American Idol makes Americans idle

Published: April 15, 2020

Even more newsworthy than inconsequential earthquakes and tsunamis in countries most of us have never been to, and more important than Joe Pavelski scoring yet another career-defining goal – something monumental enough to drive Neanderthal men-kind everywhere to wave their dicks around and vociferate in the street, is the female equivalent of football - contrived reality TV talent contests like American Idol; programs devised to transform nobodies into lowly celebrities and to lull viewers into a false sense of community.

American Idol contestant Paul McDonald has sadly been eliminated from the show, just a week after its followers received the upsetting news that Pia Toscano – a favorite of the show, had also been prematurely ejaculated.

Talent shows aren’t so bad I guess. Mindless rubbish yes, but they keep generic women happy whilst their generic men-folk watch football and drool (who said they can’t multi-task?) or tinker with themselves in their sheds.

Just good-natured fun, you say. It’s only sport/television. What could be more inoffensive than that? It gives people a sense of community. It means they can form sides and pledge allegiance to them; a bit like war.

American Idol is the Fourth Reich

This is exactly how society would be had the Nazis won the Second World War.

The problem I have with these programs is their formulaic nature. There’s the ritual humiliation of the absurdly bad, the fat, the congenitally ugly or the possibly, completely insane – who they probably extract from the local sanitarium, ply them with ecstasy for breakfast, wash that down with flaming Absynthe and then roll them downhill in an iron barrel, while angry monkeys bang its sides with wooden spoons, for about twenty minutes before they’re due to go on.

And then; there they go, making complete asses of themselves on television for the whole nation to see. It’s fine to laugh at them, in fact we’re encouraged to do so by production companies who edit them to make them appear even more ridiculous. “Ha ha ha – let’s all laugh at the stupid people,” which is fine; it’s accepted because we’re all doing it.

Then there’s the ones with a modicum of talent, and we’re allowed to pity them because they are generally fairly sane and inoffensive looking, “oh but they have had sad lives.”

Then the dreadful circumstances of their dreary yet traumatic lives unravels: the poverty, the cancer, the psychotic episodes, the inflamed labia, the myopia; how they’d been dreaming of this moment since they were born into white trash, the progeny of sociopathic alcoholics with poor taste in interior design. Everything so repugnantly saccharine and buttered upon us so thickly that we would consider self harming if it didn’t mean actually moving our bloated cadavers from our couches.

We should pity her, she's had it tough. American Idol makes winners of us all.

These are the ones we are encouraged to support. The episodes are edited in such a way that we feel for these contestants; like they’re one of us. Not the talentless funny looking clowns who failed the auditions. No.

This is the equivalent of laughing at a cripple and then sympathising with Angelina Jolie because she was bullied at school (for having lips like a smacked squid).

This is allowing innocent people to be publicly bullied by television; and we sit back and enjoy it because we can; because it’s what keeps us from asking difficult questions about what’s really happening in the world.

Then there are the enthusiastically exploited wannabes desperate to shake free from their dowdy lives, quit working at the bank/factory/laundromat and be persecuted by paparazzi so they can publish photographs of them not wearing any knickers, even if they have to remove them later, using Photoshop.

They tart them up like uncomfortable corpses wearing more make-up than the structure of their plain features can legally handle, squeeze them into highly flammable clothes and make their hair so big, it’s visible from space. And that’s the boys.

Then there’s the jury, a line up of the irksome, the bad haired, and the patronising, quibbling over a bunch of interchangeable wannabes. The tarty judge with blow dried features; the avuncular and unctuous benefactor – an ambassador for smugness; and the rebarbatively sadistic one that everyone hates because they have the gall to be honest on a TV program, despite being the only reason people keep coming back in the first place.

The jury deliver unnatural lines like they are auditioning for a walk on part in Pricks in Space and probably don’t even sit through the tedious acts - only appearing to watch them thanks to the teenage insomniac in the editing suite, making it seem that way. The choreographed disagreements and walkouts employed to increase viewer figures, the media frenzy and the bullshit.

News space is taken up in papers and on news programs; minor celebrities discuss in explicit detail which acts deserve to win or lose; people behave like they actually care.

Then the winners squeal, the losers bawl, or is it the other way around. Someone gets a record deal because they can sing a famous song quite well, although they have no discernible star quality whatsoever.

And then the same thing happens again with the next series: same format, same formulas, same audience, same couch, different year.

This isn’t light entertainment, it’s television light on entertainment and it not only belittles the participants but it insults its viewers and wastes their lives.

Football and television have been used to pacify the masses since their inception. It is a given that young boys, most of the world over, will be indoctrinated into the ‘beautiful game’ whilst the umbilical cord is still unwinding. Worse still, almost everyone these days just wants to be famous because television has made them believe it’s easy.

There is something medieval about these forms of entertainment. If we’re progressing as a species, surely we should have gone beyond throwing people to the lions or the ridiculous modern day jousting and bravado that occurs in sports stadiums everywhere.

Sport has long been associated with violence; and television encourages apathy. Do we really want to get to the end of our lives and say, “Well, I sure watched a lot of television?” Or, “I spent a large portion of my life watching men kick a ball around in a big garden, wearing knickers?”

Aren’t we intelligent enough to have better things to do now?

Feel free to leave a comment suggesting better ways to spend our time than watching pituitary retards on television.

Read about other horrendous reality shows like Bridalplasty, Raising Sextuplets, Real Housewives of Beverley Hills, Heidi Montag’s unnamed rubbish and the that started the decline of decent entertainment - Big Brother.

images: routenote.com; celsius1414.com

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Published April 15, 2020 by in Celebrities
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