Hosts and Parasites

Carlson (l), Lemon (r)

Is there a shortage of celebrities?  Aside from the odd Saturday Night Live host who seems to be plucked randomly from the population at large, it seems like the same names and faces keep shuffling around from place to place causing the same boring mayhem.  Could no one else have bought Twitter?  Does Bill Maher deserve another talk show?  Joe Biden again?!  How many flavors of Oreo do we really need?  

While CNN is patently not reeling from Don Lemon's second career move at the network in less than a year (this time to the other side of the door) its remaining hosts would like us to believe that Tucker Carlson's departure from rival fake news outlet Fox on the same day has everything to do with his former producer Abby Grossberg's non-revelatory revelations about a hostile frat boy atmosphere among Carlson's production team.  It's all a bit too pat and run-of-the-mill.  How could it not be related to Fox's $787.5 million Dominion payout of the prior week and more to the point, the exposure via a trove of released emails of the hypocrisy of Fox hosts, including especially Carlson as Trump-reviling MAGA posers.

In the way they perfectly embodied their respective networks for so much of the dawning of our new, post-neoliberal era-- Lemon in his shallow calorie-poor corporate-flavored limousine-liberal Trump-obsessed identity-informed performativity; Carlson's exposed posturing a more Alpha WASP, old money, straight, white and male intersectional identity alt-right wing counterpart-- they bore a striking similarity. 

I don't grieve the career of either departed host.  I grieve that in this imagination starved culture it's inconceivable that either career is doomed.  As to who will re-emerge sooner in a stronger iteration, the smart money would be on Carlson. As of today when I google"Don Lemon fired", the dateline on most of the articles that return is the day it happened.  Meanwhile the Carlson speculation accumulates.