Tag Archives: Reality TV

Hillary may be the presumptive head of the US empire but Trump is its asshole

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Hillary may be the presumptive head of the US empire but Trump is its asshole

Billionaire reality TV villain Donald Trump is bringing his presidential candidacy roadshow to Denver JULY 1ST. Like the rhetoric of the Westboro Baptist Church, Trump’s utterances don’t warrant rebuttal. But unlike the lone Fred Phelps family espousing their gutteral homophobia, The Donald has followers. Some see Trump as an underdog challenging the empire’s vetted candidate. Some may be provocateurs staining his campaign with violence. What is certain however is that popular enthusiasm for Trump echoes his hate speech and dumbfuckery. If zenophobic bigotry congeals into a white power movement, that’s the specter of fascism that begs a swift preemptive beatdown. Trump can tramp his celebration of brute ignorance wherever he wants, it’s a free country, but local communities need not welcome his fan base aping the white thug’s antisocial behavior.
 
Friday July 1. Western Conservative Summit, Colorado Conventional Center, Denver. Be there!

Is Palin writing for SNL or vice versa? Who are this election’s screenwriters?

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Remember when Sarah Palin gave her infamous 2008 Katie Couric interview? Palin’s disordered responses were so Miss Teen Carolina that Saturday Night Live writers didn’t have to wring out a parody. Instead Tina Fey brought down the house by repeating Palin’s folksy schtick verbatim. Essentially SNL added a laugh track. Every week the entire country tuned in to SNL in anticipation of Fey’s mimicry act. Eight years later Palin has come out of the wood paneling to endorse fellow freak Donald Trump. Immediately everyone is salivating for the SNL instant replay. Hmm.

It seems Sarah Palin has reprised her role as fount of Ugly Americanisms and I have to wonder. Maybe SNL’s humorists hadn’t caught a break after all. Maybe they had been hard at work in preproduction. Working on Sarah Palin as season pilot. Gag writers didn’t have to write a Palin parody because they drafted the original jokes.

We like to think of our comedians as authors of their own brilliant wit, yet we know their TV talk shows employ gaggles of writers. It’s true from Comedy Central to the Tonight Show. Why do we give a village idiot like Sarah Palin credit for her seamlessly funny imbecility?

Or Donald Trump for that matter? Trump has yet to miss a single sour note or plumb an inoffensive punchline with his every gutterance.

If we recognize the American two party system and its lesser of bogeymen false choice as an unchanging melodrama, we must consider the show has its screenwriters. Palin and Trump and Hillary and Bernie are reciting lines already tested on focus groups, seasoned to our taste, to manufacture consent for political continuity.

And how about casting directors? Somebody is deciding who gets the screentime. Why is anyone asking Sarah Palin’s opinion about Trump or anything for that matter. What qualifies Palin to opine at all? She’s been neither public figure, candidate, governor, nor mayor of Alaska’s meth capitol, since she came and went two elections cycles ago.

Political kingmaking is frequently attenuated by media gatekeepers but clearly the casting decisions they make are based on viewership ratings.

If there’s a show with cast and crew, there’s a showrunner. Elsewhere in TV-land the spotlights is regularly turned on them. I’m not talking about campaign managers or party heads, they are the stage managers or Don Pardos at best. Showrunners are the real auteurs, if that word doesn’t lend excessive dignity to their oeuvre, which is crap.

Team Obama 2008 won advertizing’s most prestegious award for that brand’s successful campaign. The Cleo is an industry award, generally outside the public’s viewshed. Of course the awards should have been Emmys.

If you want to see the real wits behind the scenes, it’s time to unmask the twits. Exile them to Reality TV where they belong. Let us accept or reject the showrunners if you’re going to pretend this is a democracy.

If you are not scared by GOP debates you are not drinking enough Koolaid.

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After last night’s televised Republican candidate debate there followed emails which begin: “if that didn’t scare you, consider this”, etc. Well, guess what? You’re supposed to be scared! You’re supposed to worry that any of a lineup of numbskulled fundamentalist zealots will appoint more Justice Scalias to the Supreme Court. You’re supposed to worry that a racist hatemonger will lead the nation to unbriddled fascism. You’re supposed to be so unsettled at the lowness of America’s common denominator that you’ll elect ANYONE to divert your handbasket going to Hades. Even, God forbid, that unscrupulous Hillary.

You think Trump’s supporters are stupid? Look at the idiot the election show-runners are taking you for! Reality TV couldn’t script a more preposterous baffoon than Donald Trump. And he has followers in spite of his irrational carrying-on. Trump’s appeal isn’t owed to his outragious zenophobia or simpleton populism. Those play to the average liberal’s fears. Trump grows more popular the more the corporate media opposes him.

If ever there might be a Washington outsider to slay the oligarchs, it’s Herr Trump the uber oligarch! A village idiot spews more truth than entrenched bureaucrats. Trump’s act is still electoral Kabuki, but in the linear realm of possibilities, the smart voters are going for the longshot because the authorized contenders offer nothing. So how is this for scary: Trump fans are smarter than you! Calm down, it’s not by much.

Vanity Fair cover spotlights a gender trait Caitlyn Jenner didn’t nip or tuck: male privilege.

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Thank you Bruce now Caitlyn Jenner for stepping up to be an olympian standard-bearer to assail the stigma of gender dysphoria. Caitlyn’s reveal on the cover of Vanity Fair is a triumph, for transexuals and, one might hope, “women of a certain age”. But that it certainly is not. Caitlyn owes her magazine cover to her celebrity power of course, to sensationalism, and above all to her male privilege.

And there we have the distinction feminists have long drawn between their struggle and that of man-made women. It’s not about whose struggle is greater. But it’s not the same struggle.

As a woman, Jenner now faces every traditional gender disadvantage except obviously the wage gap. With another exception. If you doubt that Caityn Jenner has yet to shed her alter ego’s male privilege, ask yourself when was the last time Vanity Fair put a 65 year old woman on their cover, wearing a bunny suit? Not that female celebrities even twenty years younger would likely consent to being presented as corseted sexpots.

Jenner claimed in her interview that she is asexual, maybe to un-complicate the anticipated male gaze. Or maybe that’s one hurdle too far for our reality-phobic media which needs to repress sex to sell it.

So Vanity Fair couldn’t help but sexualize the cover, but it leaves viewers with nothing to glean but narcissism. Can we fail to feel in Jenner’s gaze, the arrogance of a conquerer? That’s not an attribute exclusive to masculinity, but Jenner’s comes of privilege.

The Wheaties box superhuman decathlete had her beefcake and now she intends to eat it. No one says a trans feminine must be a shrinking violet, but the public reaction has been to coddle Jenner for her courageous act, though it seems clearly an act. When Jenner came out in April, she predicted a “wild ride”. What the audience took for trepidation was really an artful teaser for the magazine cover and the reality TV specials already in the works. Jenner’s Caitlyn races dirt track thrillcraft. Earlier this year she rear-ended a fellow Malibu driver. Jenner’s SUV fatally bumped the woman into oncoming traffic on PCH.

Forty years ago Bruce Jenner defined the hyper-masculine, now Caitlyn claims the impossibly feminine. I see a craftily Botoxed siren and I’m not sure how our culture is served to efface age and gender, especially as human beings, more fragile than we know, yearn to catch on magazine covers authentic reflections of themselves.

Okay, best thing to come out of this? #MyVanityFairCover

Can Chris Christie pretend he doesn’t know MOTIVE for extorting Fort Lee?

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Commenting on televised politics is as meaningless as speculating about developments on reality TV. Since the Christie bridge debacle purports to effect which presidential candidate gets voted off the island, it might be worth at least delving where the talking heads are not. Of course Chris Christie’s office engineered plausible deniability for their boss with the bridge blocking scheme, but Christie would certainly know WHY pressure was being brought to bear on Fort Lee. Christie’s lack of curiosity on the matter betrays an untruth. If his mea-non-culpa had digressed to speculate about a motive, he would have exposed himself to being caught lying.
 
Was the Washington Bridge closure in retribution for the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, not giving his endorsement? Was it retribution for a Democratic senator obstructing the state legislature? Retribution does seem petty. I think there’s a stronger likelihood this was not retribution, but extortion, about a yet unmentioned political goal. Especially as Sokolich professes not to know why the governor’s office acted why it did. What would be the point of retaliating if your mark didn’t know why? A second clue is that now the mayor has accepted governor Christie’s apology, still without asking why. When Christie’s chief of staff emailed “It’s time” to disrupt the traffic in Fort Lee, it’s unlikely any of the players were in the dark about what that time was.

Rogue vigilante Chris Dorner burned at the stake by angry hooded white men

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Tuning in to developments with fugitive cop-killer Chris Dorner in Big Bear on Tuesday, I half expected a televised denouement like Fahrenheit 451, where impatient viewers were given a contrived final scene, fitting the short arc of the average attention span for corporate media fodder. As I recall, that renegade fireman watched his pursuers stage his capture/demise, because authorities favored truncating a felon-on-the-lam narrative lest it generate a deviant hopeful following; it didn’t matter if the criminal really escaped. Could Ray Bradbury have envisioned the expectations which reality TV has created to satiate real blood lust?

No doubt Bradbury foresaw the ferocity with which a vengeful police state would immolate their one-man insurgent, with a compliant media averting their cameras so American viewers didn’t witness another Waco.

Americans should be attuned to these out of sight infernos, all our wars for example. Except that we know Dorner was set aflame with an paramilitary incendiary device dubbed “the burner”, this is what our extrajudicial executions look like via drones. Only last week news junkies were treated to the legal argument which the USG made to justify killing untried suspects, even US citizens. A if international law differentiated among infidels. One man’s infidel may be another’s exemplar, but he’s every government’s infidel.

So Chris Dorner had snapped. His manifesto, rambling only as much as those were his parting words, Dorner a Falling Down avenger who knew there would be no Hollywood ending. But Dorner had bought into the Rambo Army-of-One mythology. No disrespect intended toward Dorner’s feat, but elite military training proved more of a dud than a fighting machine, did it? What a laugh that American forces deign to train Afghan recruits. Any one mujahideen is likely the equivalent of a high-capacity magazine clip of US special forces in their underwear. But it’s likely authorities will never reveal Dorner’s actual superhuman achievement. He knew what he was up against, and now so do we. The crooked police machine has proven to be worse than Dorner’s complaints. Perhaps that was meant to be the audience takeaway. We didn’t get to see Chris Dorner burn at the stake, but we sure as hell felt the heat.

Louisiana Lockdown – What is Angola Prison doing on Animal Planet TV?

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Good ol’ boys probably think it’s mighty funny parading Angola’s black prisoners across the teevee, at the whim of an all-white Reality TV corrections officer caste. Inmates are portrayed like the channel’s animal kingdom predators, dangerous and unpredictable, but what misconduct is feared, the program doesn’t dare tell. For being menacing recidivists, Angola’s felons lead the life of choirboys apparently, no mention of the sexual slavery reported in a notorious memoir. What’s the HIV transmission rate in Angola? No one’s talking about racism. Was “Angola” named for its African population? We’ve already learned “The Farm” is an immense rural labor camp with a famous gladiatorial rodeo. Hopefully “Louisiana Lockdown” will disclose the reality side of its genre. Until then, the watchdog group most familiar with the mistreatment of Angola’s inmates is the humane society.

Behind the screen with Sea Shepherd

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Behind the screen with Sea Shepherd

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society Captain Pete Bethune takes aim at Japanese whalersYou have to wonder where nonviolence would get activists on the high seas. Whales can be grateful the Sea Shepherd Society heros don’t opt to sacrifice the whales to save them. Captain Paul Watson is visiting Colorado College tomorrow to elaborate, but I have no illusion he’s at liberty to detail his provocative strategies. First off, he can’t spoil the upcoming TV season of Whale Wars and second, doesn’t playing for the media really turn on illusion?

Sea Shepherd’s fight to defend whales scored big when the cameramen began to film their adventures for the Animal Planet network. Even for veteran activists the reality TV format has necessitated they take some stage direction, and meant that the documentary lens presuming to take viewers behind the scenes, created a layer behind that one.

For example, look at the action shot at the top right, where a Sea Shepherd inflatable comes in close to harass a whaling ship. Everyone is helmeted and goggled, except leading man Pete Bethune aiming his stink bomb launcher as the camera focuses in. He doesn’t even have gloves or the bulkier dry-suit of his comrades. Are we to imagine protection from the Japanese water cannons is optional? Obviously adventuring with a script requires taking greater risks to get more drama in the shot. I’m contemplating now about the controversy surrounding the ramming of the Ady Gil. It was certainly dramatic.

When I went to check out one of two Whale Wars DVDs at my public library, I discovered a waiting list fourteen borrowers long. Certainly Sea Shepherd got its money worth from the sinking of the Ady Gil, whether by accident or not. After the collision the whale warriors demanded the Japanese whalers be charged with attempted murder. There could have been casualties, if anyone had been below deck. Skeptics suspect the Ady Gil’s helmsman sneaked his bow into harm’s way. How will we ever know?

By all appearances the Ady Gil was coasting slowly, all hands on deck, when the Japanese ship suddenly turned on her. Unseen might have been a quick lunge to intersect with the whaler’s bow. It’s hard to tell from the footage, taken from just the right angle by the Bob Barker coasting nearby. The Ady Gil was an innovative speed boat designed to pierce waves, not ride them, and could well disguise a last forward thrust.

I don’t think Paul Watson is about to fess up.

The third season of Whale Wars promises to reveal what happened behind the scenes, at Sea Shepherd, because they don’t have cameras following the Japanese fleet. And I think we’re going to see where reality television hits the wall. Whale Wars is not documentary filmmaking, it’s advocacy and drama. I love it, and I’d like to see more of it.

I’m not such a kill-joy to say that fashioning 43-minute long narratives prevents telling the truth. But I suspect filming the whaling renegades is something akin to televised poker, pretending to film behind the dark glasses. After seasons of strategies and bluffs, some inferred, some revealed, Watson and co now have to play close to the chest, and certainly must never been seen by their adversaries to have something up their sleeve.

I already lament the distance which official history keeps in relation to historical truth. What really happened, the story of mankind, is reserved for the student with no whale in the race.

Sarah Palin dons lipstick for Dog Dinner

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Sarah Palin dons lipstick for Dog Dinner

Sarah Palin with lipstick
She’s got a book tour, so what? But Oprah is willing to suffer her for two couch sessions, now Hillary Clinton wants to grant her a beer summit. Foreign leaders can’t get an audience without preconditions. Why is Sarah Palin accorded such stature?

David Letterman protested his contractual obligation to feature reality TV “Survivor” contestants on Late Night. He made them stand at the edge of the stage, at audience level, instead of joining him on the furniture reserved for celebrities and real people lifted from the news. But Letterman’s rejection of the contrived importance of the Survivor casts worked against him. The television audience grown fond of the individual contestants tuned in to see their moment in the spotlight with the king of late night, and felt intimately slighted themselves by Letterman’s haughtiness.

Maybe it’s a lesson the Dem powerbrokers don’t want to relive with John McCain’s last mate from tribe GOP. With the media able to make it all Sarah, all the time, who is the Obama administration to pretend Sarah Palin is just a hockey mom in lipstick –or was it a dog– I’m surprised to have forgotten the distinction.

Actually the distinction is the difference between Sarah Palin being champion idiot at a Dinner Game, or the winner’s date at a Dog Dinner.

I know what they’re doing, and it’s every bit as gruesome as parading the circus freaks. And worse. Those Palin supporters who are also railing at the loss of whatever it was the Constitution meant to them, are going to be proved right.

Of course it depends whether you think Sarah Palin ever had a chance in 2008, or whether she has any viability in 2012. I’m inclined to think not. And I’m pretty sure that’s the consensus of those eagerly pandering to Palin’s political aspirations.

Palin makes an ideal straw candidate. She is who the people want, by “the people” I mean of course, the sans culottes. What’s the new equivalent — the American ill-dressed? Palin appeals to all variety of voters who think politics need a shot of authenticity, whatever. And she hasn’t got a chance, she couldn’t even squeeze a middle school education between now and the start of a 2012 campaign. For the coup de grace, Palin’s character assassins could parade freak two, Levi Johnston, to drop a second shoe.

There’s everything to gain by floating Palin’s balloon, because you prevent opponents from materializing a real one. By all means, inflate Palin’s ego, and let her people’s hopes take flight. Blow, blow, the sky’s the limit.

This is the American two party system at its most efficient. It’s Billie Jean Kings versus Bobby Riggs, all show. Unlike King who only reluctantly agreed to the Battle of the Sexes with the aging baffoon, the Democrats are courting their challenger. The closer she can bring her big mug into camera frame, the bigger the money the Dems can draw from those staking odds.

It’s good for Las Vegas, it’s good for the Dems, it’s good for those who think the Democrats are better then the Repugs, but it’s curtains for democracy.

Falcon Heene is going to be a star

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Falcon Heene is going to be a star

Colorado balloon boyThe Heene family takes the high road, pleading guilty to false reporting, to the surprise I’m sure of the poor-parazzi planting their tent stakes for a courtroom circus feeding frenzy. For his parents stepping up to tell the truth, Balloon Boy is going to emerge a hero, even at school. Who can fault the Heenes for taking the predatory media for a ride? They entertained, they became the butt of jokes, but they harmed no one and exposed the television media’s thinning credibility. The media is showing its vindictiveness, by explaining that the guilty plea was made to avoid Mrs. Heene’s deportation, but parents know this decision was about the kids, and I predict the Heene family’s star will rise. The media may never forgive them, but it’s too competitive to pass on this enterprising bunch.

How culpable was the media? There was not a single possibility that a child was being carried aloft by that mylar balloon. The media willfully played along and knew the story’s unraveling would make for even better ratings.

The prevailing opinion has it that the Heene parents committed an obvious error in judgment to plan this fraud and make the children their accomplices. I’d even agree. But in today’s scheme of things, isn’t seeking fortune and fame a matter of calculating what you have to compromise? It’s too early for mere television viewers to know if the Heenes actually miscalculated. Lots of ordinary people have launched themselves into the celebrity firmament on gambits which would embarrass the rest of us.

Was the Heene gambit much worse than taking your family to sail around the world, or any other foolhardy adventure? They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind. In this godless age, that is no longer a warning. It’s become an adage to define the fast track for social climbers.

We can second guess to what risks parents should or shouldn’t expose their children, but I don’t know who can say that a grab at the brass ring is ultimately out of bounds.

The fraudulent child-abducted-by-balloon story could almost pass for tongue-in-cheek, really. Just how stupid are the reporters and law enforcement? If you called them to complain of an elephant stuck in your toilet, and they came, my first thought is not going to be to accuse you of fraud.

I don’t care how many search and rescue emergency vehicles were expended on the balloon chase. They’re salaried, and the fuel and equipment hours can be expensed as training exercise. Giving chase is what those personnel are for.

I’m much more concerned about the media teams, fully prepared to build media events from fabricated premises. But it’s what they do with the big stories, like war, and politics. Balloon Boy exposed it.

The Famous Oprah Video punks who?

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The Famous Oprah Video punks who?

Oprah famous video black eyed peas good day
You find it by searching for FAMOUS + OPRAH + VIDEO. Because hyperbole arcs the hyperlink. Allegedly, the viral clip is being removed as fast as websites are putting it up. I’ll bet the reason would have more to do with James Frey and Augusten Burroughs baldfaced disingenuity than copyright infringement or Oprah being embarrassed by pedestrian plagiarism. The performance by the Black Eyed Peas, taped live in downtown Chicago for the 24th season of Oprah’s talk show, purports to ignite a spontaneous dance, to Oprah’s joyful astonishment. While the video may be a crowd-pleaser, it certifies corporate music’s lack of originality, and the American TV tube’s despicable boobness.

The jubilant TODAY’S GONNA BE A GOOD DAY scenario borrows of course from the T-mobile commercial featuring a dance production taped at a Liverpool train station, set to a medley of powerhouse dance numbers. At first fellow commuters are surprised. By the end we realize the entirety has been choreographed. Youtube viewers would recognize the contrivance from the Belgian train station scene, where ordinary commuters begin dancing to a favorite song from The Sound of Music, until the whole crowd is participating.

Is dance so highly infectious? There’s something people really love about seeing that theme play out. It gives viewers warm fuzzy feelings having to do with belonging to community. There’s nothing wrong with the Black Eyed Peas wanting to reap that same enthusiasm for their pretend live video. Who holds it against pop to imitate from anything?

Their job of commercial entertainment is to popularize, and an Antwerp central station is hardly a setting familiar to Americans. Better a live concert audience, youthful, outside, wearing the usual panoply of Disney colors, living in the moment, attached to no context of exterior lives, a high school musical on a sunny day, reality TV on vivid.

Both predecessors feature onlookers who stare transfixed, some calling friends on their cellphones, others recording what they see. In both sequences, often those standing on the periphery turn out also to be participants, eventually joining in the dance.

In Oprah’s version, she is the lone spectator, watching incredulous from onstage. Like the train station commuters, she holds a cellphone aloft, eager to record the dance epidemic as it spreads throughout her “audience.” Apparently, it’s not enough today to drop your jaw to show surprise, you have to pull out your camera to show how you know when seeing defies believing. What, is Oprah going to Youtube it? Would her television audience worry that the impromptu dance was going to pass without someone recording it for posterity?

Oprah’s spontaneous wonder may have passed for genuine before a television audience who didn’t see the dance coming, but on the instant replay, how will Oprah’s act play? Are we to believe she didn’t know about the Christo scale choreographed event? If the stunt had been planned as a surprise, do you suppose Oprah wouldn’t have noticed her audience was suddenly uniformly younger and more fit, wearing uniformly bright colors evenly distributed across the monitor screens. Failing that, do you imagine someone as skilled as Oprah at communicating with peoples en masse, wouldn’t detect that this audience had something up its sleeve? It’s probably no false flattery to brag that Chicago is not big enough for Oprah and a surprise party of thousands, without invitations coming across her desk.

The Black Eyed Peas dance bomb may have made wonderful television, and it might have been even better if Oprah had winked instead of gasped. Because now the scene is simply contrived. To watch it in hindsight, as has become the norm for television in the Youtube age, there’s Oprah punking us all.

CNN did it with Balloon Boy, FOX does it for politics, and the rest do it for the war: false concern, contrived conclusions. American media nourishes with falsity. Musicians lip-sinc, Yo-Yo Ma faked his performance at the inauguration, as we learned all instrumentalists do in cold weather.

Balloon Boy parents know Must See TV

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Balloon Boy parents know Must See TV

balloonboy falcon ft collins colorado
In defense of Balloon Boy’s parents not looking too hard for him in the garage, can you imagine their eyes weren’t riveted like everyone’s on the television images of the soaring balloon? The spectacle was not a mere stray weather balloon, but a 6-year-old aeronaut aloft. Theirs.
If viewers have cause to suspect a hoax, it’s the corporate news and whatever their owners/sponsors would rather us not be pointing at.

Of course little Falcon Heene’s prime-time onscreen debriefing revealed he’d concealed himself, or wasn’t answering his parent’s calls, or thought his parents might have been play-acting, “for the show.” No doubt taping two episodes of reality TV for “Swapping Wives” had taught the Heene household about stage-managed reality. I can imagine there were lots of scenes where the kids had to learn to stay out of the shot until the cameras were ready for their closeup.

America, this is reality TV, the play at home game.

Perhaps we’ll learn later if network producers were in the house today making sure their footage, the entirety of it, from action to personal interest, would make good television. Little Falcon grinning from under a box in the garage would render the aerial footage about nothing but a runaway Chipotle float. A child’s escaped balloon is something you see everyday at the state fair, hardly TV Worth Watching. Not to mention the anti-climax for the rescue posse chasing on the ground for the big payoff reveal, the Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault on a barren Eastern Colorado field.

I find it hard to believe, actually, that Falcon’s father, couldn’t tell at a glance whether his helium borne backyard project was carrying the significant extra weight of a child. That was no UFO to the balloon’s engineer, who’d have to have noticed if ballast had been dropped at the takeoff point to compensate for a supposed passenger.

Similarly, police helicopters are equipped with infrared sensors which would have revealed immediately if a human body was aboard. The entire media distraction was a fabrication.

Judging a book by an unflattering cover

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Judging a book by an unflattering cover

Illustrator George Booth cartoon character with catsBritain’s Got Talent, Simon Cowell’s UK precursor to American Idol, is pulling another Paul Potts out of its hat, flying in the face of its own conventional wisdom that only attractive people could possibly have talent. This time, straight out of a George Booth cartoon, she’s “never been kissed” (never had a boyfriend, job, etc), climbed out from under a rock we’re supposed to believe, Susan Boyle.

You might well ask, how otherwise would un-pop-culturish faces get a hearing? I share in Mr. Potts and Ms. Boyle’s triumph, but the feigned incredulity of the celebrity judges mocks us all.

Do you remember Paul Potts, the jagged-toothed mobile phone salesman who wound up singing like Mario Lanza? You can see it replayed on Youtube still, the smiling junior Fudd, patiently bearing the judges’ smirky condescension until he had the chance to give them pause.

Susan Boyle on 2009 Britains Got TalentThis year it was Susan Boyle’s turn, already 20 million views online. To her credit, or her handlers, Ms. Boyle doesn’t wait on the stage with the air of a sanitarium orderly for her turn to turn the tables. She antes up a feisty personality, impossibly self-confident by the audience’s pre-judgment. Until…

Are we supposed to believe that neither Simon Cowell nor the other judges anticipated how a face that could have scuttled a thousand ships, would have made it past the preliminary call-backs without something up its sleeve? Or that Ms. Boyle’s notoriety might not have preceded her. A voice like that is not untrained. She was already a star in her local church. It’s hard to imagine that her village neighbors hadn’t arrived by the lorry load for their 47-year-old protege’s television debut.

Tenor Paul Potts on Britains Got TalentLikewise, Paul Potts was already a traveled tenor before his performance on Britain’s Got Talent. Noted control freak Simon Cowell is probably the Idol/Talent antagonist delivering the real virtuoso acting on those shows. Pretend or not, his reality TV magic does leave viewers with a sense of enrichment.

So are we chastened by coming face to face with our predisposition to low expectations for our common looking peers? The Potts and Boyle moments purport to provide transformational climaxes, but I’m unconvinced. I believe rather we are still laughing at the fool, and reinforcing our media’s quite artificial prejudice against ordinary people. Social classes used to be distinguishable in a person’s face. America’s melting pot, and to a degree, democracy’s march across the world, may have blended the clues we are accustomed to finding in bone structure, eye color and posture. It looks to me like Western media is determined to bring eugenics back, the dividing line being the red carpet.

American Idol
I remember reading not long ago a culture magazine blogger expressing surprise that an unknown contestant had advanced past the Idol favorites. I wondered: there are such things as known Idol participants? There’s already a distinction between reality TV and celebrity reality TV, now there are pre-Idol idols?