Is the American celebration of mediocrity a symptom of the looming failure of democracy or an indication of its enduring health?
Is the emerging dominance of ordinary, humdrum and limited in American entertainment, politics, education, science and medicine a tribute to freedom of speech and the rights of the individual or a sign that American Democracy is fatally flawed?
AMERICAN IDOL is a case in point. Putting aside the umcomfortable implications of the painful fact that the nation's most popular and commercially successful entertainment product is produced by the English-speaking world's most powerful and influential far right wing extremist, AMERICAN IDOL has made mediocrity both astonishingly lucrative and universally popular.
Year after year and week after week, we are led to believe that at best moderately competent singers are potential super stars and brilliant talents. It truly does boggle the mind. Sure, one can argue that AMERICAN IDOL is not a talent contest but rather a popularity contest--and perhaps that is even the point. We have come to replace brilliance and excellence as standards for success with popularity.
America no longer celebrates excellence, she now worships at the altar of the middling. We no longer look with pride and enthusiasm to men walking on the moon and cures for cancer. We now hunger for the self-deception afforded by Biblical mythology and shrill extremist pundits.
We see this play out in almost every walk of American life.
Our politics are plagued by intellectually impaired Sarah Palins and mob mentality. Those who believe in education sit quietly at home while those who believe dinosaurs roamed the earth some 6,000 years ago are now steering one of our only two viable political parties.
The Fourth Estate has been hijacked by hysterical shriekers on both the left and the right--and if one believes that freedom depends on uncensored access to factual and objective information then the mediocrity that now characterizes the American press should surely fill one with a chilly sense of fear and foreboding. FOX stands front and center, while The New York Times and PBS hang by a thread.
Major organized religions have reduced civil liberties, constitutional law and even health care reform to a morass of fear-based bans, propositions, restrictions and regulations.
At one time a global model for freedom, humanism and equality, America has now become a second rate mediocrity that at best stands as a running joke in Canada and Europe.
Mediocrity, of course, is the handmaiden of fear. In direct opposition to every other industrialized democracy--all modeled after what we once were--we fear gay Americans as a threat to family, marriage and national security; we fear a world unpoliced by an economy-crushing military empire--the largest in human history; we fear a fact-based modern educational system that would underpin a progressive economy, science, medicine and freedom; and worst of all, we fear leaders who speak to facts and truth.
Simply put, as a nation we seem to fear thinking, reason and even compassion.
So I pose the question: Is AMERICAN IDOL's wildly successful commercialization of the ordinary, a celebration of freedom or a symptom of our final days as a competitive and robust democracy? I suppose I've provided my own answer to this disturbing question, but I pray to the popular God who most Americans believe would deny me my right to pursue life, liberty and happiness that I am wrong.