Do you want to have your faith in humanity put through a crushing, multi-dimensional, staggeringly monstrous test?
Read the VoteForTheWorst.com feedback page.
At first, I thought American Idol was ridiculous. Then I decided to actually tune in to the beginning of Season 3 last year, mostly out of fascination over the psychology and sociology involved with people who can't sing to save their lives who nevertheless believe they could actually get on the show outside a blooper reel. By the end of Season 3, I had my favorites and I had my theories. I never took the show seriously, but found watching it entertaining. I especially liked trying to predict what an army of speed-dialing and text-messaging twelve-year-old girls would do each week.
This year, I tuned in from the start, looking for more entertainment and more psychological curiosities. As the season went on, though, I found I was impressed with one or two of the contestants enough that I actually looked forward to their performances each week for their own sakes. Yes, I hate contemporary pop music for the most part, but with all the weird themes they do week after week we thankfully haven't heard as much as you'd expect.
Anyway, as the weeks went on and on in Season 4, I became increasingly surprised at Scott Savol's durability. His continuing presence on the show defeated all of my models for predicting winners and losers. My wife suggested that there was an Anti-Idol movement out there skewing the votes, reminiscent of the Angry Dwarf / Howard Stern / People Magazine web poll episode years ago. I insisted that there just couldn't be enough angry pranksters out there to offset all of the hard core cell phone kiddies.
Then I saw a news story on VoteForTheWorst.com. So maybe my wife was right...
At first, I was a bit peeved that the prank (if, in fact, the site really has much influence) had kept Scott Savol on at the cost of the much more entertaining to watch Constantine. I got over that quickly, as the nature of the prank sort of appealed to my perverse side.
Having thought about it a little more, though, I guess I am a bit bothered by the site. I don't believe, like many of its detractors, that it is bad for "stealing the dreams of the contestants". It's merely bad in a more pedestrian sense: it's taking pleasure by ruining someone else's innocent fun.
But now I've read all the screeching email posted on the feedback page, and I'm left speechless. I still think VoteForTheWorst.com is mean-spirited and basically wrong, but come on! Among the weird things said by Idol supporters are that the site is "unconstitutional", "slanderous", "illegal", "doing something—I don't know what but something—to America", or "the worst website ever". What? And I'm amazed at how many people claim to know "hackers" who are at any moment on the verge of shutting down the site, or who are threatening to call the police, or who don't know how to properly use the phrase "you've got another thing coming".
On the flip side, the site's defenders are frequently out of bounds as well. And what's with the conspiracy theories? You'd think Fox was sending black helicopters over people's houses and using Randy's weird neologisms to encode brainwashing messages in viewers' heads or something.
The whole discussion is so high up in the stupidsphere you need an oxygen tank if you're going to read more than a few sentences of it.
Yes, I admit I'm amused by the irony of the "Fedoration" member(?!) who writes "THE FEDORATION DOES NOT NEED YOUR PHONEY VOTES!!! JUST YOU WAIT UNTIL THE FINALE.....ANTHONY WILL BE THERE AND WILL WIN....THEN WE'LL SEE WHO THE WORST IS" (sic)
And, yes, the person who sent in the re-ordered CD track listing in an attempt to demonstrate that the show is fixed was clever, but a lie is a lie. Isn't it? I laugh, but it disturbs me.
In the end, the show is mildly entertaining, the show's fans terrify me, the show's detractors are ugly, and VoteForTheWorst.com is pissing in the punch just for laughs.
And now I'm ranting about it.
Maybe the right approach is to just look on it all and smile in appreciation of the fact that we're all children, and we're all works-in-progress. Or maybe not.
Dennis Prager today was talking about distinctions between the bottom one-per-cent of humanity, morality-wise, and all the rest of the more mild sinners that make up pretty much the whole human race. The distinction is real, I'll grant, but at the same time, no one is born into actively loving the worst of evil practices. Osama bin Laden started small like the rest of us, with petty selfishness and very small self-deceptions. The difference is how far he took it. So I've been thinking about small mean acts today, and so I found myself on VoteForTheWorst.com. That and I was curious who they would pick after Scott and Anthony were both booted from Idol.
Am I a moral hypochondriac?
Or do I just need more sleep and less headcold?
Frazier, out.
