...under The Mother Country ain't dead yet files. (H/T: Gates of Vienna)
Apparently You Tube has disabled embedding of this video "by request." I link to the You Tube version nonetheless because from my end the audio is of higher quality.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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I have found myself somewhat bemused by this phenomenon. I don't watch American Idol's "delusional aspirants" segments, I remember William Hong best for his appearance in the Alien Loves Predator web-comic (as in never actually heard him sing, maybe he's actually quite good). It's not that I can't stand to watch stupidity or anything, I just prefer people with beautiful voices pretending not to be able to sing to people who really just can't sing. Both are similarly cruel, but one tends to sound a lot better.
So even as amazing as this woman's voice is (and I have to say it's very impressive), I was more interested in the fact that the reports I have heard about everyone in the audience expecting her to flop were apparently entirely accurate. Nor did it seem like an audience that had been subjected to a barrage of truly mind-numbingly bad performances that night, though I doubt they had heard anything else so sublime.
Even the judges, who deal with singers professionally and are on a show that is all about polishing the images of people who already have good voices. Is it really just because Susan Boyle is neither thin nor young? She's built like a singer, not a dancer...and the show is not about dancing.
But then again, I wasn't all that impressed by September 11 when it happened. Ho hum, Islamic terrorists are trying to kill us all again...huh, should those towers have collapsed? The story of how anti-asbestos hysteria killed thousands on a morning when only a few hundred would have died otherwise was the only real shocker for me (followed up very shortly by the results of a disturbingly similar "environmentally friendly" engineering compromise on the Space Shuttle). I mean, the exact same group already tried to blow up the Trade Center. I think Osama even left a "you haven't heard the last of me" kind of message on that occasion, when Clinton couldn't be bothered to acknowledge the attack.
It's not mere superficiality...there seems to be some kind of structural defect in the humankind's ability to make reasoned projections about future events. It's not just the general public, frequently, as in the cases of both Susan Boyle and 9-11, it was the experts who were apparently the least prepared for what they had no excuse for thinking impossible.
I doubt England will be as hard hit as America by the coming crisis. To some extent, their economy is far less dependent on moving about vast quantities of basic necessities, and far less dependent on imports (which they will still be able to buy, since they don't rely on the dollar). More fundamentally, I think the British people have developed an ability to accept terrorism as a fact of life and deal with it the same way we deal with traffic deaths.
They won't fall apart and wring their hands in lieu of action when it becomes clear that the time has come to enforce their own laws rather than accept Sharia. Dirty little secret, America already accepts all the essential tenants of Sharia law when it comes to dealing with horrific crimes committed by "minorities" (a very selective term which doesn't include Asians, nor will it ever include Caucasians).
So, they won't be loving life there in England come the end of the world. But they won't be America either.
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