of unemployed and angry people, are the Masters of the Universe getting a clue.

The critical fact that most DU people don't realize is that being right is no great satisfaction. Unless something close to divine intervention occurs (and how many vocal atheists are there here?) this will only end in blood. Blood spilled in the executive suite and on the streets, in the ghettos and the suburbs. And nobody knows who or what will be left standing at the end.

When the bottom fell out, half the town of Flint went to jail and the other half of Flint worked as prison guards.

Win, win for the rich.

If there's blood to be spilled, they'll provide the weapons to both sides.

And that might be considered scahdenfreude, but as I said, blood is blood. If this country goes insane (and I think in my darker moments it'll be when, not if) chaos will rule. And darkness, and decay, and the Red Death will hold illimitable dominion over all - but it won't be a peaceful death, only a gory and painful one.

Over for dinner and a movie. (This circa 1992)

Let's watch "Roger and Me."

People would watch, and then the comments all went along the lines of "Well those simple minded auto workers - what did they expect? They never went on to college. They knew NOTHING. Of course,
they should have planned for the day when their jobs were obsolete!"

Fast forward ahead four or five years. Suddenly the same programmers I knew, who had been so cocky, were seeing their jobs taken over in Silicon Valley by people with HB1 visas. And the other jobs seemed to be over in India or Pakistan.


Americans simply need to learn to stick together, but I am afraid it may well be too damn late.

It laid out the whole neoliberal philosophy that dominated the late twentieth century and finally fell to a crashing death last year.

Something that is always absent from any discussion of Network is how the news division goes full circle during the course of the story. It begins as a money losing public service; then it is transformed by corporate apparatchik Frank Hackett and entertainment division chief Diana Christiansen into a successful and lucrative enterprise by exploiting the mental illness of network news lead anchor Howard Beale; and finally ends up as again being a money loser, not as a public service but as the propaganda arm of corporate CEO Arthur Jensen.

The 1976 film prophesied in this way the path we took from Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite to Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake to Brit Hume and Jim Cramer.