October 25 - Severance

Glenn was there.
So were Bill, Rush, Sean, and Ann.
Michael, too.
And Keith, Rachel, and others.
All of them were gathered around a mammoth dining room table where they had just devoured a lavish feast. The food was almost impossibly delicious, and the conversation was certainly impossibly uncivil.
Collectively, they were the most self-righteous, opinionated, arrogant blowhards the mainstream media was capable of producing. Divisive, self-serving, polarizing, and hypocritical to a truly unbelievable degree. Taken individually, they were insufferable. But put them in a room together, and it was living hell: bickering, pontificating, preaching, tuning out everything else, willfully turning a blind eye to anything that didn't gibe with their obscenely skewed, biased, and never-in-doubt conclusions and ready to pounce at a moment's notice on anyone who dared to see any issue at all in a different light. They argued and berated each other like verbal pit bulls on PCP. It had been going on for hours.
Their host loved it.
At last he, their host, stood up and tapped his fork against his wine glass, and the room fell silent. As soon as he had their full attention, he began to speak.
"First off, I want to thank all of you for coming here tonight. I can't tell you how great it is to finally have all of you together in one room. It's amazing that everyone's busy schedules allowed for this evening. Ever since I started dabbling in media all those years ago, I've dreamt of a moment like this when I would have so much raw talent together in one place. It's really amazing."
He began walking around the table.
"Now, I'm sure you're all wondering why I called you here tonight. Sorry, I've always wanted to say that."
Everyone laughed warmly if not mechanically.
"No, but seriously, I called you here tonight for two reasons. The first of which is that I wanted to extend my most sincere and heartfelt thanks and gratitude for all the work you have done through the years both individually and collectively. Because of your tireless efforts, the level of political discourse in the United States is at an all-time low. You've taken all the context, nuance, and texture out of every issue and replaced it with simple 'us versus them' dichotomies and fear mongering of the most egregious magnitude. You've oversimplified everything to such a degree that wide, wide, wide swaths of the population have replaced actually taking the time to think about things themselves with belching out whatever spurious conclusions you've come up with to support your raging anti-(fill in the blank) bias. People are no longer waiting until all the facts are in before carefully considering different angles of issues. Instead, they're reacting! They're overreacting! They're leaping to judgement at a moment's notice. They're embracing their differences and denying their similarities, and it's all thanks to you. Because of you, every issue has been reduced to populist slogans, petty and insubstantial accusations, gross manipulations of information to fit a particular agenda, crass scapegoating, undisguised hypocrisy, and utter pigheadedness. Ladies and gentlemen, I couldn't be happier with what you have accomplished."
Everyone at the table looked around, pleased with themselves.
Their host's tone shifted a bit as he continued.
"And that brings me to my second reason for calling you here tonight, which is to tell you that, well, frankly, I've grown bored of it all."
Everyone shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
"And so, effective immediately, I'm nullifying all your contracts."
The table exploded in outrage, and the host waved them off.
"I know, I know. You're going to sue, you're going to get on your phones right this moment with your agents, your lawyers, and blah, blah, blah."
The room calmed down.
"You're not going to do any such thing. And even if you were, you wouldn't get anywhere. You can't even begin to imagine the legal team I have at my disposal."
They slumped in their chairs in resignation, and their host continued.
"However, I am nothing if not sporting, and so I've decided to put together a little contest, the winner of which gets to keep his or her contract."
His guests leaned forward, waiting for him to go on.
"It's pretty simple, really: Battle Royale. Anything goes. No holds barred. The last person standing gets to keep his/her contract. Everybody else? I'll be seeing you again, well, soon enough"
He looked over the faces at the table.
"We understand each other?"
Keith and Bill indicated that they did by stabbing each other in the throat, and everybody else immediately followed suit. Ann and Rachel pounced on each other like rabid hyenas. Glenn, tears of rage in his eyes, attacked everything in his vicinity. Rush and Michael grappled with each other, but neither of them could get any traction because of their collective size. Sean jumped on top of the table and started throwing plates and cutlery at everyone in sight.
The chaotic melee stretched past the five minute mark.
Little by little, people were eliminated. Ann and Rachel crashed through the plate glass window and plummeted to the ground several stories below. Glenn and Sean skewered each other with shish kebabs.
Finally, only Rush and Michael remained, and it looked like Michael had the upper hand, gripping Rush in a stranglehold. But Rush squirmed out of it, grabbed an American flag from the corner, and impaled him with the flagpole, punctuating it with a breathless, "Die, you traitorous sicko!"
He had done it. Rush was the last man standing. He stood smiling, red faced, drenched with sweat, ready to do whatever his host asked.
His host dispensed with him with an index finger pointed at his heart, and he was dead before he hit the ground.
The host then told the help to tidy up the mess, grabbed an unfinished bottle of red, and started thinking about what he would do next to mess with humankind.