“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad… The dollar buys a nickel’s worth… 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… I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
Howard Beale, Network, 1976
MAYBE IT’S because I’d been vegging out watching every single moment of the previous fortnite of Wimbledon, that the instant I saw a bleeding, wounded Donald Trump rise up defiantly, waving a clenched fist and chanting “Fight! Fight!” that my first instinct was to say, “Game, Set & Championship. Mr. Trump.”
The moment was priceless, an unscripted billion dollar political advertising campaign poster, like something out of an inspirational Rocky movie. And it wouldn’t make a difference whether I voted for him or not based upon this instance. I live in California. The state votes Democratic for me whether I like it or not.
But this also reminded me of that 1976 satirical black comedy–drama film Network in which the fictional television anchor Howard Beale, played by the Oscar-winning Peter Finch is so fed up with the direction of the country that he goes off script on camera to announce to his national audience: ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
Soon he has millions across the country yelling the same mantra. And, like Howard Beale, today I’m fed up with the direction of the country, so much so that I want to open a windowjust to scream the same thing.
Indulge me for a moment. This is what Howard Beal says leading uo to his outburst:
“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 TV’s 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.'”
Does that remind you have how so many of us feel today?
I can’t excuse Donald Trump’s sometimes racist, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes scandalous language and behavior. It’s utterly opposite the values I was taught and grew up with in the America of the 1950s and 60s and which, for the most part still exist in much of the country today, much as it did prior to my generation. I also refuse to accept the country that we have become today, so angry, so divisive, so accepting and forgiving of the criminal culture and environment that sadly we sometimes mirror those second-rate, Third World countries none of us would live in, though we try to save — and now we’re having trouble saving ourselves.
Unfortunately, I have no crystal ball for seeing how the election November 5 will turn out. My common sense, though, remains pretty sharp.
On Saturday when Mr. Trump rose up to signal that he was not only safe from an assassin’s shots but also mad as hell and wasn’t going to take this anymore, he probably sealed the deal on beating Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whomever the Democrats ultimately run against him, every bit is decisively as the Spaniard 21-year-old Carlos Alcaraz whipped so-called all-time tennis great Novak Djokovic in their Wimbledon gentlemen’s championship match the next day.
Bravo to Donald Trump every bit as much as to Carlos Alcaraz.
What Mr. Trump does the rest of the way in this presidential campaign will largely determine whether he has the wisdom and foresight to maintain that apparent advantage and to hold on to a God-given second chance not so much at greatness as for redemption in America.
TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author, is a writer-at-large and the national political writer for LAMonthly. org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.
