Hold The Underwear!

My first instinct is to go "see, I told you last week shit was going to get in-a-bad-way weird," but that's hard to take any credit for. It doesn't even qualify as prognostication when there are really only less than four likely outcomes and all of them are directly related to the same people and the same impulses. My bold prediction was that "something will happen!" and I guess we can be relieved it was only yet another late night talk show host getting summarily fired and not, like, an act of violent retribution. Yes, we're down one Jimmy, but the basic rule of late-night TV for the last couple of decades is we stock Jimmys so deep, you never really run out. Things are a little more dire now as we've only got the one Jimmy left, but he's taken steps to anchor and aluminum-clad himself against the battering of the growing storm, for the low-low cost of his basic human dignity.

Kimmel was ostensibly fired for saying insensitive and outrageous things about the Charlie Kirk killing, but it's not even below the surface where we see the issue isn't so much murder as it is merger. Murder is an A-1 problem that warrants no defense. But side by side with the Stephen Colbert thing, the suggestion emerges that the exact same people--the Trumpified FCC--finds points of leverage to lean on corporate interests caught in delicate negotiations for which they need federal approval, then attaches the string tied to the back of the suit-jacket of the very public comedian they don't like, resulting in a yoink off the stage. This is a very cynical analysis, I know, but it starts to look a little bit like the murder of Charlie Kirk is being deployed as a cover in the Kimmel "suspension" to avoid the awkward, muffled indefensibility of the Colbert cancellation. Congratulations I suppose to the Nexstar people, whoever they are, and to the Walt Disney Corporation for their act of radical compliance. Everyone denies this and all is couched in the right number of broadcast-safe allegedly-s. It's also a shallow analysis, but that's what makes it seem somewhat compelling: I'm not actually capable of a deep analysis as the business of corporate law isn't really one of the topics I know anything meaningful about. If it were a category on Jeopardy, I'd still well clear of it. I'd go for "Potent Potables" first and I don't even drink. One of the answers is reliably to do with sherry, whoever she is. But if I can cobble this chain of events together, we can't even deign to call it "underhanded." It's pretty openly handed.

It's also not novel or interesting (and yet here I go!) to notice that the loudness and brazen-ness of the perpetrated act ends up kind of being the point. The first Trump administration was hampered by professionals who knew what they were doing monkeying up the works by insisting on actually doing the jobs for which they were ostensibly hired. Inevitably, they would be fired for competence, or to put it another way, for not offering the most full-throated defense for an insane and reckless idea by the idiot Boy President when asked about it within a half mile of a microphone. On the way out, the president would make sure we all knew they were useless, backstabbing weasels who didn't deserve any level of employment and the fact that he failed to notice that before literally all of them were hired in the first place, well, that just proves how sneaky and sinister they were.

Now the most raging, virulent, audacious incompetence is not only excused but praised as long as the person doing it remembers to extol--as loudly as possible!--the courage and virtue of their boss. The fireable offense they could commit would be to stammer in public when questioned about the work they do. That's the old model, where when pointedly questioned by a lawmaker or a journalist, a functionary caught in a lie or not able to explain away a deficiency or a public fuck up mews and burbles and eventually crumbles, and that's the scandal. Recent testimony in Congress by FBI Director Kash "Krash Out" Patel and RFK "I'll Kill As Many As Your Children As It Takes To Keep Them Safe" Jr. shows that the new model is not only to defend the indefensibility of their records, but it's to SHOUT DOWN ANGRILY those who dare question. If you're wondering how committed they are to this course of action, think of what it takes for someone with RFK Jr.'s voice to actually shout.

That's the line now: we must be outraged, and the source of the outrage itself is irrelevant, so long as it is correctly performed in public. In the short term, it makes everything feel empty and hopeless, as if everything is an edifice and no building, like the rebuilt decoy version of Rock Ridge from the climax of the 1974 historical documentary Blazing Saddles. In the end there, the forces of cynicism and evil and Harvey Korman were defeated; the main difference now is there's no obvious Cleavon Little figure to save us, even though we don't deserve it.