Disney owns ESPN. ESPN re-hired Keith Olbermann. (Again.) The Olbermann Unemployment Countdown is on. (Again.)By Yours Truly
https://www.themaven.net/theresurgent/community/the-mouse-rides-a-great-white-shark-8nVuIZaw80SyToSP8a9KMw/If you look at him from a certain angle, Keith Olbermann bears a slight resemblance to Groucho Marx. That is, if you can imagine Groucho having been buffed from the plebeian son of a modest East Side tailor into the patrician son of a teacher and an architect. But Olbermann also resembles Groucho in a way that produces migraines, not laughs, when he shows it.
"Politics," Groucho once observed, "is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and misapplying the wrong solutions." Whether as a sports maven, or whether as a political commentator who shows you wisdom by standing athwart it, Olbermann looks for trouble, finds it, and misdiagnoses it. As for misapplying the wrong solutions, Olbermann usually does that among his colleagues and bosses.
He is to employment, unemployment, re-employment, re-unemployment, re-re-employment, and re-re-unemployment what Zsa Zsa Gabor was to marriage, divorce, re-marriage, re-divorce, and re-re-marriage. And he isn't half as funny as was Groucho when, asked what he thought caused his first three divorces, he replied, "I think it was my first three marriages." Groucho knew where to draw lines when delivering his patented insults. Olbermann probably thinks any lines other than pinstripes on baseball uniforms or those he delivers are fascist plots.
His re-hiring by ESPN is his third term of employment at the sports network. And Disney, who also owns ABC, the network that just dismounted the sabertooth known as Roseanne Barr, seems unafraid to mount a great white shark. Whether its ride aboard Olbermann will out-live its ride aboard Roseanne is up for speculation. Olbermann's employment history, never mind his politics, may well have people creating and meme-ing Keith Olbermann Unemployment Countdowns.
Olbermann is vile enough to make the rest of today's gutter politics and polemics resemble the courtly scythe of Murray Kempton on the left or the polysyllabic, genial irreverence of William F. Buckley, Jr. on the right.* Once upon a time Barry Goldwater remembered that everything he knew about Lyndon Johnson, approaching the 1964 presidential campaign, "told me he was not capable of opposing without hate." Regardless of whom or what he opposes when or where, Olbermann makes Johnson resemble Alphonse and Gaston.
It hardly began with last August's notorious tweet in which he demonstrated his singular ability to turn on a penny from a self-styled above-it-all patrician to a schoolyard lout in attacking Mr. Trump, a man to whom loutishness is not necessarily a vice. Criticising the president's tendencies to tweet from the lip, his actual or reputed policy positions, or his alleged disinterest in the details of, you know, his actual job, is one thing. But telling the president to perform an anatomical impossibility upon himself, deploying a certain four-letter euphemism for fornicate while so telling, doesn't exactly elevate your longed-for status as a diagnostician to be heeded by people who do think seriously, even if it might get you dinner, dancing, and a hotel reservation with Samantha Bee.
Olbermann likens himself to H.L. Mencken, applying to himself Mencken's self-description, "My business is not prognosis but diagnosis." You wonder whether Olbermann is aware of another Mencken observation, "The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary."
His third-time-around employment by ESPN may yet leave the network feeling too much like the abused wife who believes it for the umpteenth time when her husband swears he'll never, ever,
ever-ever! do it again. Once a braggart that he didn't burn bridges, he incinerates rivers (that was in the wake of ESPN executive Mike Soltys's fabled crack, "He didn't burn bridges, he napalmed them"), he may be just realistic enough not to make such a promise this time around. He's resigned or been fired over incidents running the line from tensions at the office and with co-workers to misbehaviours out of it, whether taking potshots at his employers' headquarters while promoting a book or contributing to Congressional candidates while on the job as a presumed journalist.
Enough of us would lose careers over that, often enough after the first or second time, regardless of whether our politics are the kind our employers favour or at least don't reject. Olbermann leads a professional life perhaps too charmed by half, but you wonder at last whether even that charm will wear off to stay this time around. He certainly doesn't practise another Groucho Marx pronouncement: "I'm not interested in belonging to any club that would have me as a member."
The Olbermann Unemployment Countdown may proceed apace; its eventual consummation may yet prompt an ESPN/Disney lament that it didn't ask itself whether it wanted to be any club that would have him as a member, yet again. Unlike Groucho, Olbermann won't leave 'em laughing, not for the reasons Groucho usually did, anyway.
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Not an idle comparison, by the way. Kempton and Buckley were friends since the 1950s, not above needling each other's views in print but not beneath savouring each other's company and wit out of it. When Kempton published his anthology, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, three years before his death in 1997, he dedicated it to "William F. Buckley, Jr., genius at friendships of the kind that passes all understanding." (Buckley, apparently, nagged Kempton for years to compile such an anthology, and indeed helped finance its publication, his second and last such anthology.) It's to lament that, when Buckley's posthumous A Torch Kept Lit was compiled and published, the elegies therein didn't include his lyrical elegy to Kempton, published in Miles Gone By.
