I could say that this is irony made manifest, that a show on Comedy Central is bringing light to issues of governance, while cable television shows avoid it. Howard’s point is that once a law becomes part of the canon, it becomes almost impossible to change. The legal code is filled with detritus that benefits few. Howard gave two examples, one each from both sides of the political aisle. One was a juvenile facility in New York state that could not be closed because of a law in New York that any facility that employed union workers needed a year’s advance warning before closing. There were no juveniles for it, and it was costing $50 million to run. But the hands of the state were tied. Howard also mentioned subsidies to cotton farmers that have been on the books since the Depression. Cotton farmers were small farmers, going out of business then. Now, not so much. Most cotton is farmed by large corporations. And they pull down a subsidy of $3.2 billion a year. And cotton is selling at an all time high. Howard has an organization at Common Good. Check it out.

 Here is the video from Jon Stewart.

Howard was at TED in 2010, and here is the video from that.

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Seth Meyers rocks it.

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I don’t know how it is that Mr. Lumet came to direct the script by Paddy Chayefsky, but the script is a gem of no-holds-barred, damn-the-audience writing.  It is filled with the argot of television, but doesn’t give a damn if you understand it or not.  Mr. Chayefsky foresaw the world of television in which we live, to our detriment.  Just about the only thing that television has not put on the air in the form of reality television is a planned, live assassination.  But that is available on YouTube.

Some people remember this scene as the most important.

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Other people remember this scene.

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I like those, but the one that had me rolling on the floor on first viewing was the one where the radicals and the lawyers are negotiating contracts.  That clip is not available.

The movie starred Faye Dunaway.  She won the Oscar and she should have.  Robert Duvall inhabits his character in a way that only he can.  I think that Mr. Lumet probably turned the camera on and let the actors work; the script seems clear enough, the characters well-formed, direction was not needed to find the beats in the scene.  There are long speeches, which are normally death for a movie, but I liked them.

What Mr. Chayefsky doesn’t say is that the thing that draws our attention is spectacle.  He was railing against spectacle and the use of it to delude and mislead people.  But that is how it ever was.  One step on that path was the gladiatorial games.  Pure spectacle.  Against the backdrop of spectacle, we then try to identify the elements of narrative that will inform our lives.  Such is as it ever was.  Sophocles wrote about a king who bedded his mother and fathered his own half-siblings.  Think that wasn’t spectacle?

There are two kinds of spectacle: sex and violence.  One is the embodiment of the greatest form of intimacy we humans possess, the other is the played as if it is.  Our mores don’t allow us to explore sexual relations between consenting adults in a way that seeks to understand and communicate, so our storytellers turn to violence or violent sex.

I’m not a fan of reality television.  I don’t watch that much television any more and I must confess to a certain element of pride of ignorance when references to reality television are made in the popular media.  Mr. Chayefsky recognized the speed of communication and what it could do for mankind, and I think he also recognized that we would not use it well.  The Everyman television, YouTube, can be used as a tool of democratization, but it can only act as a solvent, stripping away the chimera of respectability that repressive regimes use.  It can not teach mutual respect for others nor direct us away from our inborn tendency toward clanism.

But here we are and it is our planet, or rather, the planet of our children.  I hope they don’t damn us in our graves.

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And here’s the audio:

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A DIY scanning electron microscope.  See the video there.

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