Your Morning Paddy
For Friday, October 125th, 2024
Week 83 of our regular morning feature here at Friedman of the Plains Worldwide in which we highlight the great words and works of great men and women, as well as those who are insufferable, delusional, and even fictional.
This Week Paddy Chayefsky
“We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.” — The Americanization of Emily
Bonus Paddy:
“I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, 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.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!” — Network (Screenplay)
It's funny. I saw Network again recently, and as impressed as I still was with the performances and the vitality of the writing, it smacked of too little too late. The US had sent millions of its kids to Vietnam, and tens of thousands had come back dead. Our little adventure defined as "anti-Communist," in the end, did about as much good as did our 20-year foray into Afghanistan. For a while, we made the foreigners look like brown Americans, but in the end, they weren't.
One of Eugene O'Neill's recurrent themes is that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, but that's inaccurate: Succeeding generations seem eager to repeat their forebears' mistakes. Paddy's right: As long as there are statues erected to Nathan Bedford Forrest and army bases named after Braxton Bragg, we will mistake rank treason for heroism. Imagine Franklin's surprise if, after the fledgling United States lost its war for independence, Britain put up statues of Washington, Hamilton, and Paine.
Instead of the generals, there could be statues to this guy, and who else, Dalton Trumbo, maybe. Cresative truthful men and women like that. Songs even. Idunno but I might be the first person to realize that you could fit "Paddy Chayefsky" into the same scansion as "Viva Las Vegas", if that was the way some lyricist wanted to roll.