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The United States of America now seems to have officially become a banana republic. That's really the only conclusion one can draw, after the events of the past week (and the past eight months, for good measure).
Last night, Jimmy Kimmel returned to the airwaves. Well, most of them, at any rate. Two corporate conglomerates of ABC affiliates refused to air the show, but with modern technology available, everyone can now watch his opening monologue even if you live in a television market where his show was pre-empted.
The official YouTube video of the opening of Jimmy Kimmel Live! has (as of this writing) 15.7 million views. If you haven't seen it yet, it is well worth watching. In fact, today we are pre-empting our own political column to present a full transcript of what Jimmy had to say last night in his opening monologue, because it is an important statement on free speech that stands on its own, and one that everyone who cares about free speech should either read or watch.
Disney, in the end, did the right thing. That's the big news today. And it is a clear victory for free speech.
Last week, Disney abruptly yanked Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show off the airwaves, after being pressured to do so (for purely political reasons) by the head of the Federal Communications Commission. Today, Disney apparently saw the error of their ways and announced that Kimmel will return tomorrow night.
[Program Note: Once again, we are pre-empting the entire format of this column due to the seriousness of the situation America now finds itself in. Most weeks, we strive to rise above the firehose of distractions from Donald Trump and his administration, to focus instead on things which truly matter -- which, this week, include Trump once again rolling over for Vladimir Putin while he invades another NATO country's airspace, as well as Trump blowing up boats in international waters just because he feels like it. But this week the distraction truly was what really mattered. Because this week we had a direct assault on the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press in a way not seen since Joe McCarthy trod the halls of the U.S. Capitol. So we had to write an extended rant instead of our usual column, just to warn everyone in advance.]
Our subtitle this week is meant to honor the passing of Rick Davies, one of the founding members of the musical group Supertramp, who passed away less than two weeks ago. In one of their biggest hits ("The Logical Song"), one lyric seems to sum up where we now stand as a nation:
Anyone "tired of all the winning" yet? Just asking....
In the same week America passed the grim milestone of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, a black man was suffocated by a white police officer while three other cops stood by and either helped him commit this crime or did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Since then, there have been sometimes-violent protests in the streets of not only Minneapolis but in several other cities across the country. The dead man was accused of the crime of trying to use a fake $20 bill at a convenience store. The cops, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, provided him with a death sentence -- for the transgression of trying to pass a fake twenty.
President Donald Trump executed a double-reverse bit of irony today, by signing an executive order that he thinks will threaten social media companies like Twitter into allowing conservatives to spout whatever hate-filled or wildly inaccurate rants they wish to. However, as with many things Trump does, his executive order might just wind up giving companies like Twitter more incentive to police Trump's own tweets. In other words, by attempting to "fight back," Trump may in fact have just shot himself in the foot.
The mainstream media crossed two cultural lines this week, in reaction to one of the most offensive things any American president has ever been caught saying. The first line crossed was to overrule the censors. Standards and practices can't complain when a word used on the news is a direct quote from the president, after all. That would be censorship of a different (and darker) type. Still, last night we were rather surprised to here a reporter on the evening NBC news broadcast actually use the word "shithole." No bleeping, no asterisks, just: here is what the president called some African countries. On broadcast (i.e., non-cable) television, at 5:30 P.M. (not some late-night broadcast, in other words). That is a first in America, to be sure. The Washington Post used Trump's unexpurgated, unbowdlerized quote in so many headlines today it was tough to keep an accurate count.
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (or, as we affectionately refer to him, "BriWi") was ruthlessly mocked online this week, after a war story he told turned out to be a complete fabrication. Our headline today refers to the funniest mockery we've yet seen on the subject, titled "That one live shot I did from the moon," for no other reason than it makes a funny headline. We really have no news to report from the moon, although (as usual) there are quite a few bits of lunacy to report from the political world. As for BriWi, well, we'll see what happens next. Perhaps it's time to give Lester Holt a shot at the big chair? It's a little hard to feel too sorry for BriWi, since he reportedly rakes in $10 million a year to read the news to America every night. Nice work if you can get it, eh? Or hold onto it, for that matter.
As you can tell from that title, today's column is going to be nothing short of nit-pickery. But then my original plan (due to lots of offline stuff that needed doing today) was just to re-run an old column, so at least this way you get to read something new, even if it is nothing more than an extended tangential semantic complaint. But I feel the complaint is a valid one, or to put it another way, I feel this nit needs picking.
We've got a lot to get to in our weekly roundup of politics this week, it seems.