Text of a test monologue. Would you like to see me deliver this on camera, with no makeup, no lighting equipment, and using Notepad as a TelePrompTer? Head on over to my https://www.patreon.com/ArabellaFlynnPatreon, and for a dollar a month you too can see me waffle on in real time.
Hi, all. You may notice that I am on video now. I was going to shoot a couple of tests and apologize for the poor quality of the footage, and explain that I want to start vlogging and streaming in addition to writing, but I need some equipment to do it properly and for that I need to raise some funds... But fuck it. This is going out first instead.
As I record this, it is the fourth of July. You can probably hear the fireworks outside my window. I know I can. There are a lot of those, because we've all been inside and bored for the past four months.
I know a lot of people who have opted not to observe the holiday this year. The 4th of July is often viewed as a celebration of the American institution, which is a little bit on fire right now, with a few people determined to squirt lighter fluid all over the flames like a bored suburban dad at a barbecue. On the other hand, it's also Independence Day, and marks the end of the long, painful process by which a population broke free of distant, uncaring overlords who cared mainly about the financial dividends of their colonies, and ignored the grievances of the people until they started breaking shit. So YMMV.
I would comment on some of the details, but I don't know them. The Late Show is on hiatus, and John Oliver doesn't air until tomorrow. I, like a lot of my demographic, get most of my current events from comedians. There's a reason for that.
I actually watched a lot of news as a teenager.
Well, "watched" might be too strong a word. It's easier for me to fall asleep if there's some sort of droning noise in the background. When I was about fifteen, I discovered that, unlike the main CNN channel, which has actual shows and documentaries, CNN Headline News just runs the day's top stories over and over again in an unending 30 minute loop. Interesting enough to keep me from falling into a train of thought that will prevent me from sleeping, boring enough that I don't want to stay up and listen.
I have no memory of the desk anchors. I'm sure they were consummate professionals, but they also had no distinguishing human characteristics whatsoever. I know they were updating the loop live, because occasionally a story would be added to the list and another one would drop off the back, and occasionally one would flub the text on their prompter, but other than that there was no hint that the face at the desk was attached to a living, breathing person.
I do remember a couple of the correspondents. One was Christiane Amanpour. Her voice stood out; CNN is an American news station that was originally restricted to American cable networks, and the vast majority of the staff is from the US. Amanpour is British-Iranian, having split her childhood between Tehran, before the revolution, and London, after. They liked to send her to the bowels of Eastern Europe to report from the war-torn streets of Citygrad in Countrystan. She had already caught some criticism on her reporting of the Bosnian War, for advancing the apparently controversial opinion that genocide was bad. I didn't know that at the time; I just thought she sounded more like she told real stories than read off lists of facts.
Another was Anderson Cooper, who was not nearly such a big deal then as he is now. Cooper, a self-described adrenaline junkie, was a war correspondent at the time, with a habit of ducking only briefly for explosions before standing back up to continue his piece to camera. He wouldn't be infamous until his coverage of Hurricane Katrina years later, both for the overall stellar job he did, and also for that one time he got tired of getting non-answers from some government toad in a live interview and very professionally flipped his shit at the lady, asking if she realized how tone deaf it was to sit there thanking other politicians for doing essentially nothing while there were still bodies in the street.
I quit watching the news when I moved away to college. It wasn't necessarily that knowing was worse than not knowing, but I felt a lot of pressure to be "adult" about it at that point, and watching proper news shows made me anxious to the point where I wouldn't sleep. I outright avoided it to the point where I made it to a canceled class at 4 pm, Mountain Standard Time, on September 11, 2001, before anyone told me what was going on.
I wasn't able to put my finger on why I found the news so horrible until many years later. I can't remember what rabbit hole I'd fallen down, but I ended up sitting on YouTube watching segments of the live news coverage of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. Reagan was shot in the side and later recovered without complications, but his Press Secretary, James Brady, was struck in the head and sustained considerable neurological damage. Brady, together with his wife Sarah, later went on to be a noted advocate for gun control, but at the time was reported to have died on the scene.
I wound up watching a lot of one of the news desks -- ABC, I think. It started out like all the others, until the anchor tripped up a couple of times and referred to Press Secretary Brady as "Jim", and I realized: He knows these people. Personally. He's a member of the White House Press Corps, or a friend of the Bradys, or both. I'm watching a journalist reporting on a moment of historical significance to the American people, and a human being who has to tell the entire nation about someone's personal tragedy. His investment did not make him any less professional or informative than any of the others, but it did make his coverage feel very grounded in reality in a way that most news, then and now, does not.
The older I get, the more disquieting I find it to have a talking head behind a shiny desk read me a list of horrible things that have happened today without any apparent reaction. It makes it seem like these things are a randomized representative sample of the cruelty of the universe, rather than what they are, which is a list of things so unusually terrible they made the news. I realize that this is part of an effort to remain impartial so that the viewer can decide how they feel about events, but it's also disturbingly normative. Yes, everything is on fire, everything is always on fire, this is nothing new.
I can't say I'm any more enamored of the opposite, either, the more recent style where the news anchor's entire job is to tell you that entirety of human existence is awful and here's what you should prioritize being afraid of this week. Everything around you is on fire, the fire is racing right at you, and here's whose fault the fire is.
A lot of Americans, especially younger ones, have taken to getting their news mostly from political satire because-- well, one, because for about the past twenty years, our comedians have been better at fact-checking than our actual newsrooms. You can thank Jon Stewart for getting a bee in his bonnet over that. But also because their coverage of major issues takes neither of those paths. The Daily Show alumni write up stories like they actually live on the planet they're reporting from. You're on fire? They're on fire too! Holy shit, let's all find some water!
The conceit behind the comedy of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and Full Frontal and Last Week Tonight and now the monologues on The Late Show is not that this is a normal amount of fire for everything to be on so it's fine, nor establishing that someone has set you on fire on purpose and here's who should be punished for it. It's bewilderment and frustration at the way we somehow keep catching on fire over and over again. Yeah, they crack jokes, because it's their job, but all the jokes are predicated on the idea that this is, above all, just very, very, inexplicably stupid. We can, and we should, be better than this. And the hosts stubbornly refuse to just give up and internalize as immutable all the reasons why we aren't.
You wouldn't know it to look at him, but Jon Stewart has accumulated "fuck you" money from his time on The Daily Show, among other things. I really hope the rest of them are doing the same. Because we need some figureheads who are able to say "fuck you" to a lot of authority figures right now without having to worry about how their family is going to survive the next month. John Oliver has HBO backing and I'm pretty sure Last Week Tonight has roughly equal budgets set aside for handling lawsuits and shoveling money at charity. Stephen Colbert has been insulting Donald Trump as hard as he possibly can since day one, and he just re-upped until 2023. Samantha Bee has her husband holding the camera to shoot her monologues out in the woods.
They've all figured out how to produce their show over the internet, so at least we have something to watch in the After Times.
I really hope the neighbors run out of fireworks soon. Aside from not wanting the neighborhood to be literally on fire at any point, one of my housemates has a dog, and the dog has epilepsy, so this has been an interesting evening. Sorry about the fireworks, sorry about the camera, sorry about the country, sorry about the state of the world. Imma go find my Xanax. G'night.
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