On the ending of Cobert's Late Night

Eleven years of holding the powerful to account in his monologues lambasting the felon president and his goon squad, the finale exceded expectations. Stephen won’t be off screen for long, I hope. I’m already looking forward to the new Tolkien movie he’s writing; he may even have a role in it given his continuous asides to the audience and camera, ‘really an actor’.

So one more good thing killed by joyless Trump and the greedy tech/media oligarchs, Larry and sonny-boy David Ellison.

I wish I had a Paramount subscription I could cancel.

But the brilliant final scene by Colbert reminded me of Chekhov’s story, “The Death of a Government Clerk” (the-death-of-a-government-clerk.pdf). Time after time, minor beaurocrat Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov makes tragicomic advances to a general (Brizzhalov) to secure a formal pardon for sneezing on him at the opera. The general brushes him aside, “let me listen!” Ivan makes more attempts, even the day after, and several days after to make a proper apology.

The culminating scene is the general shouting at him, “Go away!” which sends him, literally, into a death spiral, staggering down the streets, tripping, collapsing, and drawing a final breath.

Chekhov is poking fun at “the little man” syndrome common in 19th-century Russian literature. Tchervyakov doesn’t die of a disease or political execution; he literally dies from a lack of structural permission to stop apologizing.

CBS caved, law firms caved, Tech giants caved. Colbert instead has the entire CBS building sucked into a green vortex, shrunk, and put into a snow globe, which his dog is sniffing at until called away by Colbert’s voice.

The people left in that building are very small people.