SHEPARD SMITH: You’re live on FOX News Channel, what are you doing?
MAN: Walking my dogs.
SMITH: Why are you still here? I’m just curious.
MAN: None of your fucking business.
SMITH: Oh that was a good answer, wasn’t it? That was live on international television. Thanks so much for that. You know we apologize.
Heart of Darkness - I doubt that any random passerbys would dare swear at FOX's Shepard Smith now
Dressed now in the faded, bloodcaked fatigues he took off a National Guardsman he’d found beaten to death in the Treme St corridor, FOXNews’ Shepard Smith stands motionless before the listing skeletal remains of what was once a Best Western on Rampart St, his head shaved clean, jaw stiff, chin ticked slightly upward and pointing toward the on-camera spot his crew is using to augment the firelight from fifteen or so torches held by a gang of lumbering, topless refugees the sunburned anchor rounded up earlier from the wreckage of the Iberville projects.
On either side of him, a series of staggered, 8 foot-to-10 foot pikes fashioned from driftwood and stretches of gothic metal gatework salvaged from the standing water, hold the wide-eyed heads of a CNN camera crew and a couple of photogs from the Associated Press—“errand boys,” Smith tells the camera’s blinking red eye, “sent to by grocery clerks to collect my Pulitzer.” In his left hand, he holds a microphone, the handle covered in a thick, stringy gore. In his right hand, he fingers a piece of sharpened aluminum raingutter, folded into a blade and snipped at regular intervals to form a kind of makeshift serrated edge, itself coated in a viscous paste of blood and tendon and spinal fluid.
As the camera zooms in, Smith doesn’t speak. Instead, he holds the blade aloft to gather the camera’s focus, where it lingers for several seconds.
“That’s hell fire, man,” his producer says off camera. “That’s purity. That’s where God is now, man. Today, this very instant—in the teeth of that blade. And these—these are his Isaacs”—at which point the camera jerks left momentarily before pulling out to focus on the grisly severed heads that frame the serene-looking Smith like a cadre of mildly confused gargoyles.
“Shepard, man. The Shepherd, you dig?” The producers voice is lilting but quick, picking up cadence until it settles into sing song. “He is our Abraham, man, our Yahweh. The angels have spoken to him, you see?—and he, he has obeyed --”
-- And then the satellite image, like most all of New Orleans, goes dark. |
