On being mad as hell...

I'm flip flopping my Monday night post with my Monday morning post. I wrote this on Friday and since I've read plenty of others that are on to the same theme. My ego won't allow this post to wait.



I've long felt that a major social eruption was coming in this country. Not as long as some friends who are probably more prescient - but nevertheless the usual markers for massive civil discord have been accumulating since at least the early 70s when real income began its long decline and we became dependent on others for our energy.

My go-to world view tells me that the Reagan-Clinton years were a respite in the this anger build up - but geological (a need to secure oil) and corporate realities "came home to roost" under W. The second Iraq war was fought so we'd have military bases in a bad neighborhood. A neighborhood that sustains us . Another bubble was expanded to paper over the ongoing decline in real wages, and manufacturing. It worked. Until it didn't.

Obama won presenting as the anti-Bush - successfully funneling the anger that built up after the financial bubble and the war went south. Though it's long been apparent to any one who looked that BHO works - in general - for the same people as W. He's not the anti-Bush at all. He's the natural next step. His first and most important job was saving that which least deserved saving. Which he - taking the baton from Bush - has attempted to do by printing little objects of future nostalgia called "dollars".

Still, the anger has been just below boiling all year. On some level most people know the system is a crock. Incompetence is rewarded. Idiots get massive bonuses which you and I are forced to fund. The nation is lied into war. Failed business get conjured dollars...In other words, everything we thought was true is turned on its head.

In this system of values hard work is replaced by entitlement, consumerism destroys thrift, and irony becomes the new sincerity. It is intriguing to note that people's spending and saving habits turned on a dime last fall -before the recession fully unfolded. Why? People knew something was askew and have known it for a long time. Even as we bought houses and TVs on credit, people somewhere deep down knew they weren't living right.

I should have expected health care reform to cause so much anger. I'm more likely to raise holy hell at a townhall over bailouts. This skewed my vision. Most people have health insurance they like and - true or not - the meme that they may lose this is taken extremely personally.

The anger around the heath care debate is about health care - but its also about so much else. In the past decade we've comforted ourselves with bread and circuses as the country dug itself deeper into debt and was looted from within. As the prophetic and fictional Howard Beale said about us back when Hollywood made movies that mattered: Just let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel belted radial tires and I won't say anything....

But the fear that health care will dissipate for the majority hits deeper than corporate looting, taxes and even our recent wars. It is, by definition, personal. It is a line in the sand. The elite can screw us in a million way - but it cannot take THIS. In Network Beale also declaims: You've got to get mad. You've got to say 'I'm a human being goddammit my life has value'! That sentence may be the true subtext of the entire health care debate. Indeed, it comes close to hitting on the current gestalt of the nation.

Breaking up the circle jerk

A few days ago I grandly intoned that "Jon Stewart matters". What I meant was that Stewart has proven himself as a pop cultural shaker if not exactly a mover. He probably destroyed CNN's Crossfire by eviscerating the 4 panelist on their own show. Stewart was also first out of the gate to state that it was "okay to laugh at Obama".

Still the public castration of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last Thursday leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Cramer, without a doubt, invited it. He would have been wise not to appear at all. His ridiculous show on CNBC, Mad Money, is so ripe for mocking satire that it appears to be a satire itself most of the time. It is asinine.

What is distressing about this is the idea that anyone would take Cramer seriously in the first place. His show's set evokes Pee Wee's Playhouse - not sturdy seriousness about investing.



CNBC and MSNBC are particularly, but not uniquely, responsible for the rampant dumbing down of information. The priorities of the cable news channels are inverted. Ratings come first, information such as it is, always works in service of the higher goal of higher ratings. Stewart's take down of Cramer is more like a family feud than a pubic service. Both men traffic in the same currency: entertainment packaged as information. Stewart is just more upfront about it.

I feel no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who lost money because of a stock pick Cramer made. If you invest based on a loud clown's advice...well then you get what you deserve. (Cramer may have some bonifides in reality. Still his show presents him as a crack addled ferret with A.D.D.)

The public lashing of Cramer has the whiff of the mob with a bucket of tar and a pile of feathers looking for a culprit - any culprit.

Citizens need to ask themselves an overarching question: Why is almost all television news so untrustworthy in this country? Not just financial information - but all information. Why are we continually presented with huge story arcs about needing to go to war, or the amazing skills of junior Senators and then told after that fact that maybe, just maybe, the media did not tell the whole story. Oops. The arc is straightforward enough: No balance in reporting an issue or topic for months, followed by the issue playing out badly for most, but beneficially for a few, followed by recriminations in the media when the war has begun or the election is over. It is a manageable, compact, 3 act structure that has nothing to do with "news".

As fictional anchorman Howard Beale intones in Network "We'll tell you any shit you want to hear." I'd only add with 30 years of hindsight that first they'll tell us why we want to hear it.

So now the infotainment network called CNBC is in the docket for missing the financial meltdown. The infotainment network called CNN is gleeful. Giving the openly infotainment based Daily Show a good rating and some free P.R.

Someone needs to break up the circle jerk.

What is not spoken about is real responsibility. This would implicate you and me - and you and me might turn off the TV - the final catastrophe for all network executives. Real criminals and real greedy, amoral, bastards brought us to this point. They must pay in the courts and with their reputations. Nevertheless a profound and troubling disconnect in the general population allowed all this to occur. Being consumers of everything from burgers to religion to news instead of being citizens of a society with responsibilities must end. We are a nation identified with consumption. It is put to us as our duty and highest calling. Of course, CNBC and CNN feeds us any shit they think we want. It is profitable.

Beale tells us to "get up and go to the window and scream 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.' " What we are not "to take" is not stated. I'll tell you what I think it is in 2009: Stop allowing yourself to be treated as a "consumer" first, last and always. Cows need to be herded, not citizens. Beale again - you've got to say: I'm a human being goddamit and my life has value.

And when that is done - remember the media will try to monetize your humanity as well. That is what they do. We must stop allowing everything to be an entertainment for our consumption and distraction.

Cramer entertained, he was then taken down by another entertainer, for our entertainment. Are we any closer to finding out how we got here?


P.S. for anyone who finds a contradiction in my use of two clips from a movie to make a point about corrosive infotainment I say this: Network is entertainment. It is also art.