A Sad State of Affairs

 

Alysyn “Red Light” Camera, Lie Checking Editor (and CNNT Mole)

I had the privilege of working with Chris Walrus back when we were both, for the sake of our careers, having to pretend we were conservatives at Fascist Faux News. I was fortunate enough to escape to CNNT a few years ago, but he did something far braver. He stayed and gradually threw off his camouflage to reveal the true liberal son of his iconic liberal father, the magnificent Mike Walrus.

There’s always a price for standing up to the fascists. You wind up having to do things you don’t want to do. Toughing it out when all the outcomes are going against you. The Mueller Report and the two bungled impeachments. Then the doxing that’s required of the arrogant racist, sexist right wingers. And when you have to fight dirty while still having coffee with them it breaks something precious in you.

So I thought Chris had made a timely last minute leap, like the ones who got the last helicopter from the roof of Saigon, and that he would be okay here at CNNT+. Only it wasn’t to be. They had their foul fascist hands inside our domain as well, and I guess I was wrong that we could all somehow get through this gauntlet. But they did what they always do. If you can’t discredit the front line commandos like Tupper and Stetler and Quomo and Lemon and, yes, me, then you just get plumb ugly and take out the top, the leader. Jeff.

I used to call him CNNdatore Zucker, or Enzo for short. He knew everything about just how sick and twisted and anti-Democratic and racist and sexist and homophobic and seditionist the Trumpsters were. Why Chris trusted him as his own private Saigon chopper. 

But they did him in over the usual. The Republicans are obsessed with sex. A mature man like the CNNdatore can do what he wants, and speaking personally, I myself felt privileged. I only went to American University, and the whole time I was at Faux News I was little more than a lying harlot. My education came from Enzo. I’m the lowest of the low, a white middle class Jersey girl with incredibly bourgeois parents and nothing much to offer. Enzo taught me. I became under his tutelage a progressive, global, pansexual champion of diversity and a warrior against the ultimate intrinsic inherentistical evils of Amerika.

It didn’t occur to me that Chris Walrus was already suffering from GOP-induced PTSD. I knew he had had a few dramatic episodes on set after Enzo departed, smashing microphones into interns and what not, but there’s tends to be some diva in the best of us, and I trusted he would regain his steady hand at the TV tiller.

Then Chris seemed to go missing. For days. Once or twice I knocked on his office door. No answer. I thought about calling his smartphone. But I’m just me and he was him. You know.

Brian Stetler seemed to be enjoying my consternation and confusion. One day he said straight out, “He’s gone. Chris Walrus bailed on us. He doesn’t have feet of clay. He has guts of Manischewitz.” He put a photograph in my hand. “What’s behind the office door you keep tapping on.” When he showed me the photo he had taken incognito I immediately crumpled it up and threw it at him.

I uncrumpled it when a few days later some fascist actually texted me a newsy paparazzo who broke into Chris’s apartment and then put this dismal image on line:

I feel so lost. Not even Pam Kleb knows how to comfort me.