Ode to Tucker Carlson’s Tanned Scrotum (satirical poetry)
The inner city blood bath is some blowhard’s vocal scrotal rant
The six o’clock news
Sent camera crews
To capture some blood in the streets.
But to drive 90 miles,
Makeup, script, setup, smiles
And make deadline in time for the views
Was way too damn hard. So they cheat.The inner city blood bath
Is a camera focal artifact
And some blowhards’ vocal scrotal pissant rant.-Tom Tordillo
6o’clock news wasn’t a thing for Millennials. Gen Xers witnessed ‘news entertainment’ (aka cable news) displace that tradition: “Here we are now, entertain us.”
The ‘Greatest Generation’ concocted ‘6 o’clock news’ as a Depression Era ritual, first with radio, then after WW2, with televisions when they could afford them. They demanded ‘real news.’ Global news mattered, because people you knew might die or the Soviets might get ahead of us or some new war might start unless you knew what was up.
Baby boomers grew more skeptical: presidents lie. Nobody cares. Jim Crow? Bad. Inner city? Bad. Vietnam? War sucks. Suburbs? Good, safe, vibrant, new (White). Communists? They’ll nuke the cities anyway: stay clear.
Generational beliefs slowly detach themselves from reality, but resonate powerfully long after they become inaccurate.
Hence, news crews in the 1980s and 1990s — amassing footage from scenes of violent crime — cooking up the same daily fodder of heartbreak in the cities — couldn’t afford to drive 2 hours back and forth in traffic and return home in time for the 6 o’clock news.
‘If it bleeds, it leads’ — but only if you can get a camera crew out to catch the blood. For 20 years or so, you could do that in the cities, but not the suburbs. Hence, Baby Boomers were trained to hate cities, and rural Americans (typically working in businesses launched by Baby Boomers) learned to agree with them.
Cable news broke that cycle — BUT replaced it with something worse: grabbing eyeballs required finding every last drop of blood, so that new watchers would tune in and stick around. And if there wasn’t enough blood? Then give them personalities to tell them horror stories.
Violent crime in the 2020s is a fraction of what it was in the 1980s/90s, even with an uptick over the last 3 years. In 2011, America had the lowest homicide rate in 40 years. Nobody cared.
The uptick in 2020 was the highest ever. Who was president in 2020? Yet his supporters STILL think he was keeping them safe.
Cameras focus on what sells: in an era when anybody with a camera phone can capture the blood on the streets, the key to selling is to have ‘personalities’ who curate those camera images and fit them together.
Blood draws flies and eyeballs. So does sex. That’s probably why America has heard about Tucker Carlson’s scrotum.
Carlson’s show airs at 8 pm Eastern Time, 7 pm Central Time, 6 pm Mountain Time. Here’s an interesting graphic of how Carlson’s target audience voted in 2020.
Squint at that image a bit, and Florida looks something like a scrotal sack, N. Carolina/S. Carolina a flaccid member, Ohio/W. Virginia an erect member. Utah could be a butt plug.
Having seen that, wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the days of ‘if it bleeds, it leads’?
Or better still, to real poetry.
