American Idolatry

Keith Olbermann has regular conversations about this show, with no small amount of snark, and Joe Scarborough has to talk about it almost daily, and Larry King has serious (seriously lost his career, but I digress) discussions with them regularly as well. It's almost become its own industry.

Maybe it's just me being too serious and overmedicated. But I have some observations about this show.

There is no other show that comes to mind that is dedicated to not just ridiculing, but holding in abject contempt, people's dreams. It is destination television for the cruel among us to ridicule to the point of obvious pain. There is a coda in our society that you can't amount to anything above trash unless you're a celebrity. These people, however bad they may be, see that as their ticket out of their misery. And people watch and laugh at their attempt to bring their dreams out of the primordial muck of their existence to become that celebrity. That means there's a cruel streak running deep in our country that is really disturbing.

I hate reality television in all forms, but I admit to watching the first season of the Apprentice. There are a gazillion others; there's an entire industry borne of becoming a reality television contestant. Survivor is another popular one. However judgmental I am about these other shows, and however popular they are with the average viewer, they don't approach the disquieting pile-on of laughing at someone's dream. We all have dreams. You didn't grow up saying you were going to be a janitor, or an accountant, or a burger-flipper. You had something you wanted to do with your life. You wound up with something else to do as work, but there is a dream inside of everyone that never really left us when we left childhood.

The packaging that is done by the producers to make the really bad look *really bad* only perpetuates my point. It's just alarming to me to see how much a freak show in modern times resembles the freak show circuses that came to small towns during the depression. And no one feels shame for it.

When I was younger, I correlated the two following statements: A half a billion people watched Wheel of Fortune, and George H.W. Bush was president. Today, gazillions of people watch American Idol and laugh at people's attempts to better their lives, and we're stuck in two wars and about to enter a third. It's no coincidence.