Tucker Carlson On Fame

"Hardest of all to get used to, though, was the loss of anonymity in public. Working in television is like having your picture in the Post office. People you've never seen before know what you look like.

"I didn't fully comprehend the consequences of this until I flew to Italy for a friends wedding. Thanks to bad weather I wound up spending quite a bit of time in the Paris airport. One beer led to another, and by the time I boarded the flight to Florence, I'd definitely been drinking. I wasn't embarrassingly wino drunk, though I was dirty and unshaven. I was, however, impared enough not to notice that there was a large Moroccan man seated between me and the aisle.

"Not long after takeoff, I had to go to the bathroom fairly desperately. (Savvy travellers, I've since learned, don't drink four liters of beer before getting on airplanes). By this time, the Moroccan guy was asleep, completely passed out and snoring. Rather than wake him I decided to climb over his seat. Stepping from one armrest to the other, I made it successfully.

"I had no such luck on my way back. Years later I convinced myself that the plane had turbulence just as I was standing over the sleeping man. I'll never know for sure. I do know that somehow I lost my balance and wound up falling knees-first into his lap.

"He woke up screaming. I didn't understand the precise meaning of his words, but I got the general point. He yelled in the intercontinental language of pain, fear and confusion. I tried to apologize, but this seemed to make him more agitated.

"He didn't stop shouting until I got off his lap, which wasn't easy. It was a loud moment.

"But not so loud I couldn't hear my own name spoken in a stage whisper from three rows back. It was a group of American tourists. They were staring at me. "That's definitely him," said one. "I saw him on CNN last week."

Tucker Carlson, Politics, Partisans and Parasites.