POSTPONEMENT: We stumbled upon some comic relief...

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2026

...before heading off to the mission: We'll be spending the bulk of the day at the medical mission. For that reason, we don't expect to execute a normal report this day.

That said, we stumbled upon some comic relief in the course of our daily perusals. We start with a passage from Michelle Goldberg's new column for the New York Times.

What ever happened to Tucker Carlson? (Tucker Carlson! Remember him?)

What ever happened to Tucker? As happenstance would have it, the New Yorker's Jason Zengerle has published a book on that topic.

Goldberg discusses that book in her column. We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of the suggestion housed in this passage, but we did find some dark humor there:

Tucker Carlson Needs His Hatreds

[...]

In 2010, [Tucker] set out to create, with The Daily Caller, a right-wing news site that would value serious, substantive reporting. Unfortunately, he soon found that his audience wanted not sober policy journalism but stories that “actively antagonized liberals,” Zengerle writes. So Carlson, committed to the site’s success, staffed up with a group of white nationalists, one of whom reportedly referred to his desk as “the Eagle’s Nest,” after Hitler’s mountain lair.

Carlson’s immersion in The Daily Caller’s analytics helped him understand, well before many of his peers, Trump’s potential appeal. His insight enabled his rise at Fox News, where he’d started as a low-level contributor. “The project at Fox of trying to find normal-seeming, television-camera-ready human beings who would make a sensible case for Donald Trump was not a small lift,” a former Fox producer told Zengerle. Carlson could do it, and that propelled him to prime time.

In such ways, the prophet Carlson roamed the American desert. At any rate, Carlson ascended to prime time at Fox--and he became the channel's top messenger. 

In the aftermath of January 6, he devoted himself to a project in which he played highly selective video clips from the Capitol building that day. Those clips were selected to convey the impression, to millions of viewers, that nothing untoward had occurred.

So goes our imperfect species' recurrent, insistent madness. That said, a bit of comic relief was present in that anonymous quote about Fox:

 The project at Fox of trying to find normal-seeming, television-camera-ready human beings who would make a sensible case for Donald Trump was not a small lift.

According to Zengerle, so said a former producer for Fox. On this campus, we mordantly chuckled, for the following reason:

On occasion, we ourselves have described the people we see on Fox News Channel shows as a collection of "Unrecognizables!" Some say they resemble the bar scene from Star Wars, though we ourselves wouldn't say that.

Borrowing from the late Ed McMahon, How unrecognizable are they? We ask you to ponder this fact:

Yesterday, we managed to sit through every segment of The Five, this former nation's most watched "cable news" TV program. We're not sure we've ever seen an hour so insipid, so defiantly vapid. 

("And yet, this is [us]," Ezra Pound might have said.)

We may try to describe the vapidity of that hour in the next few days. Meanwhile, a bit more comic relief may have lurked in this news report from today's Times:

Greenlanders Watching Turmoil in the United States Say No Thanks

[...]

The United States defended Greenland during World War II and the Cold War, and Greenlanders used to see Americans as protectors. But now the idea of joining up with the United States—a deeply divided nation with no universal health care, widening inequality and chaos on full display in the streets of Minneapolis—is not so appealing.

“What are we supposed to think of the U.S. now?” asked Julie Rademacher, who heads a Greenlandic association in Denmark. She said she too had been disturbed by the news from Minnesota.

“I feel a lot of sympathy with many American citizens,” she said. “It must be hard to live like that.”

Those Greenlanders today! Truly, they live at the end of the earth—and yet, they feel sorry for us!

For ourselves, we can't shed the feeling that the recurrent impulse toward tyranny has already won in this land. According to that theoretic, it's all over now but the shouting—and there's plenty of that down here!

With that, we're "going out to clean the pasture spring," or to do something vaguely like that. We may try to describe yesterday's (all too recognizable) hour in the days and the weeks ahead.