Jiveass Jarvis
The origin of the mantra: 'I'm mad as hell'
By Andy Klein
In 1976, Sidney Lumet directed Network, a prescient film about conglomerates, media culture, and the degradation of human experience, written by Paddy Chayefsky. Chayefsky was the most honored writer from the “Golden Age of Television” and second in fame only to Rod Serling. Some petty and shortsighted types criticized Chayefsky for biting the hand that had once fed him, but that didn’t really matter, as long as Network was a hit – a fact, that is, central to the film’s plot. Nothing else mattered.
While it would be wrong to say that we now live in precisely the world that Network predicted, the similarities are strong enough that a new generation of viewers might not even get the joke. Those who have grown up in a world of cable news and reality TV are likelier to take the movie as a history lesson than an exaggerated satire. I mean, of course, television is about ratings, and so-called news programs are produced like entertainment shows. Your point is …?
I suspect that TV would be no different today if Network had never been made, but some of its accuracy might be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy: That is, it’s possible that TV execs took it more as a handbook, in the manner of Machiavelli’s The Prince, than a cautionary tale.
In any case, it’s certain that at least one person outside the industry took it that way. Howard Jarvis – the public face of Proposition 13 – co-opted the catchphrase of the film’s mad prophet Howard Beale: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” In the process, he misquoted and actually
improved Chayefsky’s version, which was “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” “Take this” is a bit clunkier, slowing down the rhythm, while “take it” rolls more naturally off the tongue.
Unlike his fictional counterpart, the real-life Howard wasn’t crazy …
unless you mean “crazy like a fox.” Jarvis may have been a sincere ideologue, but he was also an exploitable presence for the California Real Estate Association. He was a perfect Central Casting pick for the Gruff Old Uncle – the benevolent, no-nonsense guy, who was too damned old to worry about what he said. In a ’40s movie, he would have been played by William Demarest.
Like Beale, he tapped into a general dissatisfaction with life in America. In doing so, he was one of the pioneers of the amazing political turnaround to come. Watergate had disgraced Richard Nixon; the scandals should have made Republicans unelectable. Any reasonable analysis of our troubles would have suggested a swing toward the left, not the right. But, when people are simply “mad as hell” – too mad to bother about reasoned argument – it’s easy to steer them over a cliff.
At that time, a sequence of legislation and court decisions had indeed mucked up property tax assessments in California. Jarvis turned Chayefsky’s slogan into a rallying cry for homeowners vs. those pesky tax-and-spend bureaucrats. Renters were brought on board by assurances from the CREA that the savings would be passed along – one of the most predictably false promises in California history … except, perhaps, for the assurances that essential social services wouldn’t be affected.
Savings passed on out of landlords’ sheer sense of justice … Cut revenues with no adverse effect on services … Clap loud and Tinkerbell won’t die.
Near where I lived at the time, libraries had to shorten their hours within a year. Fire departments saw their funding shrink. And the vast majority
of tenants saw their rents increase shortly after passage – a fact that, locally speaking , was the main catalyst for the passage of Santa Monica’s amazingly strong rent control law.
More importantly, however, Jarvis’s successful deployment of folksiness to sell basically unfeasible notions was echoed in Ronald Reagan’s subsequent election and eventual deification. His triumph emboldened Republicans to sell the patent absurdity of supply-side economics to the public. Its legacy includes the last seven years of smoke and mirrors.
Published: 01/23/2008
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