Unreliable Narrator

I don't really feel like I need the pelt of Bill O'Reilly on the wall. I've been paying some attention to the charges from Mother Jones and Mediaite and whomever else. First of all, it feels like more of the equivalency game the media plays, where if one side has a say, the other has to be equally represented, even if the other side is scientifically retarded or socially irresponsible or worse, like climate deniers, anti-vaxxers or Bobby Jindal. Like "they got Brian Williams, so we have to take down one of theirs now." But come on, that would be admitting that Brian Williams, a member of the Mainstream Media, is one of "ours," a shill for the Progressive Un-American Left, which we've been trying so hard to keep under our hats since the Truman administration. These shenanigans practically just give the game away.

Second, really, Bill O'Reilly? He gets paid $20 million per year to do his show. Say he gets fired tomorrow. He's already like eleventy-six years old. All he'll be left with is more money than he could ever spend even if he had a 100 times the lifespan left in him AND a thirst for the blood of Salvadoran nuns. I don't know if you know this, but that can get really expensive. It's not like the blood of Honduran nuns, which you can practically get on tap. Hell, some days it's harder not to come into contact with the blood of Honduran nuns. In retrospect, maybe that says more about my lifestyle than I wanted.

Bill O'Reilly is a bully, a self-promoter and a fantabulist, a hypocrite who, when faced with his own hypocrisy, resorts not to organized defense but the verbal equivalent of a Korean War-era Chinese human wave: volume and volume and volume. But to quote an old Dothraki saying, "It is known." Al Franken already covered this for everybody more than a decade ago. Not only in a book, but right to the man's face, in that bravura, contentious, painfully uncomfortable way that only pre-senator Al Franken could.

I encourage you to watch the video because it couldn't be more damning. He exposes an outright, long-running lie, for example, that O'Reilly's horseshit dispenser of a tabloid program Inside Edition had won not one but two Peabody Awards. This happens with Bill sitting about 18 inches off Al's right elbow. It couldn't be more assuredly confrontational and, this is important, absolutely unassailable in the facts.

And what was the fallout from that humiliating exposure? Twelve more years of the Factor, at like 20 mil a year.

So really, what can we expect of this? He's not Brian Williams. He's not (any longer) pretending to be a journalist. He deals in self-righteousness and the wounded, prone, flailing kicks of old-style, suffocating white male privilege. He needs someone to be out to get him anyway.

I used to at least applaud O'Reilly for his courage and good humor, agreeing to both visit and host Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert when clearly he was a target and animating spirit, respectively, of their own satiric blood-spilling, unlike that breakable thing Rush Limbaugh. But watching the last couple of days, I get (even more) that it's less magnanimity and more of a guy with no fucks left to give. What are the stakes for him, really? If there are Ivory Towers in American culture, they aren't in academia anymore, they're in conservative media. Where else can you make your bones by railing against convicts and liars while being constantly exposed as both? If your kid says they want to be a professor, tell them don't bother trying. The real job stability is in the Angry White Person market. Sure, sometimes you'll have to do some unsavory things like defend rape and the massacre of children with automatic weapons, but the pay is outrageous and nobody can ever, ever fire you.