Voices: The Meek Inherit Celebrity
You've got to believe me.
I had absolutely no intention of watching reality TV's latest sorry excuse for programming, "WB Superstar USA."
That's the anti-American Idol where "only the bad survive." Of course, the finalists don't realize they're bad because the judges keep praising them until the end when the hoax is revealed.
Premise aside, the promotional hype would have scared me away. But later that evening, there I was bouncing back and forth between "WB Superstar USA" and the all-time strangest reality TV show, PBS's "Colonial House." There ain't nothing more bizarre than historical accuracy. Move over, "Survivor."
Admittedly, I am one of those people who skip around during the commercials and then get caught up in a new program and never see anything in its entirety. But there aren't any "commercials" on WVIA. I really would have preferred to watch the colony of 21st Century people attempt to live the lives of 17th Century American settlers.
But I couldn't get the scathing commentary of Berkeley Daily Planet managing editor J. Douglas Allen-Taylor out of my head. In his May 11 column, "The America We Know," he addressed Bush's response to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Specifically, he wrote:
"The humiliation of individuals has become an American obsession; it is, in fact, the growing American pastime, surpassing football and baseball as our national sport... Now, voyeurs of despair, it is the agony of the losers on which we dwell." He cited the pop culture thrill of watching Donald Trump ax failed apprentices or seeing unappealing singles "elimidated." I guess his deadline came before he caught wind of "WB's Superstar USA."
Allen-Taylor's supposition chipped away at my distaste for witnessing William Hung cloned like a strip of paper dolls and hung up for dishonor. I was still high on the fumes of the columnist's moralizing when I bid the neo-colonists "good day" and tuned in to "The Frog." My thoughts evolved rapidly.
But why do people wallow in the misfortune of others? Are they just high school bullies all grown up wanting to feel superior?"
The justification for humiliating these no-talented freaks is, of course, that they don't realize they suck. The crime is that no one has told them the truth yet. Surely, they're better off knowing. Aren't they? Don't they have any friends?
What we want is permission to be vain. Distorted self-perception isn't a nightmare if you don't care what other people think. It's inescapable - we can't see ourselves the way other people do. If as Anais Nin wrote, "we see the world not as it is, but as we are," that person in the mirror exists in 6,369,267,200 potential different versions.
That's about when my brain caught on fire and I began to suspect "WB Superstar USA" really wasn't about humiliation. This show wasn't interested in the conforming-to-the-norm, practically perfect, pretty people. They were the boring filler that stood between the judges's next discovery of a genuine, one-of-a-kind phenomenon. I saw the glimmer in chick judge Vitamin C's eye as one of the worst singers unfurled his full fan of freakishness.
The producers will eventually say, "Oh, by the way, we were just kidding about all those nice things we said." But it will be too late. America will embrace their favorite losers and cheer them on and learn that anyone can look like a winner given money and a little attention from the right stylists.
No one is supposed to like the three intentionally obnoxious judges. I mean, that one guy's named "Briggs." That's it. One name. Just Briggs. Tell me that's not pretentious on purpose. In the end it won't matter that it's all a hoax because the biggest loser of all is going to walk away with a $ 100,000 advance on a recording contract and he'll be a celebrity and people will love him and imitate him and want to be around him and want to interview him and some will even want to be him. It won't matter how he got on the show. When all is said and done, the people America will hopefully be making fun of are those conformists so trend-addicted that they will buy and listen to an album of really bad singing.
-- alicia grega-pikul, 20 May 2004
Send e-mail to: apikul@timesshamrock.com.
