American Idol As The Best Regime
Timothy Sandefur on May 25th 2006
I was an American Idol skeptic for a long time; anything that popular, I thought, must be lousy. But the fact is, as Brian Kennedy says, that this show is a marvelous celebration of American joy, uniqueness, commercial enterprise, and fun. The show conveys a wonderful sense of life—even the parts where they bash the bad contestants are done in a good spirit: the audience doesn’t get the idea that these are bad people who ought to be ashamed; rather, the audience shares in the feeling that we’re all not-very-good shower-stall singers, and yet we sing anyway because we enjoy it. It’s not considered very sophisticated today to relish something that’s “wholesome,” but the fact is that wholesomeness is a crucial part of the good life. The soul can be polluted and strained just as much as the body, and to have an opportunity simply to celebrate singing, and the success of undiscovered talent, is a luxury that many people never really enjoy to such a degree.
Moreover, American Idol is a rebuke to those silly “crunchy conservatives” who insist that modern technology and mass production denigrates community, and so forth—in T.S. Eliot’s idiotic words, “The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.” But that’s not true! The community has all joined in on this wholesome, fun, harmless moment to celebrate opportunity, singing, and lightheartedness. What could be more American than that? Lightheartedness is, I think, a profound and incredibly rare value, and one which our country has figured out how to mass produce. That may be among its greatest accomplishments ever.
Not to mention that Taylor, like, totally kicks ass.
Filed in The Bistro