The Howard Beale Memorial Society is a non-profit, public interest Wyoming corporation qualified to do business in California.  We have a President (that's me) and three directors, as required by California law.

    Unless our directors have masochistic tendencies I have not yet discovered, they will remain anonymous as far as this site is concerned.  If so motivated, you can direct your outrage at me.

I'm old and rough, and dirty and tough,

like Barnacle Bill the Sailor. 

I drink my whiskey when I can. 

I drink it from an old tin can. 

For whiskey is the life of man. 

Says Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

   Seriously, and more specifically, about me:     

   I've had a long, varied and, at least to me, interesting life.  Born in California, parents divorced, attended several high schools, including a military academy, played in most all major sports, got my first jobs, and started college during the Great Depression years leading to WW-II, studying aeronautical engineering at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and UC Berkeley, but spending more time playing football, bridge, and raising hell than I should have. 

   When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, I was waiting to be to be called for Army Aviation Cadet training.  13 days later I was on my way to Texas -- and learned that the Sunny South wasn't like California in winter--near froze my young butt off.  Later I learned about chiggers--Ouch!  I got married, was commissioned as a  navigator, produced my first son,  and flew a tour of combat missions out of England with the 8th Air Force in B-17s--which forever changed my view of the world and politics.  I then returned to the US and went through cadets again, becoming a twin engine pilot in B-25s.

   After five years in the Army, I returned to Cal, switching to  political science and law, produced my second son and received  BA, MA and JD degrees, all under the GI Bill. 

   Until l started practicing law I had earned my living from age 17 on working as a ranch hand, seaman, Lockheed Aircraft assembler, swamper, cook, bartender, construction laborer, jack-hammer operator, and taxicab driver-- the last occupation being from stark necessity after graduating from law school and being admitted to the California Bar because those times were far different than today: the big law firms were paying young lawyers 150 bucks a month for 12 hours a day, six days a week,  which wouldn't feed the boy, much less wife and children. So it was root hog or die, and the resulting stresses persuaded wife #1 to seek greener pastures. 

   Whatever --  A former FBI agent offered me a nice office in down-town Oakland in exchange for work, showed me where the court house was, and off I went, fighting the world, the local District Attorney, the insurance companies, and bringing justice to the poor and unfortunates of Oakland, largely recommended to me by my cab driver friends, and becoming deeply involved in politics, married Nadja (see New Horizons in Politics] a wonderful woman who became my constant companion for the next 50 years, produced a daughter, and embarked on our legal and political careers. 

   One of my objectives -- born of my war-time experiences -- was to find out just who were the movers and shakers that set young men at killing each other in wars.  It seemed to me that Alameda County politics was as good a place as any to start finding out, for right in front of me, so to speak, we had a two powerful Congressmen, a very powerful Senator and newspaper publisher, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court was a former California Governor, a former Alameda County District Attorney, and a Postmaster who not only was quite wealthy but also had been a West Point classmate of President Eisenhower.   Plenty of material to study.

  Besides, I didn't have an automobile or the price of a bus ticket out of town.  And like Abe Lincoln was fond of telling, it was "root hog or die."

  I soon discovered that my political science professors at Cal didn't have the slightest idea how the political world, at least that part that was right under their noses, was run.  My law school professors had more accurate ideas, but these they held clasped to their breasts for the benefit of their less turbulent students, the ones who went into the upper reaches of organized society to spread the greater glory of their professorial wisdoms.  A great system for preserving the status quo.  If that's what you wanted to do.  I didn't. 

  World shaking disasters -- not just the hydrogen bomb -- were shaping up and plainly discernable, even then.   People were talking and writing, but no one of any importance was listening, even as today.  Too many important people are invested in business as usual.  Call it greed.  Call it social inertia.  It all amounts to the same: the classical formula for the death of a civilization.

Well, enough of this personal stuff.

* * *

   We're planning on expanding into all 50 states and their lesser subdivisions so that we and you can maintain direct contact with all our politicians who, as you may or may not know, for the most part have insulated themselves from contacts by any person or organization outside their own electoral constituency.  And even there, like that oldie . . .

Here's to old Boston,

The land of the bean and the cod,

Where Lowells talk only to Cabots,

and Cabots talk only to God,

. . . our feckless politicians listen only to each other and their financial masters.  

  So the Howard Beale Memorial Society is about making our voices heard, over the e-ways, the airways, our cities and towns, our telephones and over the back yard fence.  We've got to put the fear of God into these rascals before they are the ruin and death of us all!

   This being said, I'll get right to what we hope to do and how we can be contacted.

   Our home URL is www.networkcentralca.net   If someone wants to take over our California site, we'll go national -- the ca indicates our location.  As to the rest of the name of our URL, obviously we took "network" from our center-piece movie.  We added "central" from the old telephone exchange where the operator was called "central" because someone else had reserved the name "network" and wanted an outrageous price for it.

   Most of you won't remember the old party lines where you reached other people on your line by a crank on the side of rather large box screwed to a wall in your home. You would crank a full revolution once or twice or whatever for the number of rings required to get to another farm house on your party line.  Each rotation of the crank would cause the bell on every one's telephone to ring, but if you thought that only the designated caller came on the line, you believed in the tooth fairy.  Everyone who wasn't busy milking a cow or otherwise working his/her but off  picked up to hear what was going on.  No TV in those days.

   I don't remember how many rings were needed to get Central, which is what we called one or more ladies in town sitting in front of a console with holes into which they plugged one line to connect to another. "Operator" came on somewhat later as I recall.  You might ask her for "long distance" or give her an exchange name, like "Butterfield" followed by a series of numbers, probably five or thereabouts, I really don't remember.  The operator would pull the plug from your party line and stick it in the appropriate hole on her switch-board.

   In the cities, large numbers of young women sat in front of those switchboards working around the clock in shifts.  The city Lotharios soon learned that the changing of shifts was an excellent time to hang out around the telephone building to meet young women.  And so it went.

   So now that you know more than you ever wanted to know about telephones in the old days, there remains only the "ca."  Which, of course, is for California.  If you want to contact your local politicians, you must have an e-mail address from the same geographical area as your elected representative because these rascals all have their computers rigged to accept mail only from same geographical area.  Now if you give them money, instead of advice, they might deign to correspond or even speak with you.  In their business, when money talks bullshit walks. Money makes the mare go.

   So if you are of a mind to harass the politicians nearest to you, give us a call.  We'll fit you out with the URLs for your own area and, when we get through with this project, templates for your own website, and you, in turn, can establish sub-sites in the lesser political subdivisions of your state. 

   In the meanwhile, until we get our chat and writing rooms set up, if you would like to submit your own solutions to our major national problems or comment on ours, we will be pleased to post them provided you follow our RULES.  But we don't have the manpower for editing and won't post anything that isn't in an appropriate format.

    You can contact us and our several departments as follows:

    For posting on our pages dealing with the movie NETWORK per se or discussing the usages of political propaganda, e-mail to                

howardbeale@networkcentralca.net/

   For posting to Angry Prophet, e-mail to

angryprophet@networkcentralca.net/

   For posting to the Democratic/Republican Coalition, e-mail to

coalition@networkcentralca.net/

   For posting to New Horizons in Politics, e-mail to

mariepangloss@networkcentralca.net/

   For posting to Thersites, e-mail to

thersites@networkcentralca.net/

   To contact our webmaster (a euphemism), e-mail to

lewwarden@pronet.net/

   Our snail mail address is in the Contact box at the bottom of each page.

   You can pretty well tell where the particular subject matter of your submission should be directed by checking the material that has already been posted there.  With one important difference.  YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT SHORTER AND, HOPEFULLY, BETTER WRITTEN than our efforts.   Having paid good money and expended countless hours of work on this project, we have conferred special privileges upon ourselves.  If you want to sound off with equal extravagance, you will have to make comparable contributions, which is a very high price to pay for poorly written nonsense.

   As we used to say in the Army (and I suppose they still do), rank has its privileges.

   Whatever, let's hear from you.

                       Lew Warden