Fire Drill Part 4.2- Fox News

Fox News

            March 18^th, 2031. 0706h. If it were not for all of the shouting outside in the Transamerica’s parking lot, I would not be awake yet. But the yelling is there, so I have dragged myself, mostly unwillingly, to the little coffeemaker to better approach a state of humanity that I do not at all feel I belong to.

            I spent the better part of the last couple of days feeling like fetid little goblins had set up camp in my stomach for the express purpose of turning it and my intestines into a magma-lined expressway for any and all liquids and solids to proceed on a merry trek to becoming molten shrapnel to be brapped out into the toilet with the speed and approximate sound of a 1920’s Tommy Gun.

            Under normal circumstances, I might spare readers from such gory details, and at least attempt to refrain from getting too autobiographical in my essays or articles. As I’m still not entirely sure what this project is going to become, I’ll indulge in a bit of color here in the OneNote, with the expectation that the only eyes that will be set upon this bit of TMI are my own in retrospection.

            I made the mistake of not having packed all of my preventative medicinal goods when I left Minnesota, and furthermore, committed the grievous sin against the First United Church of Matthew’s Immune System of not immediately going to Flinn Pharmacy over on 17^th Street in downtown Deertrack to pick myself up a supply for my time here in Georgia. As penance for this wickedness, my insides have decided to flog me like an abusive nun in an Industrial Revolution-era church-run asylum.

            I can comfortably say without fear of contradiction that the yelling can only have come from the far end of the hotel’s parking lot, where a couple of well-dressed, middle-aged men stand with their arms folded over their chests, being hollered at by Mitch Stengell, another of the long-term residents at the Transamerica Inn. Mitch is what I would refer to as lower-golden-age, a slightly stooped man in his early 70’s with a wispy poof of white hair atop and around the sides of his head, the back completely bare, except for the oddly shaped liver spots dotting the landscape back there. It looks, through the slightly filmy exterior of my room’s window, like a broken halo wrapped about his skull.

            I cracked my room’s door open a few minutes ago to try and see if I could make out what exactly he was howling at the two well-dressed fellows about, and my timing could not have been more cringe inducing; a few seconds along, when one of the newcomers took a moment to interject something, a racial epithet came from Stengell after the words, “I ain’t done talkin’ yet [slur]”. I am loathe to even retype the word he used, but I’ll help you imagine it; the man he was speaking to is African-American, and the word rhymes with ‘moon’.

            I’m going to just wait until Mr. Stengell returns to the relative safety of his rented suite before I go have a friendlier chat with these newcomers.

**

            0905h. God said ‘Let there be light,’ and so there was, according to Genesis. Rather more entertaining to yours truly, however, is an observation posed by the revered and masterful storyteller, Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld novels. His comment, originally appearing in one of his Discworld novels as a kind of philosophical musing put forth to the reader in the front-end material of the book, is as follows: ‘No matter how quickly light travels, it always finds that The Darkness is there ahead of it.’

            What that has to do with an aging racist yelling at a couple of professional-looking fellows at the Transamerica Inn in Deertrack, Georgia, I will explain now, or at least, endeavor to. When I was finally certain that Stengell was safely tucked back into his room, I headed outside, striking up a cigarette and giving a brief wave of acknowledgment to the suits, now both standing by a large field van of the same sort the CNN folks had been in before their departure.

            Unlike the CNN van, however, which had been plain white and rather nondescript, these gentlemen’s bore the all-too-familiar branding and logos of its parent outlet: Fox News. When I was growing up, Fox News had possessed a reputation for effectively being a media mouthpiece for the establishment GOP, trusted chiefly by old-guard conservatives and people who simply didn’t want to listen to the various fractured and self-devouring Political Left sources that were constantly trying to score Virtue Points in a never-ending battle of one-upsmanship. Since the end of the Trump Administration and the death of Rupert Murdoch, however, a great number of everyday viewers and online pundits have remarked that the Fox News brand has stumbled, albeit grudgingly, toward something approaching neutral ground.

            Making my way to my fellow media employees, I offered a faint smile. As I got to within a few yards, I realized that I recognized the African-American member of the duo; Tom Shavers, a legal analyst and expert. He’d made numerous appearances on the network over the course of the previous two years, and was both soft-spoken and wickedly sharp with a comeback. One of my favorite snippets, compliments of YouTube, had been Shavers responding to Progressives Report’s assertion that he was simply a ‘token black guy’ Fox News had brought on to avoid charges of racist hiring and airtime practices. In the snippet, Shavers said, “It’s good to know that my years of work in the legal field can go overlooked by the folks at Progressives Report because I happen to have been born black.” He’d said this with a straight face, and with as much subtle scorn as could be had before it became overt.

            “How do you do, fellahs,” I said by way of greetings. I extended a hand toward Shavers and said, “You’re Tom Shavers, right?”

            “Indeed I am, sir,” he replied, taking my offered handshake quickly. I turned to the other gentleman, who gave me a nod as we shook.

            “Rick Allens,” he said. “And you?”

            “Matthew Hayes, Minnesota StarTribune,” I answered. “But I’m not here with the paper.”

            “What brings you to this little shitsplat town, then,” Allens asked. I will confess to feeling a slight sting at this. I am not immune to the kind of queer tribalistic response that flares up when someone speaks ill of the place from which I hail. No amount of education or neutral, objective thought training seems able to fully eliminate this subconscious reflex from the human mind, especially when one views their upbringing and the locales of it with any measure of fondness.

            “Actually, I’m from here, born and raised,” I said. This response elicited a slow spreading grin from Shavers, who looked askance at his colleague, who had the presence of mind to at least look slightly embarrassed at this juncture.

            “You visiting family and friends, then,” asked Shavers.

            “No, I’m working on an extended piece for LookBack Magazine,” I answered. Allens pulled a pack of Marlboros from his blazer pocket then and lit one up with a nod.

            “That’s a solid publication,” he commented. “So, doing a kind of retrospective on the Massacre?”

            “Something like that, yeah. But I’m more interested at this point in seeing how people have changed around here since, cover the memorial installation too. What about you guys?” Now, one should bear in mind that a lot of folks working in the media don’t like to share specifics with their competition; it’s considered an amateur move, and one that can sometimes lose you access to exclusives or ‘first looks’. However, there are those of us in the field who are confident enough in our abilities to present information in a unique fashion that we don’t much worry about such things. Allens and Shavers, it turned out, were among that grouping, along with myself.

            “We’re actually here as part of a tie-in story our people back in New York are doing,” said Shavers. “There’s a case in Manhattan where someone’s trying to reference William’s Law, make a case for it being applied somewhere other than Georgia.”

            “That seems right up your alley.”

            “Which is exactly why they sent Allen and I down here,” said Shavers, accepting an offered cigarette from his colleague, as did I. “Personally, I think it’s needless law. If someone you’re connected to does something heinous, you gotta toughen up, suck it up, and ignore that nonsense.”

            “There’s a lot of people who don’t see it that way,” I replied, exhaling out of the corner of my mouth. “There’s a lot of pressure that the public can bring down on someone’s head, make their lives miserable.”

            “It’s all just talk,” said Shavers. “And besides, if you shut down the loons who send threats and whatnot, you make it that much more likely that, instead of sending word ahead that they’re going to do something stupid, they just go right ahead and do the stupid thing.” I considered his argument for a moment, trying to think of how it balanced against my own support of William’s Law. Shavers made a decent, plain-spoken case against the law, one that I found difficult to skillfully refute as briefly as he had stated it. Being born and raised in the American South, I was brought up hearing quite a lot of the kind of ‘tough it out’ approach to conflict that he was advocating.

            “Not everybody can just ignore it,” I finally said. “Will Norris wasn’t just getting emails and phone calls; he had people shouting at him from the roadway in the trailer park, vandalizing his private property, even harassing him at the little side jobs he would take as a handyman around town. How much can one person be asked to ignore?”

            Shavers pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger thoughtfully, lips pursed, seeming to consider my perspective. “You may have a point there,” he conceded. “I suppose it’s a matter of perspective, a difference of opinion and not much more.” He was effectively invoking ‘Let’s agree to disagree’ in a superbly civil manner, which is a great deal more than Fox News personalities of the past proved themselves capable of.

            We talked a little more shop then before I parted company with them, coming back here to hotel room. I recommended they talk to Chief Carlyle about the circumstances around William Norris’s death and the subsequent legislation that came into being as a result, a tip for which they thanked me. There’s genuinely nothing to worry about from those gentlemen; much like the folks from CNN, their cause for being here is not at odds with my task.

            Still, it is a little distressing that there’s so much big-name competition here in Deertrack.

-Josh here, folks. You know what’s not distressing, though? A show of support for The Storyteller’s Corner here, and there’s several ways you can give one! The easiest route would be just to share the Stack if you think others might enjoy the fiction works that show up here (maybe give it a ‘like’ as well). Another great way would be to head on over to www.buymeacoffee.com/byronofsidius and give what you feel you can in terms of a single-serving donation. I’ll be honest, folks, I’ll likely end up turning any donations there around and using said funds to subscribe as a paid reader to other Substacks that are paywalled. Without a lot of expendable funds of my own, it’d be excellent to have this side fund from Buy Me a Coffee to shop around right here on Substack and find those publications I’d love to dive into but can’t right now due only to a paywall.

This may strike some as glaringly selfish on my part, but let me ask- would you rather I lie about my intentions for paid support funds?