•• A New Season Begins ••
"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 streets, 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 TVs 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 all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're
crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we
don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the
world we're living is getting smaller, and all we say is "Please,
at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have
my toaster and my TV and my my steel-belted radials, and I
won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
"We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people
sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors,
creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the
illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that
the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do
whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat
like the tube. You even think like the tube. In God's name,
you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion."
• Howard Beale • In Network • The Movie
5:12:51 PM
