Mad As Hell

I worked in an office this past summer. Around the room were several wall-mounted TVs tuned to financial news channels. The intended purpose, I assume, was to keep the office updated with any breaking news relevant to their occupations. In effect, it was rarely watched.

Initially I paid little attention to the TV nearest to me, which played CNBC. But within a few days, my professionalism yielded to the call of Sirens. In disinterested retrospect, I might say it was the lilting Australian accent of Mrs. Amanda Drury that first caught my attention.  But perhaps by that point I had already been irrevocably entangled in some sort of geometric love arrangement between Erin Burnett, Maria Bartiromo, Becky Quick and Melissa Francis (I don’t care for Trish Regan).

As the summer progressed, my boyish curiosity with these beauties faded into an asexual and benign fascination with the curious Mark Haines, whose daily 9 a.m. declarations seemed to grow more crazed and scientifically fallible: Welcome to the financial center of the Milky Way. Can we really be sure?

Such was my first criticism. And as I continued to watch, I developed a position of my own: that Mark’s lack of evidence was a consistent trend of CNBC financial news. If one might spend the time to objectively deconstruct the programming, one might see the stupidity of it all; the unnecessary stock footage, weak transitions, irrelevant graphics, impoverished commentary and abject male anchors.

But it was lunchtime and all this Microsoft Excel work was getting me hungry. Luckily for me, CNBC had just arrived with my piping hot 1’oclock Power Lunch. So I kept watching because it was on.

Converse to a palette for wine, a palette for bullshit is acquired by a continuous wearing down of the senses and intellect. So it was that, although I acknowledged my submission to the programming, I rejected its ideology, as might a strident P.O.W. resisting indoctrination. My salvation was found through well-crafted streams of witticisms and sarcastic commentary formulated in my narrative mind, which assured my ego that I was better than these people. In so far as it lasted…

My sense of levity stood little chance against Larry Kudlow’s smug buzzsaw of stupid, tone-deaf questions. My superciliousness became bitterness. So I instead satisfied my ego by designing poetic justice for these anchors, such that were worthy of Dante’s Inferno.

The coiffed Scott Wapner would be bald. The bald Steve Leisman would report in a dress. Larry Kudlow would report in lipstick. David Faber’s tie would be chocolate stained. Mark Haines would be hogtied in his gaudy American flag ties and Ben Ferguson would be eaten by grizzly bears.

With exception of that last one, I guess mostly just stuff with hair and clothes. You might say I lack creativity, but for the most part these anchors are identical: they are egos traipsing around as humans. Their practiced brow furrows and pitched tones are as artificial as the news they report. Is discussing Tiger Woods’ effect on the PGA Tour’s balance sheet really “financial news”, or do they just want to converse about golf? Likewise, is the ShakeWeight an investment opportunity really worth of a news segment? These anchors talk about a double dip recession as if they were ordering at a Dairy Queen; they reduce complex economic policies into simple golf analogies; and they laugh, wave and holler on a seven-way split screen like Bonobos. None of them displays more resemblance to these primate relatives than Rick Santelli.

What put the stake in my heart, however, was that they compared this particular circus monkey to The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, Howard Beale, as portrayed in Network (1976). But what they failed to mention was that Howard Beale suffers from psychosis and adopts two drastically different viewpoints during the movie. So whether the comparison of Santelli is to the truth-telling iconoclastic newscaster who orders his fans to turn off their TVs or to the broken man who preaches the corporate message, I am unsure. It seems if anyone had actually bothered to watch the movie, they might realize the blurriness of this distinction, with regard to Santelli. And I’m sure that they see the former. I see the latter — he is no hero.

So yeah, I won’t mind not having cable at my house this year.