The nation is in the midst of a true Howard Beale moment. And it looks like it might last a while.

Beale, of course, was the fictional fed-up anchorman in Network, the acclaimed 1976 film about the changing TV business. His 34-year-old rallying cry—“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”—could just as easily have been made this year.

Look around and you’ll no doubt see someone who has had it. Not just a little angry, but spitting mad. "Woman (or man) on the verge" kind of mad. "Yell from the rooftops" kind of mad. It’s an anger that has the potential to be with us for years to come, and it has serious implications for society and business.

Exhibit A is Steven Slater, the Howard Beale of our times. Slater’s face and story are everywhere this morning—the flight attendant’s profanity-laced tirade at a passenger on a JetBlue flight and his escape from the plane on an emergency chute is the kind of story that hot, hazy Augusts were made for.

Slater went off on a passenger who was standing up to get his bag while the plane was still moving after it landed at JFK Airport. He got angry because the passenger reportedly got steamed at him. How dare Slater do his job! How offensive to be told something you don’t want to hear! The customer, it seems, is not always right.

Another story making the rounds today is that of a woman who went ballistic on New Year's Day at a McDonald’s drive-through window in Toledo, Ohio. She allegedly hit an employee, then punched a manager, then broke a window. What set her off? McDonald’s was still serving breakfast, but she wanted Chicken McNuggets.

This isn’t the first time this year a McDonald’s employee has been assaulted. In March, a man climbed through a McDonald’s window in South Brunswick, New Jersey, and allegedly assaulted a restaurant worker because he thought his fish sandwich was taking too long to arrive.

It would be easy to dismiss these examples as random cases of customer service gone wrong. But something more serious is taking place: a prolonged economic downturn marked by persistently high unemployment, political discontent across the spectrum, and a means of communication (social media) that validates exactly what we want to hear are all contributors to the current culture of malcontents.

Anecdotally, the evidence is everywhere:

—Workplace violence is on the rise. Last week saw one of the most deadly events in recent memory as a driver at a Connecticut beer distributor killed eight co-workers before killing himself. He was angry over what he described as racism at his office, although officials there said he was being investigated for theft. That shooting followed one in January when a disgruntled worker at an ABB Transformer plant in St. Louis killed three people before killing himself, and a February incident at the University of Alabama’s Huntsville campus when an instructor at the school killed three people.

—Last week’s ruling by a federal judge in California that the state’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional provoked talk of the “end of days” by some religious types and cries from social conservatives that judges are destroying the Constitution.

—Target Corp. and Best Buy, two Minnesota-based companies, are under attack because they contributed to a political group called MN Forward. That organization, which says its main mission is to support job-creation efforts and has endorsed candidates of both parties, is backing Republican Tom Emmer for governor. Emmer holds socially conservative views on same-sex marriage, and gay rights groups are, in effect, saying Target and Best Buy are campaigning against them. Even though Target has strong policies protecting gay employees and its CEO has apologized to the gay community, a boycott of the company is underway.

—Ever since Barack Obama became president in January 2009, the political scene has been ugly. His opponents argue that he’s “taking our country away from us” as they accuse him of being a socialist or a Marxist. His friends—many of whom remained pretty calm during the George W. Bush years—claim he’s not acting fast enough to enact change. Fox News’ Glenn Beck has called Obama a racist, while a carnival game in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, depicts Obama in Amos-and-Andy style and allows people to throw things at him.

—Any one of a number of recent news stories has a strong element of anger: fishermen and environmentalists angry at BP for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Mel Gibson going ballistic in a series of recorded calls with his girlfriend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison getting hot with the board of HP over its treatment of recently departed chief executive Mark Hurd, and anything and everything connected with the Tea Party.

Aside from the very real fear that anger can quickly turn into violence is a deeper concern that we’re losing any sense of a middle ground. The very idea of affording someone the “benefit of the doubt” seems like a quaint, old-style quality. Confrontation, not civility, is prized.

It would all make Howard Beale a very happy man. Well, it would have if Beale hadn’t been assassinated at the end of Network as his bosses both wanted to get rid of the malcontent and boost ratings in the process. Getting angry, it seems, isn't a lasting solution.

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J. Jennings Moss is editor of Portfolio.com.