The Most Conservative Show On Television

America is facing a self-esteem crisis. There’s too damn much of it.

In a nation where failure is rewarded with bailouts, the successful are public enemy number one and society’s nannies spread the lie that everyone is a winner, a simple TV singing contest provides the loudest voice of bedrock conservative values like hard work and personal achievement. And that voice has an English accent.

For the three folks who don’t know because they have been living in a cavern next to Osama bin Laden since 2002, “American Idol” has wannabe crooners appear before a panel of four judges and warble some song for about sixty seconds. The viewers vote (by paying a buck to the phone company) on who stays in the contest and who gets tossed off, but before the voting the singers get feedback. This is when the fun begins.

Three of the judges are almost always positive. Randy Jackson, a producer who calls people “Dawg,” usually says something along the lines of “You really worked that out” or “Every week, you get up there and bring it.” Kara DioGuardi, a songwriter, mostly urges the singers “to show us who you are.” Paula Abdul, who looks astonishingly like she did back when she was making records in the 80’s, absolutely loves everything about everyone. Her critiques are rambling, often incoherent affirmations not only of the singers’ performance but their essential beings – “That was beautiful, moving, heartbreaking, and I can feel that your inner beauty shining through and look, there’s a squirrel and I have a hat. I love you.”

None of this could be considered criticism. It is mostly validation, criticism’s arch-nemesis and the bane of anyone actually trying to improve himself.

It’s the fourth judge, English expat Simon Cowell, who makes “Idol” so conservative and so refreshing. Because he just doesn’t care. And it’s glorious.

“That was bloody awful,” he will casually observe. Then the camera will pan to the 22-year old singer slash Hooters girl as her jaw drops in the face of an undeniable truth no one has ever dared tell her before.

“But singing is my dream,” she’ll protest.

“Get a new dream,” Simon will reply without a hint of emotion, “because your singing is a nightmare. Go home.” And they usually do – the audience tends to vote off those not making the Cowell cut.

There are still a few places left in American society where hard truth and unrelenting standards still intersect – courtrooms, basic training, match.com. But those are exceptions.

Schools ban competitive games, stop designating valedictorians and promote everyone with a pulse to protect the tender feelings of those who fail to achieve. Teachers whine endlessly about the tyranny of standardized tests and the oppression that is accountability. Auto companies mismanage themselves until their capitalized value is less than that of Arby’s while the wizards of Wall Street flush trillions on deals that would make P.T. Barnum blush, yet they all get checks from Uncle Sam. People do stupid things – like buy houses they couldn’t afford on twice their income or have eight kids with no husband – and end up with cash subsidies and sympathetic profiles for the geriatrics who still watch the CBS Evening News.

It’s clear many of these contestants have never been told the truth about their singing – that is, been criticized – in their life. It stuns them – someone has pointed out that they are less than perfect! They are flabbergasted. It’s like Simon has just lectured them in Swahili.

“Well,” they will stammer, “I think I did really well and I had fun out there.”

Only in a society where children’s’ self-esteem has been made the Holy Grail of the educational system could a 19-year old communications major from Maryland State with a love of show tunes presume to place her opinion about singing on the same scale with that of a 30-year record industry vet who could tile the floor of his mansion with the gold records he’s honchoed. And who lied to this young woman and told her that the amusement she derived from her activity is somehow relevant to evaluating the skill she displayed in executing it?

But you can see in the eyes of the smart ones that they are thinking about what Simon said. That’s good – criticism is the key to improvement. Validation is the key to staying lousy.

Simon, like all rebels, comes in for his share of grief. He is mocked for his huge ego, but he has a right to a healthy ego – Simon is tremendously successful music impresario. He earned it. The problem is the huge egos of people who have not.

Mostly, Simon is accused of taking pleasure in slashing the contestants down to size, but a closer look proves that is just not so. Simon is never happy when trashing a performance – there’s no smile, no hint of delight. If anything, he is irritated, offended that he and the audience were presented with a poorly arranged, lazily performed, overindulgent mess of a performance. The only time he is clearly happy, in fact, is when someone does well.

“That was brilliant,” he will say in exactly the same way he just told a lesser performer that she sounded like a broken woodchipper with a chest cold. But you can see the comer of his thin lips turn upwards in delight. Simon does not enjoy failure. He enjoys earned success.

Where society seeks to avoid at all costs “stigmatizing” people by telling the truth about them, Simon swims upstream against this feel-good nonsense like some kind of truth-telling salmon. Like so much of society, many of the contestants show up believing they are somehow entitled to validation. In the past, this misconception would have been dispelled by parents and teachers. Now it’s up to Simon.

The American people are hungry for the kind of conservative values like hard work, discipline and healthy competition that “Idol” rewards. The show is a huge hit and Simon is its (pardon the expression) heart. At the risk of inflating his ego further, Simon Cowell is clearly the most important British contribution to Anglo-American civilization since the Magna Carta.