George Noory - Mad as Hell: Americas #1 All-Night Radio Host Takes on the Dangerous World We Live in

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

I dedicate this book to my mother, Georgette, who has helped shape and guide me all my life, and to my amazing children, Wendy, Kristina, and Jonathan, who made parenting look easy!

Id like to acknowledge my editor, Bob Gleason, and my associate editor, Elayne Becker, at my publisher Tor/Forge for the remarkable support on all my projects, and the late Guy Gibson who helped mold me into the broadcaster I am today.

From the City of Angels off the Pacific Ocean, good morning, good evening, wherever you may be, across the nation, around the world. Im George Noory. Welcome to Americas most listened-to late-night talk show, Coast to Coast AM .

We live in a dangerous world that has been changing at warp speed, making it hard to keep ones footing.

We are going through a metamorphic process, changing, transforming as a planet, a nation, a people, and a society.

Some of the changes are shaped by history and natural events in our physical environment, including the incredible transformation of technology over the past several decades.

Above all, we live in a dangerous world that is spinning out of control. We are confronted by endless wars, terrorism, global instability, and environmental disasters that are often suspiciously not natural.

The metamorphosis is not just about things but about people you and me and our neighbors and families across the street, across the nation, and around the world.

As a national radio host with my ear to people who reflect a cross section of our nation, I see folks being stretched mentally, emotionally, the planet being divided into a tiny group of privileged haves and a vast number of have-nots while the middle class is steadily losing what it worked so hard for.

Somewhere along the line we need to get back to a middle ground, because if we dont, our social order will burst at the seams.

My biggest concern, one that I am acutely aware of each night that my show is broadcast coast to coast, is the frustration and tension of people with just about everything . There is anger and even rage on the part of some, gloom and a sense of doom in so many others.

I see myself not only as an entertainer but also as a facilitator trying to create calm in a very stressed world.

People are stressed because they dont know where they are headed in a world they seem to have no control over.

The world is changing faster than most of us can keep track ofit is so fast and slippery that a great number of people cant keep their footing.

Most of us feel puzzled by the events reshaping the world into a form radically different than the one we were born into. Puzzled and even alienated. We wonder where we came from, where we are going.

And who is pulling the strings.

I see premeditation and malice behind much of what is destabilizing the world, and the weakening of America as it is forced into being the worlds policeman in endless conflicts around the globe. I see it in droughts that are driving up food prices and creating hunger; a billion people without access to pure drinking water; people being displaced globally, by the tens of millions, by war and climate change; terrorist nations, hordes from the Dark Ages, that suddenly arise fully armed with cutting-edge military weapons where there had been dust and rust before.

There are scheming hands controlling many of these machinations, intrigues to interconnect our nation with the rest of the world in order to make it easier to divide and conquer.

I see something else, too. The pale specter of biblical prophecies.

Before we discuss these things at greater length, Id like to tell you a bit about myself and how I came to this knowledge.

We have ills in our society that make people feel helpless, while our political leaders fail to deal with problems that affect us. The cleansing we need of our political system, our border problems, the destruction of the middle class, the endless wars, and barbarians from the Dark Ages are changes akin to a flood of biblical proportions.

Im as mad as hell, and Im not going to take this anymore!

The line is from the 1976 movie Network . The statement has been immortalized by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest movie lines in history, along with such memorable ones as Frankly, my dear, I dont give a damn, from Gone with the Wind , and Im going to make him an offer he cant refuse, from The Godfather .

The film is about a TV news anchorman, Howard Beale (played by the late Peter Finch), who is fighting a losing battle, struggling to accept the social ills and widespread corruptions in the world he reports upon for a television network. Finch delivers the line when he is on the air ranting about and lamenting the sad state of the world, which no one seems to be doing anything about.

Peter Finch won an Academy Award for his performance (as did two of the other actors and the screenwriter), and the film was selected by the National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress, as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. (A footnote to Finchs Academy Award: he passed away before learning he had won for Best Actor.)

You might wonder why I am bringing up this seventies flick. Or, as Howard Beale put it in the movie, What has that got to do with the price of rice?

I am mad for many of the same reasons Howard Beale wasthe ills of todays world that most people feel helpless about are not that much different than those of the fictional world that sent Howard Beale into violent rants. The film reflects much about whats wrong with our own society and about the people who are supposed to be doing something about the problems.

What grates me the most is that the people we rely upon, the ones we elect because they promise to deal with the problems, that we give the money and the power to so the problems can be fixed, are too often lazy, corrupt, incompetentor just dont care.

In the film, Beale says that everyone knows things are bad, that theres a depression, people are out of work or scared of losing their job, the airs unfit to breathe, the dollars deflated, shopkeepers keep guns under the counter, 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 thats the way its supposed to be.

He believed that people should start changing the system by first getting mad.

Sound familiar? Maybe all the woes that bothered him arent exactly the same as they are today in our society, but they are close enough. And they are just as solvable, if our politicians and government leaders would do the jobs that they are well paid to do, instead of doing little while enjoying the fruits of our labors.

People say we need a change in Washington. Theyre not talking about whatever political party happens to be in power at the moment but a change in which our country is governed efficiently and effectively instead of being an unmanageable bureaucracy that has collapsed under its own sheer weight.