And a Little Tramp Shall Lead Them
Life is filled with interesting coincidences. Two of those occurred in the week leading up to Independence Day this year. I was catching up on some classic American cinema I had never gotten around to seeing, and as I was watching the little gem called Network from 1976, I discovered a speech that showed me that, 40 years before we elected a reality television star to the executive office of the President, we had already been told the truth about that deceptive medium, a truth even more true, in some ways, of our postmodern, post-truth, wired-up world than it was of the television-dominated world of 1976. In that film, the following speech is delivered on air by newscaster Howard Beale, the tragic hero of the film. The quote below is complete, minus a few of the less relevant passages, and a few unnecessarily profane ...