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!Children are being butchered because entire national governments care more about dollars than lives. Ever has it been, ever shall it be.
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, multi-national 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!
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.
Beale: But why me?
Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
Beale: I have seen the face of God.
Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.
Of Beatty's (Chayevsky's) speech, I take exception only to 1) Union Carbide, which merged with Dow while I was working there ("Welcome to Day One of the New Dow!") and 2) that bit about social benefits. Anybody alive today either knows or suspects that Chayevsky was being satirical or that, unfortunately, we just wound up getting fucked by the Great Big Corporation of America anyway. We'd offer to help Tom "I can see my own colon" Friedman to stuff his olive tree, Lexus and flat world up his protuberant ass, if he hadn't done so many years previously.
Why do I mention this? Because history invariably comes down to economics. Karl Marx wasn't right about much, but he was dead-on when he inverted Hegel and declared that history was about the material.
Again, ever has it been, ever shall it be.
If you don't believe me, scroll down and read why we're backing Israel's devastation of Lebanon.
Just to make clear, Israel, backed by the Bush administration, has butchered around 1000 Lebanese, many of them nowhere near defensable targets. Hizbullah, by contrast, has killed around 60 Israelis, the majority of them soldiers. Who's the "terrorist" here, Nasrallah or Olmert? Gosh, I'm sure it's the bad guy in the turban....
The Litani River, by the way, is more than 50% between the borders of Israel and Syria, and it was goal of founder Ben Gurion to rope off Israeli territory at that mark. But we're sure it's all about that defenseless Western client state defending itself against a poorly armed third-world army.
BONUS: We hate to mention this, since it affects all those persecuted Christians in America, but Qana, that place where Red Blogistan thinks Hizbullah staged lots of Lebanese "deaths" (hope those other 950 "deaths" were staged), was the place where that Jesus fellow turned water into wine. I know, I know, it's just a Bacchanalian myth retold in the Bible, like the Buddhist myth of the Enlightened One walking on water, but we're dealing with the Bible here, and everyone knows it's the Word of God. By the way, does anyone suspect, as I do, that Serapis or Orpheus was a model for "Christ"?
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