Dear Howard Beale,

What I wouldn't do to have a drink with you.

I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!

When you bellowed that line in the 1976 film Network, you made movie history. The American Film Institute ranked mad as hell as #19 in its 100 greatest movie quotes of all time. I would argue it deserved to be in the top ten—or five, although the entire monologue is pure genius.

While that scene is a nonstop barrage of gunfire, your Union Broadcasting System (UBS) colleague, programming chief Diana Christensen, pulls the trigger for the piercing bullet at the 0:56 mark when her face blooms with Machiavellian revelation. By 2:25, she firing on all cylinders, tossing a phone receiver in the air and triumphantly exclaiming, “Son of a bitch! We struck the motherlode!”

Diane recognizes you—Howard Beale—as the rarest unicorn. You’ve got all the makings for a trifecta in her world.

1. Familiarity. As an anchor for UBS for more than 20 years, everyone in America knows you. That’s media capital money cannot buy.

2. Populous outrage. With lines like, “The dollar buys a nickel’s worth,” you know exactly how to push the buttons that activate America’s anger.

3. Drama. You’d previously announced to the world that, having been fired for low ratings, you intend to “blow your brains out” on live television, which you subsequently explained away as temporary “madness.” You then tell your rapt audience that in reality, you simply ran out of “bullshit.”
   
   Insanity mixed with profanity? Baby, now you’re really onto something.

Aside: Your colleague Diane came to fruition in real life by way of one Steve Bannon.

Perhaps most importantly, Diane recognizes that triumvirate’s value increases tenfold when catapulted into the stratosphere via the ubiquitous propaganda machine of her time.

Television.

Inexplicable and disturbing image of beer can and author’s television, 2010.

You’ve been called prescient to the point of cliché, but the finer points of your demise often escape today’s rearview commentary, like how your familiarity rendered you so impotent nearly the entire production team fails to notice your on-air suicide announcement. Nor does anyone show the mildest concern over your distress. No one poses, Gee … maybe Howard needs some help, or any such thing.

Then there’s your clear disdain for your viewership, who relishes your derision as if it’s high praise straight from the mouth of Jesus.

It starts subtly: “Please,” you say, ostensibly in the collective voice of your viewers, “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.”

And ramps up: “Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers,” you bellow. “Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube!” The audience erupts with cheers.

You eventually take the governor off all together: “Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some two-hundred-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.”

At one point in the film, when Diane and UBS bigwig Frank Hackett are talking about giving you your own show, Frank says, “We’re talking about putting a manifestly irresponsible man on network television,” to which Diane nods conspiratorially.

Irresponsible? By today’s standards, Howard, that’s downright quaint.

On Sunday, March 24, 2024, as I worked a jigsaw puzzle in my family room, ABC newsman Jonathan Karl interviewed sitting US Senator Marco Rubio, who’s got an eye on the vice presidency. Karl asked Rubio about how his prospective boss, Donald Trump, treated his last VP.

Karl: Look what happened to the last guy. A mob stormed the capital literally calling to HANG MIKE PENCE and Trump defended those chants of HANG MIKE PENCE.

Rubio: I will tell you this, when Donald Trump was President of the United States, this country was safer. It was more prosperous.

You read that right.

You want context? Fine. Watch the whole thing here. The above excerpt starts at about the 5:45 mark. But the real jawdropper, my friend, is that the exchange—the part about a hanging—won’t even garner a headline. After all, that mob stormed the Capitol THREE WHOLE YEARS ago.

… yawn …

1/6/21 Storming of US Capitol, Tyler Merbler, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Now Howard, if you really want me to connect all the dots between your fictional mad as hell and and the very real threat to American democracy unfurling in broad daylight, I’m happy to meet you in the darkest corner bar we can find. I will sit with you for hours, gazing at you, laughing at your every quip as you sip an iced vodka. Then I will relay the saddest story every told, and we’ll close the place down before I get so much as halfway through it.

Baby, I’m not blaming you. After all, how were you to know when you took those first tentative steps along the Yellow Brick Road, they would lead to … this.

Love, Erin

---

ps: I love your adapted mid-Atlantic accent, which waxes and wanes throughout the film. Such a subtle reference to an America long gone.

pps: If Diane thought television was the way to worm into the American psyche, she woulda loved these nifty smart phones.

ppps: You ever hear of a guy named Lonesome Rhodes? You two are completely different and exactly alike.

pppps: I’ve always had a soft spot for news anchors, but Howard, I gotta tell ya … it’s hardening a bit these days.

Lester Holt and author, July 2016