that pt barnum was on to something.

i remember when i was in middle school about twelve or thirteen, i knew this guy his name was brandon, who was quite a bit older, five or six years. usually people that age have very little use for people in middle school, brandon wasn't really all that different that's not to say he wasn't a good or even a nice guy, he was definitely that, because i guess people of any age have very little use for people in middle school. anyways, i guess that i was seen by him as sort an exception to that rule because we became friends, pretty good friends too, in a lot of ways, he was the first person who i can say was ever a mentor to me.

well you know how it is, when you're that age and you've got a friend who's that much older, you tend to pick things up from them, and the thing that sticks out that i picked up from brandon was music. now beyond the fact that he introduced me to both U2 and steve taylor, those particular artists have very little in common. i mean you'd have to have been hiding under a rock to not be at least slightly familiar with U2 and you'd have to have been looking underneath some rocks to have heard of steve taylor, so consider today a bit of an education. sometime in the early 80s, taylor wrote a song called "am i in sync?" which cited as inspiration a woody allen quote saying "i don't want to acheive immortality through my work, i want to acheive it through not dying." what the song gets into is the idea of people willingly (on some level) looking foolish in order to ensure some sense recognition by a greater than average number of people or rememberance for a greater than average number of days, weeks, months or years.

you had to have known this wouldn't simply be about a song, and that the reference to pt barnum wouldn't be there for nothing, he's the one who told us that there's a sucker born every minute, but i'll get to that in a minute. one of the features of pop culture these days, twenty years or so after steve taylor wrote his song, is the reality television show, in which people willingly (on some level) look foolish in order to ensure some sense of recognition by a greater than average number of people and rememberance for a greater than average number of days, weeks, months or years. so there's this show, it's called american idol, i bet you've heard of it. you know how it goes, what ensues is the willing public humiliation of a great many (nearly without exception unwitting) people in exchange for a sniff of fame. they're not the only suckers though, we're all suckers, even me. maybe we don't end up assaulting any judges eardrums necessarily, but while we're at the same time disgusted by the whole thing and not so inadvertently amused by the humiliated, the producers back a dumptruck full of money up to the bank vault and fill it full of the advertising dollars we make available to them.

and that's not even the worst part because i saw an article the other day that said that producers are set to put together a "christian" version of the show, obviously it won't be called "christian idol" or anything like that, idolatry being a pretty severe violation of commandment number two and all. now there's a lot that i could say, mostly about the sort of subculture that christianity promotes for itself seeming largely incapable of coming up with an original idea and subsequently piggybacking on any idea someone else has that makes a halfway decent amount of money, but i'll save that for another day. so the show won't have idol in the name, instead it'll be called "gifted," the obvious connotation being that the finalists received their ability to sing from the Almighty, those weeded out in preliminary rounds having recieved them ostensibly from satan, who knows, really, i could be wrong about that.

i don't suspect that the program will want for contestants, i hope that i'm wrong about that and that a dearth of willing participants will make the "idea" people realize just how silly this whole thing is. but in the end it seems as though that pretty much no group of people is exempt from the desire for quick fame, and there are a couple things that seem noteworthy. that there isn't a significant difference between those in secular and religious circles with regard to the desire for fame. the difference is that "gifted" will be ostensibly about using one's gifts for the benefit of God's kingdom. i don't suspect that will be the case as much as we'll see people who want to be famous for Jesus. the other thing that seems pretty interesting to me this is the first "christian" attempt at a reality show and that it's an adaptation of the one that has the glossiest finish, the least amount of rough edges and most stresses perfection, i don't think is at all a coincidence.

i'm wondering if a tv show has to do the same things people do to become christian.

feeling: like a sucker
thinking of: getting on "gifted" i'm quite talented, really.
music: "am i in sync?" steve taylor