TWO SILOS: Vice President Harris slimed in a cab!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2024

A new Martian culture at Fox: As you may already know, Stranger in a Strange Land is a highly regarded science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein.

Don't get us wrong—we've never read it! But one thumbnail describes it like this:

Stranger in a Strange Land 

Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians.

[...]

Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it one of 88 "Books that Shaped America."

Did Heinlein's novel really "shape America?" We have no idea—that said:

Heinlein's main character—a person named Smith—is technically human but culturally Martian. With surprising frequency, an observer can seem to be dealing with something like that when he watches an array of primetimes "cable news" shows on the present-day Fox News Channel.

We're often surprised by the behaviors, and by the views, of the people Fox puts on the air. Consider an exchange which occurred last weekend on the primetime "cable news" program, Fox News Saturday Night with Jimmy Failla.

Failla was once a New York City cabbie. Today, he's a comedian who hosts his own Saturday night primetime program on Fox.

Last Saturday, his program included a videotaped segment in which he was back to driving a cab. More specifically, he was shown driving the Fox News Channel's Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (stage name, Kennedy) through the streets of Gotham as the pair of "cable news" stars gossip and degrade the culture and chuckle.

In our view, Failla and Kennedy each seem a bit "Smith-adjacent." To watch their peculiar conversation, you can start by clicking here.

The segment starts with the two Fox stars directing sexual insults at Kamala Harris. (By now, this sort of thing is quite common on Fox.) 

The insults are triggered when Kennedy, in the back seat of Failla's cab, offers this portrait of Harris:

KENNEDY (10/5/24): She's a bland, overcooked piece of chicken.

FAILLA: Yeah.

KENNEDY: Like, doesn't have any flavor. The texture is kinda gross. but you can pour teriyaki sauce on it and serve it over rice.

Somehow, that portrait of the sitting vice president seems to trigger Failla. He instantly mentions Willie Brown, and things spin downhill from there. 

At this point, the pair enjoy some smutty musings in which they imagine aspects of the candidate's relationship with Brown in the mid-1990s. While they're at it, they throw in some smutty talk in which they imagine aspects of her dating relationship with Montel Williams, which apparently tracks to the late 1990s. 

On what manner of Martian meat doth such lifeforms feed?  We began to think of Heinlein's cultural alien when this smutty exchange occurred:

KENNEDY: Great move on her part, though...Just like a total hooch! 

FAILLA; Oh, yeah!

KENNEDY (musingly): A part of me, like—I respect it. 

FAILLA: Yeah.

KENNEDY: Very ahead of her time. She put the "head" in "ahead of her time."

FAILLA (laughing): She was several heads ahead of her time. Several heads ahead of her time.

KENNEDY: (Cackles knowingly)

FAILLA (thoughtfully): Yeah, that's her. (Pauses) "We shouldn't talk about that." That's what they'd tell us.

Just so you'll know, Kennedy is 52 years old; Failla is 47. We say that so you won't think they're a pair of angry 14-year-olds angrily rebelling against "what [the adults] tell us."

As we've noted, the practice of directing sexual insults at Vice President Harris is now quite common on Fox. Over at the New York Times, a finer class of the better people insist that there's nothing to look at as this culture takes form.

As we watched this segment on Saturday night, what we've shown you already struck us as culturally Martian. But we really began to think about Heinlein's character from a distant land when the astonishing Kennedy, arrayed in the back seat of Failla's cab, somehow came up with this:

KENNEDY (continuing directly): If the sexual stuff before you're elected doesn't matter, then don't talk about what happened with Trump and E. Jean Carroll, or Trump and the Access Hollywood tape.

FAILLA: Yeah. How about that?

By now, you may think we're making this up. Go ahead—look at the tape.

The strange ruminations continue briefly from there. But for our money, we've already entered a very strange land.

Who on earth is the 52-year-old human woman who analyzed the situation in the manner shown?

For reasons we've never understood, she's been in the public eye roughly forever by this time. This comes from the standard thumbnail:

Kennedy (commentator)

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (born September 8, 1972), referred to mononymously as Kennedy, is an American libertarian political commentator, radio personality, author, and former MTV VJ. She is a commentator on Fox News Channel, a primary guest host of Fox's Outnumbered and The Five, host of the podcast Kennedy Saves The World on Fox News Radio and a columnist for The Daily Mail...She hosted Kennedy on the Fox Business Network from 2015 to 2023.

[She] was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and raised in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a wealthy suburb of Portland...She attended Santa Monica College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles on an academic scholarship. She later completed a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 2005.

Kennedy interned as a DJ at KROQ radio in Los Angeles as a teenager. She was known on KROQ as "the Virgin Kennedy."

[She] began her career as a VJ on MTV in 1992. She hosted Alternative Nation from 1992 to 1997. By 1995, she had become such a recognizable cultural figure that the sitcom Murphy Brown introduced a new character named McGovern, modeled after her.

From Murphy Brown to Willie Brown, she has just kept moving along!

For ourselves, we were always puzzled by Kennedy's presence as an MTV VJ. We don't recall any specifics, but we recall being puzzled by what the appeal might be.

At any rate, Kennedy's career has traveled on from MTV, through a great many twists and turns. According to that same leading authority, she's always trended in the way she put on display last Saturday night:

At the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, Kennedy was involved in an on-air verbal altercation with host Roseanne Barr over a fellatio joke involving Rush Limbaugh.

Way back in 1986, we knew Roseanne a bit, if only briefly. We thought she was strikingly sharp, and we liked her a lot. 

We were sorry when she headed down that road. Kennedy remains on that road today, on prime time "news" shows no less.

Back to what was said in the cab:

Kennedy is 52 years old. She is said to hold a degree in philosophy from one of "the finest schools."

Somehow, though, also this:

She apparently can't discern a difference between 1) a jury-adjudicated incident of sexual assault, described by one judge as equivalent to an act of rape; and 2) her own imagined accounts of imagined consensual acts—imagined acts she imagines happening a very long time ago.

To Kennedy, this all seemed to be the same thing. To Failla, this all seemed to make sense. 

As we've noted, sexual insults directed at Harris are now standard fare on primetime shows on this "cable news" channel. Finer people at the Times (and at other orgs in Blue America) seem to feel there's nothing to look at as this culture takes hold. 

We humans often think we understand the basic cultural landscape within which we're leading our lives. At such surprising times as this, we sometimes flash on what Thoreau said, in paragraph 2 of Walden:

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

Failla and Kennedy may have been speaking "sincerely" last Saturday night. But if they were, it seems to us that they were speaking from some very distant land. 

On what meat have these two stars fed? On what meat were they raised? What explains the culture which has surfaced on the Fox News Channel and is now broadcast every night? 

What explains the thinking of the people who put these two on the air? What explains the culture within which the loftier tribunes of Blue America insist that there's nothing to look at as these Martian-adjacent figures toss their musings around?

Tomorrow: We expect to return to Charlie Hurt's invented account of Harris's interview with Stephanie Ruhle.

On Friday, it will be back to that pair of front-page pieces from the New York Times—though knowing how way leads on to way, an Earth-dweller can never be sure.