FOX Wins Again, America Loses

From the Archives: Hemingway and Texas

I realize that’s a hell of a claim to make in the headline. But just how much is FOX harmed? And does anyone think they won’t go right back to old practices?

Nothing will change. FOX will resume lying and misleading its audience on the air. Of course, the viewers might want to be misled. Even as intellectually depraved as much of the FOX audience appears to be, the majority has to know it is not being told the truth. The rigged election nonsense they were sold was so patently absurd and indefensible that even if a FOX viewer focused on avoiding the facts, they still had to be confronted. Joe Biden won in the Electoral College and the popular vote and Trump was not even close. These are the facts FOX could not accept.

The FOX settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is good for FOX and Dominion. But America got kind of screwed. We were served up parsed political statements that are about as funny as Trump without spray tan. The $787 million dollar settlement is a verification that the network lied on the air about our most sacred process in this old democracy, and only has to write a check to walk away and repeat the process. FOX can also pretend, which it is doing, that it really just doesn’t want to drag poor Americans, (see also, advertisers), through the muck of a long, drawn out trial.

Because they are all about good journalism.

"This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards,” the network’s statement said. “We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

“Highest journalistic standards” is a laugh line for the ages.

And who the hell is moving forward? FOX will continue to distort and manufacture and outright lie if it serves their political purposes and those of the fiduciaries of companies that are their advertisers. There is no penance involved in this agreement, only absolution. Not even an apology was required and the originators of fake news had to do little more than admit there were falsehoods broadcast on their air.

“We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” was another one of their absurdist statements.

The number and total volume of lies and disinformation FOX spewed about Dominion and the election that made Mr. Biden president were enough to fill up all the data space offered by Amazon Web Services. It never stopped, and it may yet resume. The company has hardly been chastened. When you have billions to pay your bills, you have a kind of invulnerability. Sure, this will make a bit of dent in the network’s bottom line, but Hannity and Carlson and the morning flakes and every other cipher on their air is not likely to get a sudden case of the Truths.

America deserved a chance to hear Tucker Carlson and tiny Sean Hannity lie under oath. I have had dreams of those tubes of human sputum on the stand trying to avoid simple questions.

“Mr. Tucker, do you ever, or have you ever, lied on the air and reported something that you knew to be false or unproven?”

“Not to my knowledge, counselor.”

That’s evasive phrase to avoid admitting you knew you were dealing in fabrication. If you knew, the implication is you’d not have done it. But that’s horseshit. Carlson and Hannity in particular have done more harm to America than even Rupert Murdoch, who ought to be deported for being a grave threat to the republic. Everyone knows how this works at FOX, too. The network will hardly mention the settlement on air and in spite of the subject’s widespread news coverage, much, maybe most, of the people who watch FOX will never know they lost the case. In fact, FOX is likely to give the story only a few lines of copy a couple times in the broadcast day.

I don’t see how anyone views this as justice. Murdoch wrote a check to get out of jail. I am happy for Dominion because what they did was courageous and it saved their company, if not our democracy. But if there were true justice, the entirety of the network’s crimes against America would have been on display in the courtroom, and every taxpayer in the land would get a sense of lies and dirty dealing conducted by the network as it daily slings all across the country its total disregard for the truth and facts. That’s the profitable formula that makes it possible to write a check for $787 million dollars and then get back to the hard work of setting to rot the very foundations of our democracy.

Dominion is still going after Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, but their incompetence, as manifest as it is, appears more comical than dangerous. We may get to see them twist and sweat dark bullets down their foreheads, but they’ll both claim bankruptcy and neither of them has a reputation left to be destroyed. My hope now is that Smartmatic, which has the next defamation suit up, gets the empty suits of FOX News on the stand and we can get a better grasp of the horror show that is that network. If they take a big enough chunk of cash in a settlement from FOX, instead of pushing onto the courtroom at all costs, perhaps the double hits will do fatal harm to the network, or, even better, corporate advertisers will be embarrassed to be associated with determined liars.

Doesn’t seem like much to ask.

Hemingway and Texas

When Ken Burn’s broadcast his six hours on PBS a few years ago about Ernest Hemingway, I expected to be disappointed. I just didn’t think the writer’s life lent itself to a documentary. The work was, though, mostly masterful. But he failed to explore an interesting narrative thread that would have added even more intrigue to the glories and tragedies of the writer.

In the spring of 1934, a young man named Arnold Samuelson hitchhiked down from Minnesota to Key West with the goal of meeting and learning from Hemingway. Samuelson was burning with the desire to write and he thought his best chance was to learn from the acknowledged expert on story telling. Hemingway, gruff with intruders into his work rhythms, answered the door when Samuelson knocked, and, ultimately, gave him a job on his boat, the Pilar. His tasks were to keep the craft clean and write a daily ship’s log, which he did for a year. In the spaces between, he gleaned what he could about writing from Papa H.

Samuelson fretted greatly about writing and finances, a common emotion for every writer. Hemingway was impressed enough with the young man’s enthusiasm and determination to call him, “The coming American novelist” in one of his letters. Samuelson was certainly armed with experience; he had wandered the U.S. as a hitchhiker and had ridden the rails to take all kinds of jobs.

But Samuelson, who had published a few articles about Hemingway after he left the Keys, ended up in a kind of psychic stasis and never completed a novel. There is speculation he was unable to recover from his sister’s mutilation murder in Los Angeles. He scribbled notes and agonized and started and stopped projects and seemed irrevocably tethered to his year on the Pilar. No experience seemed to surpass the time spent with the celebrated author.

Eventually, Samuelson drifted down to Robert Lee, Texas, a town in Coke County that had been named after the Confederate Civil War general. Lee had served as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army’s Second Cavalry for five years in Texas leading up to the War Between the States and had camped for a while on the Colorado River near the townsite that bears his name.

There wasn’t much for Arnold Samuelson to do in the empty reaches of West Texas. He became a local handyman, junkyard operator, and a clandestine curator of a manuscript about his time with Hemingway. His daughter discovered the stack of pages after his death and worked relentlessly to whip it into publishable shape. With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba is interesting because it shows the American icon’s life when he was at the peak of his powers, though there is little insightful from its author. Certain passages, however, reveal how Samuelson was influenced by the declarative style of his hero, and leaves the reader wondering what he might have written had he found his voice. Samuelson died of a heart attack on his property shortly after returning home from buying his first new motorcycle.

There is also a brilliant bit of writing about Arnold Samuelson’s tragic life in the book, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. Written by Paul Hendrickson, I consider it to be possibly the best biography of the author, and, yes, I’ve read them all. But please don’t mistake me as someone impressed by his hairy-chested, bullfight-loving, great white hunter bullshit. I do admire, however, anyone who lives out their dreams and experiences life at its fullest, and there is an easy argument to make that was his grandest accomplishment.

My view is that another writer from Northern Michigan became the author Hemingway envisioned for himself. Jim Harrison produced numerous novels, memoirs, non-fiction narratives, and poetry, and was a food critic for Esquire magazine. Harrison is best known for his novella, Legends of the Fall, but all his books ring like a bell, and a few might be suffused with immortality.