Two Men Named Max and One Named Adolf

And a message for our times from one Howard Beale

Max Eugene Willard passed away peacefully, surrounded by loved ones at the age of 95. That’s the way to go. 

There have been several Max’s of note, including the writer Max Beerbohm and the great actor Max Von Sydow (loved him as the calm, competent hit man in Three Days of the Condor). 

One of my favorite Max’s is the former heavyweight champion of the world, Max Baer, who was the father of Max Baer, Jr., who is best known for playing Jethro on the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies. I admit this series is a secret pleasure of mine, especially the enthusiastic but dim-witted Jethro (who was based on the cartoon strip Li’l Abner). 

Max Baer v. Max Schmeling

Max Baer was a Jewish boxer who fought with the Star of David on his trunks. During the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s he had a memorable bout with the German heavyweight, another Max, last name Schmeling. 

Schmeling was Hitler’s baby, to show off the superiority of the Aryan race. 

Yeah, no. 

Max Baer the Jew defeated Max Schmeling the German. Schmeling later lost to the great black heavyweight Joe Lewis, who dispatched Schmeling in one round. 

That must have given Adolf nightmares. 

Because Schmelling refused to join the Nazi party, Hitler had him drafted into the Paratroopers and made sure he went on several “suicide missions” during the war. 

Schmeling survived. Hitler did not.

After the war, Schmeling and Joe Louis became friends. It was later revealed that Schmeling put his own life in danger by rescuing a couple of Jewish teenagers in 1938. During the pogrom called Krystallnacht he hid the boys, sons of a friend, in his room at the Excelsior Hotel in Berlin. When the persecution died down he helped the teens flee the country. They eventually made it to America and flourished.

Schmeling flourished, too, with a Coca-Cola distributorship in Germany. He died a national hero at the age of 99. 

Max Baer had charisma and charm, which Hollywood picked up on. He made a fun movie called The Prizefighter and the Lady, co-starring Myrna Loy. 

And he was not the villainous oaf portrayed in the Ron Howard film Cinderella Man. It is true that Baer did fight an opponent, Frankie Campbell, who died in the ring. But Baer went into a tailspin over that, and spent years raising money to help Campbell’s widow. 

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Random noun: Public.

Everything’s public these days. Something you say or do is sure to be captured and thrown up on social media, or archived in some database to be brought out at the most inauspicious time.

I remember the first time a street camera caught me making a right turn without fully stopping at a red light. This is known as a “California stop” but a camera snapped me and when I got the ticket the picture of an unsmiling me behind the wheel made me look like John Dillinger escaping a bank heist. 

In my Substack posts about jury duty, I mentioned that the murder was caught on a surveillance camera set up at an apartment house in gang territory. A car drives up to another car and blam blam blam, then drives off. The jury saw that on the big screen in the courtroom.

Further, there was an issue about which direction the car was going after the shooting. Detectives went to a fast food drive-through on the corner and got video footage from two, count-em, two cameras on either side of the place. The first view was the same car driving by. The second view was a few seconds later, showing that the car did NOT turn left, but right, which was circumstantial evidence of the vehicle heading back toward the apartment complex where the defendants lived. 

The Alan Parsons Project had a song, “Eye in the Sky,” which is a jaunty tune with a chilling chorus about being an eye in the sky looking at you, and reading your mind. Dealing with fools, and can cheat you blind. 

It’s happening now. 

What can we do? There was a time like this, back in the 1970s, when the great American screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky wrote the movie Network. It’s about the venerable anchor for the network news, Howard Beale (Peter Finch, in his Academy Award-winning role), whose ratings have suffered. His wife dies, he begins to drink, and he’s going to be fired. He tells his TV audience that on his final broadcast he’s going to kill himself right there on national TV. 

Naturally he’s not allowed back on the air. But he begs for a chance to apologize. He gets it, and rants about all the B.S. going on. He’s yanked off, but the ratings for his show have skyrocketed, and he’s actually given a commentary spot. 

The night before he’s to go on he has a vision, hears a voice, telling him he’s been called to “be a witness.” He tells his friend, Max (William Holden), “I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing as if I had been plugged in to some great cosmic electromagnetic field. I feel connected to all living things, to flowers, birds, to all the animals of the world and even to some great unseen living force, what I think the Hindus call prana. It is not a breakdown. I have never felt so orderly in my life! It is a shattering flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth!”

When he arrives at the studio, disheveled and in a raincoat, they put him on. And he says:

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 street, 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 in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being….My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

All over the land, people are heard shouting out their windows, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

These days there’s certainly enough anger to go around. And way too much shouting.

But Howard Beale was right. We are human beings. Our lives do have value.

We hold these truths to be self-evident. Let’s remember that and act accordingly.