A day of solid rain on Thursday sent creeks to the edge of their banks and water cascading down hills, a needed soak that took the edge off dry lawns and dusty roads.

Sporadic rains are forecast today along with thunderstorms expected for the weekend. Then we can lookforward to more grass growing, followed by more grass cutting and then more grass growing, followed by more grass cutting.

Hmmm. Think I see a pattern emerging here. Mother Nature doesn’t make it rain. It’s part of the business plan of John Deere and all the other makers of lawn tractors and mowers.

Then we have the subcontractors: Scott’s Turf Builder, Ortho weed control and a supporting cast of thousands that man the Home Depots, Lowes and nurseries here and there.

It’s all part of somebody’s business plan. Rain falls. Grass grows. Man cuts grass with equipment purchased through the business plan. Grass grows back. Man cuts again. Even here in the mountains, it’s all about business.

I got on this train of thought last night after listening to actor Ned Beatty’s brief appearance in the movie Network as the giant corporation CEO Arthur Jensen. Beatty was on screen for only a few minutes but won an Oscar nomination for the part where he, as the businessman, explains how things really work to madman newscaster Howard Beale:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear?! You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T & T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war and famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Author Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network more than 30 years ago as black comedy but the words now have a haunting ring of truth (you can listen to audio of the speech here).

Something to think about the next time you mow your lawn.