Meddling With The Primal Forces Of Nature

After finally finding time to read the complete four part series in the Washington Post on the vice presidency of Dick Cheney I could only think of one of my all-time favorite moments in motion picture history. The scene is from the motion picture “Network”, written by Paddy Cheyefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. The characters in the scene are Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), CEO of the network’s parent conglomerate, and Howard Beale (Peter Finch) the network’s deranged anchorman. The scene takes place in a darkened corporate conference room, beautifully appointed with a long mahogony conference room table surrounded by large leather chairs each with a green-glass shaded desk lamp sitting in front of it. On one end of the table stands Jensen, on the other end sits Beale.

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, rins, 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.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

I had the good fortune to have had a part in the making of Network, and the first time I saw this scene was in the summer of 1976 in my work environment. I was 24 years old and seeing this scene for the first time changed my world view. I suddenly understood oligarchy, and even worse, corporate oligarchy.

This series of articles on the Cheney vice presidency has revealed how Cheney has been able to consolidate power behind an intellectually weak president to an extent not seen before in American history. His fingerprints are all over almost all of the Bush Cheney administration policies. These scoundrels have been consolidating power and undermining American democracy ever since they were installed by the Supreme Court after the 2000 election and it has seemed to me ever since that they have been getting all their ducks in a row for what I have feared since that fall of 2000, a bloodless coup, imposition of martial law, dictatorship, the end of democracy in America.

But the Washington Post articles give me hope. The fact that they were even published gives me hope. Someone has decided that Dick Cheney needs to be thrown under the bus. The kind of behind-the-scenes manipulation on the part of Cheney’s office that runs rampant throughout all four articles cannot survive public scrutiny. My hope is that the publication of these articles and the attention that they should engender will end Cheney’s shadow presidency. Cheney seems to have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and we can only hope that he will atone.