Fox Auditions Substack Author as Tucker Carlson Replacement - Hippomuse is Hired & Fired Before First Show Airs!
Shortage of Cancelable News Anchors Roils the Media
There is a major crisis brewing in America's news rooms - there are too few forthright journalists, commentators and talk show hosts to satisfy the media ownerships' need to can them.
Julian Assange languishes in U.K.'s Belmarsh prison for having published the truth on Wikileaks.
Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox for rubbing the fur of various plutocrats, politicians and war-mongers the wrong way.
CNN anchor Don Lemon was canned for being, well, too lemony.
NBC fired news commentator Megyn Kelly for speaking her mind (or for having one).
Love 'em or loathe 'em, the ranks of the censored, marginalized, banned or canned spans the political spectrum left, right and center. It includes journalists and commentators like Glenn Greenwald, Seymour Hersh, Chris Cuomo, Charlie Rose and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.
The list of those abruptly discharged, purged, black-listed or cast into free speech purgatory is long and lengthening. What's a media mogul to do?
People -- especially little people -- need to know their place and they need to learn that speaking their minds - especially if they diverge from approved narratives - will get them in deep, DEEP, DEEP trouble. That means there must be high-profile examples of free-thinking, opinionated people tarred, feathered, roasted, ridiculed, smeared, decapitated, hanged, burned and debased. Just like all other animals in the animal kingdom, we learn by example, so examples there must be.
"Leaders" throughout history have understood the usefulness of such "teaching moments." Joan of Arc, Guy Fawkes, Spartacus, John Brown, Nat Turner, Giordano Bruno, the Salem "Witches," Hans and Sophie Scholl, Sacco and Vanzetti, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Giroloma Savonarola, Wat Tyler, Akiva ben Yosef, Shireen Abu Akleh, JFK, MLK, RFK - all were taken down for the sake of "order" (that is, maintaining the "rules based order" we hear about so much today)... and as conspicuous warnings to everyone else.
The lesson is that if such well-known personalities can have their livelihoods... and their heads... lopped off, imagine what can happen to you! But with so many high-profile journalists already having been ousted, de-platformed and dehumanized, and with the remaining broadcast bobble-heads keeping their ears low, their mouths zipped up and their tails between their legs, there simply are no more teachable moments possible.
Thus, in desperation, America's news rooms have turned to Hippomuse.
Fox News in particular (or someone spoofing him/her/itself as a representative of Fox News, perhaps?) has reached out to this very Substack subdomain to explore whether that media network can hire yours truly to replace Tucker Carlson... and then immediately get the boot.
Would we kid you about something like this? Of course not!
Indeed, we were offered fifteen minutes' minimum wage (which is about twice as long as a Hippomuse talk show would last!) for this Substack auto-da-fé. Hippomuse's hiring, followed by it's immediate public immolation, would all be for the sake of further demonstrating to all of us cowering masses the valuable lesson to stay in our lane, to stay in our Fox holes and to keep our mouths shut.
Unfortunately, beyond its world wide network of tens of subscribers, Hippomuse isn't necessarily well known to America's living room couch set, nor does it frequently appear on the usual social media platforms. Worse, although Hippomuse clearly does not hew to the approved social, political, and economic scripts, the views it expresses are so far from the mainstream catechism that, without GPS satellites and a map of the Zodiac, it's hard to know exactly where Hippomuse is coming from and where it is going. I mean, what good is a scapegoat if its politics and perspectives are, at best, undefinable and, at worst, incomprehensible? What good is a scapegoat if the scapegoat's scapegoating elicits a universal yawn? No more Hippomuse? Ho hum. I wonder what cute animal videos are on Twitter?
Are Hippomusers Russian propagandists? Chinese Communists? Zoroastrian Iranian apologists? Retro-Jacobin French pastry chefs? Marxist-Autarchic-Hammurabians? Levellers, Lychanthropes and artificially unintelligent Luddites? Leninist-Trumploditic-Crypto-Troglodytes? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Camelotian retro Democrats? Neo-nimby anti-colonial Ailurophiles? Trans-Ugaritic Analphabetics? Fractional Philatelist Lepidopterophobes? Poly-gendered Cephalopod Extraterrestrial Ephebiphobics? Monomythic Allotheists? All and none of the above? No matter - it's far better to sacrifice Freedom of Speech on the alter of social domesticity quickly before anyone - including the speaker - can figure out what on earth someone is saying! After all, in the post-Enlightenment West where the Bill of Rights intersects with plutocratic rentier capitalism, you can freely say whatever you like so long as no one can hear you.
The first step before signing the quarter-hour one-show, terminable at-will contract, the Fox Channel emissary assured us, was to complete the usual grueling, intrusive, humiliating background investigation to confirm that yours truly would be a worthy candidate for subsequent disappearance.
In that regard, news media lawyers have interrogated the innumerable friends, family and former class-mates of all Hippomuse Substack correspondents and writers to confirm, in highly confidential secretly recorded interviews administered under penalty of perjury and the bastinado, which statements were subsequently edited to misstate the facts, that:
to the best of their friends', relatives' and former class-mates' knowledge, said Substackers are persons of sufficiently low moral character to aspire to be a craven, high-income, groveling talk show host; that
said Substackers had (or had not) "inhaled" while living in college dormitories or while attending sundry rock concerts;
whether they were cisgender normies who knew, associated with or traveled in the company of oppositely sexed cisgender normies on one or more occasions without the presence of pronoun chaperones;
whether he/she/it/they currently or ever spoke, understood, studied or read any "foreign" languages other than "American;"
whether he/she/it/they espoused any officially proscribed wild conspiracy theories versus the officially condoned wild conspiracy theories;
whether he/she/it/they exclusively watched mainstream television, dutifully listened to and faithfully worshiped at the alters of NPR, PBS, ABC, MSNBC, BBC, CBC, CNN, Sinclair, and Fox, and trustingly read the gospel published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post;
whether he/she/it/they had ever opposed or criticized such crusades for Freedom and Democracy like the Vietnam War, the NATO demolition of Libya, the NATO evisceration of Yugoslavia and Serbia, the U.S. sponsored coup against Chile's Salvador Allende, the promotion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq invasion of Iran, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the occupation of the oil fields of Syria, Iraq Wars One and Two, the occupation of Afghanistan, the current US/UK/NATO proxy war against Russia, the subversion of numerous sovereign states in Central and South America, the destabilization of Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western and Central Africa, etc., etc., etc.;
whether any Hippomusers had ever grown a beard and mustache before it became fashionable for men and women to grow beards and mustaches; and
whether, while Home on the Range, where the deer and the antelope play, was there ever heard, a discouraging word, about the skies being cloudy all day?
Uh oh, wrong answers???
Well, then! Hippomuse was immediately fired even before it was hired, leading to the fastest a priori broadcast cancellation in television journalism history.
Meanwhile, the critical shortage of boot-ready talk-show hosts persists and the list grows shorter.
They might have to cancel television altogether. What then? We might have to learn to read again!
Horrors!
Notes:
Kurt Günther, Der Radionist (Kleinbürger am Radio), 1927,
Tempera auf Holz, 55 x 49 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie
Self-portrait of Charles Keene reading some horrifying news in the paper.
The Life and Letters of Charles Samuel Keene, 1892,
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Special Thanks to Old Book Illustrations