Thanksgiving “was the last day I felt relatively unworried about Covid-19,” writes CNN’s Chris Cillizza in a mawkish column that might be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.
“Since the word ‘Omicron’ entered our lexicon,” Cillizza whined, “every day has been filled with varying levels of stress.”
You know omicron, don’t you? It’s the even-more contagious variant currently making the rounds. An omicron infection presents as a bad cold or a mild flu — when it presents at all. Much to my personal delight, the not-at-all-deadly omicron variant is crowding out the not-very-deadly delta variant, representing 73% of all new cases nationwide.
That’s progress.
Nevertheless, Crybaby Chris says he’s plagued with “health anxiety and compulsive behavior” that make him “a terrible person to be tasked” with “trying to weigh the proper balance between risk mitigation and, well, living our lives.”
Cillizza feels “emotionally raw” because “everything from anger to exhaustion to resignation sits heavier on me now than it did at that Thanksgiving dinner.”
“These past few weeks,” the ones where millions of people got a new variant and then literally everyone totally failed to die from it, “have been some of the hardest of the entire pandemic.”
Is Cillizza really this neurotic? If so, how can he be a trusted news source?
Or is he just indulging in panic porn fanfic to keep the masses as fevered as he’s pretending to be? If so, how can he be a trusted news source?
What is it with CNN’s on-air talent acting like the lamest characters out of The Godfather? First, it was Chris “Fredo” Cuomo, and now we have Cillizza whining like crybaby Johnny Fontane.
Recommended: Everybody’s Got Omicron Fever!
Fontane, as you’ll recall, was a singer in the Frank Sinatra mode whose career had hit the skids. Looking to turn his fortunes around with a movie role, he visited the home of his godfather, Don Vito Corleone, on the day of his daughter’s wedding. That’s a special day when “no Sicilian can refuse a request.”
As it turns out, Fontane’s request was a little more complicated than getting the Don to make a friendly phone call to the movie studio. The studio chief, Jack Woltz, held a personal grudge against Fontane, and “Johnny Fontane never gets that movie” as far as he was concerned.
The favor was to put some very personal pressure on Woltz, in the form of his favorite horse’s head in his bed next to him.
But I got ahead of the story.
As Fontane related his troubles to the Don, he started sobbing and buried his face in his hands.
What happened next is one of the greatest moments in improv acting, courtesy of Marlon Brando.
The slap Brando made up on the spot, and it makes the whole scene by driving home just what a pathetic creature Fontane had allowed himself to become — and in the presence of his own godfather.
So who is going to slap — figuratively, I would hope — a little manliness into Chris “Fontane” Cillizza?
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