Nothing Personal

NOTE 1:  Just before we went to press, Disney announced it was returning Jimmy Kimmel back to television.  Whether I think they caved to pressure or not is irrelevant (personally, I think they were cowards).  As I write below, Disney is a private corporation which can do what it wants.  Whatever.  I still won't watch.  And not just because it's way past my bedtime.  Which it is.

NOTE 2:  There is no press.  Just me typing with two fingers, painfully, on a computer keyboard.

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    As some of you know, I'm a Monetary Exchange Specialist* at a nationally known hardware store.  Many people have come through my line looking to purchase this widget or that.  I try to be cheerful and strictly professional, no matter what type of mental disease they're suffering from.

    Trust me.  I usually keep any wise-guy remarks to myself when someone asks me where I keep my nuts, for example.

I almost gave myself a hernia holding my tongue on that one

    Due to construction, which relegated us father back from the main road, and an aging clientele which is, frankly, dying, business has been suffering.  What's more, there are some areas where we can improve as a store.  However, the owners feel there is little sense pouring money into a business which is slowly failing.  The less money they devote to improvements, the more sales taper off which leads to less of a desire to improve...you get the picture.

   Hang in there, I'm getting to the point of this.

   Now, imagine if I voiced these concerns to a customer at my register.  Concerns which are heard by the ten people behind him.  Toss in a few choice editorial comments about the owners' intelligence and well, at best, these folks may never choose to shop there again.  At worst, the word gets back to the owners that one of their employees is badmouthing them.

    They decide to fire me.  Or, if they're feeling especially magnanimous, offer me a chance to apologize in lieu of being canned.

    But, what about my freedom of speech, you ask (if anyone is actually reading this)?  Don't I have freedom of speech?  Well, yes I do.  I can peddle my freedom of speech on the street corner or among my friends at the nudie bar  church,

    You see, a business owner can choose to terminate someone who has alienated half his clientele.  He has that freedom of speech to do so.  How dare anyone demand he keep a rabble rouser on the payroll?

    What a lot of people fail to understand in the whole Jimmy Kimmel affair is that he maintained freedom of speech even though Disney suspended him for making an outrageous claim about the murder of Charlie Kirk.  Many were justifiably outraged.  As a result, Disney continued to lose millions due to the fact that the noted bigmouth was being a...bigmouth.  Conservatives

or people with early bedtimes

had no desire to hear their views trashed on national TV. 

NOTE 3:  Incidentally, I'm old enough to remember the bitch fight between Florida and Big Mouse over LGBTQ (or some other such nonsense).  Conservatives were outraged while Liberals championed Mickey then. 

"Frikkin' gay mice everywhere!"

    ABC, the network which broadcasts the show, made a business decision.  It had nothing to do with Trump (noted bigmouth himself).

Technically, the governor of, say, South Carolina can mandate that
everyone in his state be Southern Baptists.  Just not the federal government.

        For those who need a refresher on the Constitution, the First Amendment states that Congress (italics mine) shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

  It says nothing about what a private business can or cannot do.  Nothing.

    Things like what happened to Kimmel happen all the time.  Roseanne Barr was cancelled for an errant tweet, Tucker Carlson was bounced from Fox and even Donald Trump lost his Twitter account.

    Now, I didn't like that these things happened.  But, I understood that business decisions were made.  It wasn't the federal government which directed that networks take any action. 

NOTE 4:  Yes, apparently there was no shortage of arm-twisting coming from the senile Delaware Muppet Administration on Facebook.  I'm not naive.  Just one crisis at a time, though.

"I had muppets working for me, Lord?  I love that Fozzy Bear."

    In any event, Disney was within their rights to do what they did.

    Which is why I'm going to keep my piehole shut when I ring up mulch and wood screws.

Hee...hee...hee...I said 'screws.'

*cashier