“I don’t know who this Jimmy Kimble fella is, Barnaby, but it sure sounds pretty sketchy what they did to him, taking him off the air like they did.”
We’re catching up on the week’s news over our regular breakfast get together. 
“Just because he got the president mad with something he said about…” Cecil’s searching for the name, “… this Charlie Kirk fella. Somebody else I never heard of until he got shot. Did you know who Charlie Kirk was, Barnaby? Before, I mean.”
I shake my head. I hadn’t. Evidently didn’t run in those social media circles.
“What about Jimmy Kimble. Did you know who he was? Before he got fired?”
“Vaguely,” I tell Cecil.
A funny clip that had been sent my way in a group chat, perhaps. A name I probably couldn’t put a face to. Wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a police lineup.
“Kimmel, I think his name is,” I say, for no pressing reason. Kimmel. Kimble. We’ll all move along sooner rather than later. To another bit of shocking, outrageous news that we can’t believe we’re reading, hearing, before setting it aside because it’s all getting too much to take in, to absorb, to come to terms with.
“Kimmel?” Cecil asks to confirm.
“Yes,” I confirm.
“Huh,” he responds, seeming then to take a moment with another bit of his eggs benedict to consider the updated information. As if the change in the name might make any kind of difference to the story.
“It sounds like the president had a bit of grudge with him. Didn’t take to being made fun of on late night TV. The butt of his jokes.”
“So it would seem.”
“They’ve been doing that kind of stuff for years now, Barnaby. The comedians with their opening monologues, talking about current events, poking fun at the politicians of the day. Can you imagine being president of the United States and being that thin skinned?”
“I think you’ll find, Cecil,” I offer, “the man became president of the United States because he was thin skinned.”
“What do you mean?”
I fill him in on the story, apocryphal perhaps, about how when he was president, Barack Obama, he’d made fun of Donald Trump at one of those press correspondents dinners, a political roast event. 
“He probably just didn’t like being talked to like that by a black guy,” Cecil whispers across the table at me but loud enough for the group beside us to easily overhear.
“Trump,” I say to them, by way of an explanation. “And Barack Obama.”
They smile, grimly, I’d say, and turn back to their own conversation.
“I think certain politicians have the kind of temperament that doesn’t like being made fun of,” I say, “regardless of the colour of the person making the joke.”
“You mean like dictators?” Cecil replies.
Bingo.
“But even kings back in the days of absolutism had their court jesters, didn’t they?” he says.
Ahhhhh,
for the good ol’ days of absolutism.
At least you knew where you stood.
“Why do you reckon the TV network gave in to the pressure?” Cecil wonders. “They seem big enough, rich enough to tell the president where to shove it. This makes them look craven if you ask me.”
Well, well, well.
Where to start with all that? I sigh into my cup of coffee.
“I mean, for starters,” I start, “as far as I can tell, these late night hosts nowadays aren’t the sacred cash cows and ratings giants they were back in our day. Carson, Letterman.”
“The guy with the jaw!” Cecil adds.
The guy with the jaw.
“They’re easy sacrifices to make to try and keep the bullies at bay.”
“But it never works out that way, does it, Barnaby? Bullies can’t be placated. They should know that.”
Yes, they should. So maybe they’re delusional. It Can’t Happen Here and all that.
“Well then there’s all the mergers and acquisitions that depend on the administration’s approval,” I suggest. “That threat has certainly been floated by the president and his guy he appointed to the group that oversees such things. Dark talk of revoking broadcast licenses and all that.”
“So just sniveling capitulation looking for a little quid pro quo then,” Cecil says.
As usual with these sorts of conversations over the last little while, we lapse, Cecil and I, into an unsettled silence and fretful contemplation. We sink into the brunch time clatter and chatter around us. A burst of laughter suggesting there are some able to set aside our current troubling times, at least temporarily. At least over some guacamole, eggs and ham. I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse.
“The other possibility, Cecil my old friend,” I venture, “is that big business and corporations, they’re not all that disconcerted with the political direction that the country’s headed. It doesn’t adversely affect their bottom line. There is a history that suggests as much.”
“The German industrialists certainly didn’t mind Hitler and his gang,” Cecil says with a sage nodding of his head and another bite of eggs benedict. “At least, at first.”
And more than a few of them are still around.
“Car companies really liked the Nazis,” I point out.
“Oh yeah,” Cecil replies. “I know Volkswagen. Hitler loved their little car, didn’t he?”
“As I understand it, yes. Volkswagen. Porsche. Mercedes-Benz.”
“And Ford!” Cecil exclaims. “Old Henry T. was a raging antisemite.”
The list could go on.
“I read somewhere, Barnaby,” Cecil goes on, “that Hugo Boss designed their uniforms! Can you believe that? The Brown Shirts and everything.”
Don’t talk about the war! immediately springs to mind. Monty Python? No, the other one. Fawlty Towers. Don’t talk about the war!
“Money has its own ideology it seems, Cecil,” I ponder aloud. “Comfortable with any side that’ll keep it flowing.”
Once more, we grind down to an anxious silence. What is to be done? Tolstoy asked. Did he have answer? Not that I can remember. Been some time since I’ve read any Tolstoy. Nothing to be done, Samuel Beckett responded later. That I do remember, but he didn’t really mean it, I don’t think.
“So what do you think this Kimble guy’ll do now?” Cecil asks, his breakfast done and coffee cup in hand. “Do you think he’ll pushback?”
“What would you do in his place, Cecil?” is my immediate response.
“Well…” Cecil takes a moment to think about it. “I’d like to think I’d push back, take my celebrity out on the road and try to stir up a bunch of trouble.”
“OK. But would you?”
Cecil sighs.
When you’ve got nothing left to lose, what do you have to lose?
But if you’ve still got something left to lose?
“I mean, here we are, sitting north of the border, not directly in the line of fire—”
“Not yet, at any rate,” Cecil chimes in.
“Not yet, at any rate, yes. So easy for us to say,” I say, “easy for us to judge, to prescribe.”
Pushback is easy in theory. Heroic in your imagination. To the ramparts! But absolutely fraught in practice. Full of fraught thoughts.
“First they came for Charlie Kirk,” Cecil intones after another lengthy pause in our conversation, brunching sounds still on order in the background, but a little more under-sated. “And I did not speak out.”
Easy for us to be glib, it strikes me. But the time for it has grown short.