The thought of having my own talk show terrifies me. Just to try to imagine a world in which I would have to fill a space of time being personable, erudite, civil, and even, heaven forfend, funny, more or less every night, on camera, well that gives me the heebie-jeebies. But the medium does have its possibilities.
The election on November 3rd is what is really giving me the heebie-jeebies. Here's what I would suggest if I were asked to come up with a script for an election night talk show.
I would start the show as early as the network would allow me to, and I would make sure that I knew exactly what time was the earliest that anyone was allowed to report election results. At the first minute of that time window, perhaps separately in every time zone, I would announce that Joe Biden had won the election in a landslide. I would do this with great enthusiasm, relief, and conviction, with more bells and whistles that had previously been seen on an election night broadcast.
The entire show would be scripted. Actual events would no impact on the contents of the show.
Of course I would need all of the video-boards, and the remote reporters, and the pundits, and the man-in-the-street interviews, but all of that would be dummied up to suit the real concept of the show. That would be that the entire country, as one voice, had spoken, and everyone had agreed that we love good old Joe, and we were driven to tears of abject gratitude that fortune had allowed us to vote him into office as our beloved president. That our prayers to the various merciful Gods had been lavishly answered, and in an outpouring of democratic lust and civic good will we had virtually unanimously voted to bring our old familiar friend Joe back from semi-retirement to save us from the terrible mess that we had gotten ourselves into last time.
The rhythm of it would be very much like a telethon, but rather than begging for money to go looking for a cure for muscular dystrophy, we would be announcing to the world that a cure had been found. Thanks to the miracle of our constitutional right to vote, all of Jerry's Kids, metaphorically, would presently be skipping across that vast field of flowers, while all of those damn wheelchairs would be melted down as scrap. In fact, the cures to all diseases had been found! That would be the quality of our joy.
That's what I would do, in a desperate effort to drown out the chaos that is more likely to happen. The desperate wailing and crying, the rivers of tears! The hands raised to God in anger at being abandoned. The terrible knowledge that the floodgates had been opened by unseen hands, the tombs had been opened, and that horrors undreamed of were focused on destroying our happiness in all of its aspects, and that there was nothing left to stop them.
Do you think that that was dramatic? The reality of it will almost certainly exceed in horror anything that I can imagine.
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