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?

New York man to get up to 15 years jail for exercising free speech in the United States

free speech cartoonHave you ever listened to or seen Almanar tv? Check it out for 5-10 minutes and hear some news, some music, some soap operas. Almanar Tv

Sure it’s in Arabic, but at least it’s not NPR, PBS, Fox, or any of the other American military-industrial-government propaganda sources spewing out the same poison as always. Ooohhhh…. Pretty dangerous isn’t it?

Did you know that a man in New York State just got found guilty of broadcasting what you are now listening to and watching on Almara tv? That’s what the Pentagon torture, occupation, and murder crowd call ‘terrorism’! Free Speech! It must be stopped! We’re supposed to be believing all the US government lies and noise, and free speech might actually interrupt that? NY man pleads guilty to broadcasting Hezbollah TV.

So who defined free speech as ‘terrorism’, besides the US government, US courts, and US media corporate propagandists? It all started with an anti free speech coalition called The Coalition Against Terrorist Media. Had you ever, as an American, feared that supposedly horrible something defined by this group as ‘terrorist media’? That’s right! This group defines free speech as ‘terrorism’, which make this ‘coalition’ about as unAmerican as it gets!

But it goes deeper in doo-doo here, as the so-called ‘Coalition Against Terrorist Media’, despite its claim to be a coalition of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, is really nothing more than a front set up by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Get the picture yet? The defense of democracies involves the suppression of free speech, according to these Right Wingers who are actually setting current US government and legal policies.

So who is behind the so-called ‘Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’? Let’s check out SourceWatch’s entry on this group. Below is a partial list of the names of those who helped criminalize Free Speech by campaigning to have this man thrown in jail (up to 15 years) for broadcasting a TV station that is already on air in the US, Almanar tv available on internet as you did at the beginning of this commentary.

The following information was updated August 16, 2007.[4] ]Board of Directors of ‘Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’.

Steve Forbes, Board Member; CEO Forbes Magazine (site bio)
Dr. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Board Member; Former Ambassador to the UN (site bio)
Jack Kemp, Chairman Emeritus; Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (site bio)
[edit]Distinguished Advisors
Judge Louis J. Freeh, Former Director of the FBI (site bio)
R. James Woolsey, Former Director of the CIA (site bio)
Newt Gingrich, Former. Speaker of the House (site bio)
Joe Lieberman, US Senator (D-CT) (site bio)
[edit]Board of Advisors
Gary Bauer, President, American Values (site bio)
Donna Brazile, Campaign Manager Gore 2000 (site bio)
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Task Force on Terrorism Chairman (site bio)
Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), U.S. House of Representatives (site bio)
Frank Gaffney, President, Center for Security Policy (site bio)
Amb. Marc Ginsberg, Former Ambassador Morroco (site bio)
Charles Jacobs, President, American Anti-Slavery Group (site bio)
Charles Krauthammer, Syndicated Columnist (site bio)
Bill Kristol, Editor, Weekly Standard (site bio)
Hon. Richard D. Lamm, Former Colorado Governor (site bio)
Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA), U.S. House of Representatives (site bio)
Sen. Zell Miller, Former U.S. Senator (site bio)
Richard Perle, Former Chair of the Defense Policy Board and FDD Advisor (site bio)
Steven Pomerantz, Former Assistant Director FBI
Oliver “Buck” Revell, Former Associate Deputy Director FBI
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), U.S. Senate (site bio)

These people don’t defend democracies, they destroy them. Here, watch some more Almanar Tv for free Now ponder the nature of the US society where the top leaders sponsor torture of prisoners, invasions of other countries, and state terrorism around the world, yet New York businessman, Javed Iqbal, faces 15 years in jail through our government’s labelling Free Speech an act of terrorism!

Calling Obama Calling Obama! Oops, the line went dead! Did you notice how that liberals’ American idol, Al Gore, crept into the picture. His VP candidate when he ran for the White House, DP-RP Joe Lieberman, is one of of the fat cats on this list of unAmericans against free speech rights. Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be.

And notice, too, all these former top cops from the FBI and CIA defining free speech in your country as a form of terrorism. These are the real terrorists who are undermining National Security and the American right to free speech without being jailed. They hate free speech by others, and they hate democracy… PERIOD.

The Iowa horse race feeds our delusion of being a democracy with peppy pap

I Hate Iowa… no make that…. I hate the horse races, which along with America’s football fetish, are two gambling sports we should not participate in if we value our mental health. Too much steroids involved. Too much TV bullshit coming from meathead announcers and shills of all naughts. And now live from Iowa’s Cargill Stadium comes American Democracy Night! Turn it all off, for it will just rot your brain out entirely if you don’t!

Smedwards lost to Alabomba beating the Lesbian gal. Huckster in just ahead of The Mormon! This is worse than the cheerleader contests back in Junior High times. Somebody export some real democracy to us now, PLEASE. Not this Stepford thing of flesh and brain eating candidate corporatized zombies they call American Idol… I meant the American Primaries.

The Spears sisters genetic tree stump

Result of face growing around premature nose job.Dumbshell Britney Spears’ little sister is having a baby. The clan are mega millionaires, why shouldn’t they decide what they please? Clearly they’ve already decided a premature preteen nose job is fine, even if your face is going to outgrow it. Time for another!
 
Baby at sixteen. Please. A young mother in Bangladesh is on her third by sixteen. Young Indonesian tsunami survivors were starting second families by sixteen.

What does the Spears pregnancy say about American teens in general, ill-served by abstinence-only sex-ed, who are finding themselves pregnant? Most of those young mothers do not have media fortunes to fall back on and can expect basically lives of uneducated hardship. Historically, before public education, before the middle class, girls were pregnant as early as nature provided to yield the next generation of workers. Their witless beaus as well were shackled to prospect-less futures.

Appropriately enough the Spears celebrity news critics treat this development like it was a stumbled performance on American Idol. What does this mean for the profile-challenged Spears’ career? What advice can they offer to improve viewer poll reception in the next round? Will Nickelodeon dump pregnant Jamie Lynn from Zoey 101 because her figure may no longer be believed as a sixteen year old passing as a middle schooler. Oh my God. Forget about dumping the errant Bratz Doll because she presents too skewed a role model to America’s preteens.

Why are our culture deciders glamorizing White Trash?

In other Trailer Park news, a worker at a Lowes store discovers that a coworker is his biological mom who had given him up for adoption. What does that say about genetic self-determination? Even with new parents he couldn’t roll further than a mega store aisle from that tree.

Mommy, it’s not right!

All of us, of course, are very concerned about Britney and Paris, Ted and Rush. They all seem to suffer from substance abuse, and our hearts go out to them as they deal with their own private demons.

Ok, so they don’t suffer so much from private demons, but rather public ones. Still, when Ted’s makeup is wrecked by tears, and Rush shows us his crotch since he’s wearing no thong, it’s rather disconcerting to us all. So, thank God we have reporters like Professor Gary Leupp, whose The Unfair Treatment of Paris Hilton keeps us socially backward denizens of the Left informed with what’s real, and what’s not.

Let’s hope he starts up a column titled ‘SOCIETY’ to give us more regular coverage of our American Idols. We need it to help balance our unbalanced minds.