Opinion
Before there was a term for it, I discovered hate watching: the guilty pleasure of watching something so compellingly awful it makes your fillings ache. Hate listening in this case, on my tinny transistor when I was supposed to be going to sleep. Sometime in the early 60s I stumbled upon the dark prophecies of evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong on a show called The World Tomorrow. Did I know the United States and Great Britain were identified in the books of Jeremiah and Isaiah? I did not. “Increasing crime, total moral decay of the home by juvenile delinquency and lawlessness …”; “Shocking and frightening statistics …”; “The national debt …” In retrospect, Garner Ted warning of the multiple abominations heralding the End Time sounded a little like the Opposition during Question Time.
The child of an atheist Jew and a lapsed Catholic, I was immune to his attempts to terrify me with the prospect of eternal damnation. In the end he was the one who sounded scared, of a time when children would be disrespectful “and women would rule over us”!
Garner Ted, who eventually had his own fall from grace, came to mind when news broke that a more recent prophet of doom, Tucker Carlson, like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck before him, had abruptly “parted company” with Fox News. I was an occasional viewer. His puzzled - has-my-screen-frozen? - facial expressions. His blasts of high-pitched giggling that went off like a conservative warning klaxon in the face of some poor member of the “liberal elites” he’d lured on to his show. It’s a sign of the end times, surely, that someone with a name like Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, who has boasted he’s always been so rich he never needed to work, can brand himself as the voice of the ordinary Joe, but never mind.
It’s unclear exactly why Carlson got the chop. His reputation among his fans for squeaking truth to power took a hit when the Fox/Dominion Voting Systems trial revealed texts that showed that Carlson’s backing of Trump and his “stolen election” claims were at odds with what he and other Fox presenters were saying off air. Even they didn’t believe it. There were profoundly disagreeable comments about colleagues, etc. Lawsuits threatened.
