Jurassic Puke

 
A.J.Sisco, The Times-PicayuneAn oil-coated dead seabird lies in the sand on the shore of Elmer's Island Friday, May 21, 2010.

When the Tea Baggers started their "Mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore..." tirade, evoking the 1976 prophetic film  Network, they had no idea what they were tapping into, no idea the origin or meaning of their spew. Their venom has spread, and now that the decayed blood of the extinct dinosaurs is rising up from beneath the sea like doom itself, the words of  Network come back with more meaning than ever. I've quoted it before, and now here it is again. Mr. Beale, the newsman who got all those people to yell, "I'm mad as Hell," confronts reality:

from Network (1976)

Arthur Jensen: [bellowing] 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, multinational 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!  

Arthur Jensen: [calmly] 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.
Howard Beale: Why me?
Arthur Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.
Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

What can a U.S. President do, or Congress, or international outrage, or the media, or any of us against the collective Pantheon of

BP, Halliburton, Transocean, Nalco, and Goldman- Sachs?

They are the intimately interlinked entities (persons according to our Supreme Court) that have caused the biggest  ecological disaster ever and continue to make it worse with their poison Corexit....

Jack