This morning before work I switched on the TV to learn the latest pirate news. And while I was eventually gratified, I had to spend a tedious five minutes sitting through a report, the thesis of which was essentially, “Holy shit, an ugly person can sing!” Over eight million hits on YouTube as of this evening confirm that, yes, people really are stupid enough to be surprised by this fairly simple and straightforward situation.

Here’s what happened: a woman named Susan Boyle showed up to sing on a UK television show called Britain’s Got Talent, which is apparently their equivalent of American Idol. I’ve never actually watched an episode of either show, but both involve unknowns performing and being either praised or ridiculed by an audience and a panel of judges, including someone named Simon Cowell. The fact that Simon Cowell has been name-dropped all over the place for years and I still don’t know who the hell he is leads me to believe that he should be the subject of a future installment of Codger Corner.

Anyway, up comes this woman (I’d embed the video here, but YouTube has disabled embedding on this particular clip for some reason), looking exactly like the sort of women who attend Protestant churches: ugly, frumpy, mid-forties, bad hair, bad floral dress and a pleasant, disarming smile. You probably wouldn’t spend any time checking out her ass, but you would expect her to have some of the best double-chocolate caramel yum bars at the Bible Study picnic. And she walks out on stage, subjecting herself to a huge crowd of vapid twits, most of whom have very pretty faces and very dull personalities. They all smirk at the ugly woman and Simon Cowell regards her with what can only be described as a shit-eating eyebrow lift. Then the woman starts to sing, and it turns out that she has a fantastic (and well-trained) voice.

And that’s the entire story. Oh, except for the fact that everyone is very fucking surprised. Why, exactly? I hate to sound like Tipper Gore, but is this somehow MTV’s fault?

OK, follow me on this one. Once upon a time, musical talent was judged by talent. Then the music video was invented, and along came MTV. MTV quickly realized that when you’re looking at the musicians on television, often over and over again on a loop, viewership was influenced not just by how much they liked listening to the musician’s music, but also by how much they liked looking at the musician. Result: three decades of progressively sexier performers. Is it too far a logic leap to suggest that modern viewers of shows like American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent have actually been brainwashed into believing that good music can only be made by pretty people?

Yeah, I know, that sounds incredibly fucking stupid. But it’s also stupid that Simon Cowell was actually shocked at Susan Boyle’s talent. You be the judge.

As fans of “House” already know, Dr. Lawrence Kutner is dead. To the show’s credit, his suicide was handled about as well, and as realistically, as it could be. Instead of giving us one of those melodramatic TV suicides (you know, lots of foreshadowing, staring into the mirror, shots ringing out just before his friends rush in to save him), this seemingly came out of nowhere. Kutner’s friends and family were going about their lives when, not even halfway into the episode, he turned up dead.

This came as a shock, not just because Kutner was the show’s most consistently happy character, but because he was a fan favorite. After all, he was played by Kal Penn. The kids love him! So why would they not just write him off the show, but actually kill his character? This isn’t Lost! I was sure something else had to be going on.

And it was. Penn explained his reason for leaving the show in an interview with Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello:

I was incredibly honored a couple of months ago to get the opportunity to go work in the White House. I got to know the President and some of the staff during the campaign and had expressed interest in working there, so I’m going to be the associate director in the White House office of public liaison. They do outreach with the American public and with different organizations. They’re basically the front door of the White House. They take out all of the red tape that falls between the general public and the White House. It’s similar to what I was doing on the campaign.

Well. That’s a pretty good reason to quit a TV show. And here I thought he was just gonna do movies or something.

He admitted in the interview that he would be taking a pay cut at his new job, and although he isn’t retiring from acting, he is giving it up for the time being. And he’s doing it because he has a sincere passion for politics. Cynical as I am, I have to admire that. I follow politics, and sometimes engage in idle daydreaming about what I would say to this or that politician, but I’ve never even taken the time to volunteer. Kal Penn worked with the Obama campaign, and now he’s working with the administration in a job that I couldn’t explain if I wanted to. Honestly, I have no idea what the associate director of the White House office of public liaison does (I intend to look it up as soon as I’m done writing this, but for now I want to remain pure). If I had to guess, I’d say he was going to be some sort of mascot, but that wouldn’t be very nice of me.

Implied in all of this is the idea that Penn must have really impressed the Obama people during the campaign. Lots of actors volunteer on political campaigns, but it’s not often that one of them gets offered a job in a Presidential administration, so he must have some idea of what he’s doing. Pundits love to complain about actors getting involved in politics, claiming they’re attaching their names to trendy causes without really understanding without really understanding the intricacies and compromises of political life. I hope to be there when those pundits get proven wrong this time, giving another reason to admire Kal Penn.

Now that I’ve got all the admiration out of the way, let me get cynical for a moment. This is a great career move, not just for Kal Penn the politician or Kal Penn the activist, but for Kal Penn the actor as well.

Consider Al Franken: he was an SNL alumnus, a comedian, and a political commentator. He wrote a very funny book about Rush Limbaugh in 1996, but political humor doesn’t always age well, and many of the book’s jokes became dated within a few years. By the early 21st century, he was working at Air America and writing the occasional book — a respectable career, but perhaps lacking the glamour of some of his earlier work. And then he pissed off Bill O’Reilly. That’s not hard to do, but O’Reilly became singularly obsessed with Franken – everything Franken said was treated as an attack on O’Reilly, and everything he did was seen as proof of a vast left-wing conspiracy. O’Reilly’s minions spread the meme, his fellow Fox News pundits repeated it, and before long they had turned a fading comedian into the poster boy for the Evils of Liberalism. Franken’s books sold millions of copies, his story became evidence of conservatism’s misplaced priorities, and now he’s (more or less) a United States Senator.

That’s not bad for the guy who played Stuart Smalley, and it would be pretty good for the guy who played Kumar. If any conservative pundits are reading this, please, by all means, criticize Penn’s latest career move. Search for sinister motives in any acting roles he takes on in the future. Talk about him like he’s single-handedly responsible for destroying the American way of life.

I look forward to voting for him.

Saturday Night Live, long considered “not as good as it used to be,” managed to win back its viewers during the last presidential campaign, thanks to Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin. Fey had been doing just fine on her own, creating, producing, and starring in 30 Rock, but her turn as Palin elevated her from Smart Pretty Lady to Unstoppable Comedy Goddess. As well as she was doing, it was a cameo in a political sketch that made her a star in the eyes of the millions of Americans who weren’t watching 30 Rock.

If I were Dan Aykroyd, I’d want in on that. Apparently, Dan Aykroyd agrees.

Admittedly, John Boehner isn’t comedy gold in the way Palin was (despite the fact that his name is almost Boner), but I’m still curious to see where this goes. Will Aykroyd preside over a recurring series of sketches in which the Republican Congressional leaders come up with terrible ideas”? Because I’d tune in for that, or at least watch it on the internet on Sunday morning. Aside from being amusing, a sketch like that could be pretty useful in the real world — the next time the real Republicans try to present a stupid plan to the public, there’s a good chance that millions of people will laugh and say, “Dan Aykroyd already did that!” I approve.

And if SNL has a cameo role that will allow Chevy Chase to be funny for once, I’m okay with that too.

I had big plans for today. I was going to do a whole post on Super Bowl commercials, and why they suck. Then it turned out that everyone already agreed with me, and didn’t really care about the commercials because oh my god did you see that fucking catch!?

So instead, I’m going to focus on my latest pop-culture obsession, Big Love, HBO’s series about a lovable family of fictional Mormon polygamists. I finally got caught up with it last month, after watching the first few episodes in 2006 and vowing to come back to it later. Now that I have, I’m finding myself less interested in the stories (which are pretty good themselves) and more interested in the religious eccentricities throughout.

The Mormon belief in “testimony” crops up in several storylines. I have no idea how accurate the show is in its depiction of this belief, but what I’ve seen is curious, to say the least. The short version is, when a Mormon is faced with a tough issue, they pray about it, and sometimes receive a “testimony” from the Holy Spirit, telling them that their actions are right.

This concept figures heavily into the show’s premise. The protagonist, Bill Henrickson, was raised on the compound of a fundamentalist LDS sect that practiced polygamy, but was kicked out as a teenager (mostly so the old men could keep all the young wives for themselves). Over time, he rejected polygamy, met and married his wife Barb, and started a successful business, all the while maintaining a strained relationship with his family on the compound. Six years before the start of the series, Barb was diagnosed with uterine cancer and had a hysterectomy, derailing the couple’s plans to have more children.

Bill prayed on the matter, and received a testimony that he should return to his polygamous roots, take a second wife, and make more babies. I have no idea how he talked Barb into it — the show has left that up to our imaginations thus far — but she said yes, and he married (spiritually, but not legally) an ultra-conservative woman from the compound. A couple years later, Bill began courting a third wife, and married her after receiving another testimony.

During the run of the series, Bill has received testimonies about his business investments. His best friend and business partner (a fellow polygamist) received one about taking a fourth wife, but it turned out to be completely wrong, and the courtship ended on extremely bad terms. Bill’s 16-year-old son has received a testimony that he should “live the Principle [of polygamy]” when he gets older. Barb, still Bill’s legal wife, has confessed that she never received a testimony for the Principle, but is willing to live this life because she sincerely believes her husband’s testimony was real.

It’s not my place to say whether these characters, or real life Mormons (both mainstream and fundamentalist) are faking their testimonies, but the process leaves plenty of room for rationalization. You pray, clear your mind, and listen for divine guidance. To the untrained mind, the Holy Spirit will sound suspiciously like your own thoughts and intuitions, but trust us, it’s totally real, and not just coming from inside your head. The fact that Bill’s testimonies affirm his preexisting beliefs is, to him, proof of those beliefs’ rightness, as opposed to proof that he imagined the whole thing. When a testimony fails to come, it usually concerns a complex issue that a character hasn’t figured out yet, meaning they have no intuitive answer. Their solution: “Well, there’s no testimony, so I guess this problem isn’t that big a deal.”

It’s depressing enough to see fictional characters behaving this way — thanks to the wonder of testimony, Bill’s son has begun sinking into religious fervor and rank misogyny — but it’s even more upsetting to know that real people are making decisions using this system, and others like it. I’m not just talking Mormons here; for all I know, the show has completely misrepresented this idea, and real-life Mormons would find the concept laughable. I’m thinking more about the whole universe of “spiritual-but-not-religious” people, whose methods for communicating with their gods, spirits, and higher consciousnesses is strikingly similar to Big Love’s take on testimony.

I’ve had countless people tell me that unleashing one’s latent psychic abilities (or whatever) feels almost exactly like listening to one’s own intuition, except that you have to assume there’s some kind of divine truth behind it, and that’s why I don’t hang out with those people anymore. Because, dude. I don’t need to use half-remembered pagan deities as an excuse for talking to myself, and I sure as hell don’t want to use them as scapegoats for my own stupid choices. Most of all, I don’t want to rely on my own illogical, neurotic instincts to make major life decisions.

And that, I suspect, is what all those cranky “New Atheist” authors mean when they say that faith is not always an admirable quality.

P.S.
What the hell is wrong with me that I can’t just enjoy a TV show, without picking apart all the creepy implications therein?

In 1996, a young Barack and Michelle Obama were interviewed as part of a project on couples in America. They had their picture taken on the sofa, said lovely things about each other, and generally gave off the same smart-people-in-love vibe that we get from them today.

This is just the latest effort to humanize the new President, remind everyone that he’s just a normal person like us, and hopefully dispel any lingering rumors of a hidden radical agenda. Like all the previous efforts, it will mostly fail, not because he actually is a secret radical, but because his detractors are too committed to hating him. A handful of people will say, “Well, I guess he’s not so bad after all,” but many more will see this as another PR stunt, possibly planted by agents of the Obama Conspiracy.

So. If a few cute photographs won’t sway the die-hard haters, why does the media keep putting them out there? My first instinct was to assume they were acting out of white liberal guilt, but that seemed too obvious. No, they’re trying to bring about a phenomenon that I’ll call the Huxtable Paradox*.

I takes its name from the family featured on the Cosby Show, which many critics regard as the series that truly humanized African-Americans in the mind of the average viewer. The question is, why this show? Since the 1970s, there had been plenty of shows whose casts were mostly (and in some cases, entirely) African-American, but they aren’t treated as revolutionary. It’s not as if they were too “edgy” for the average viewer; if Richard Pryor could sell as many albums as he did, then white America could handle George Jefferson’s insults.

The simple answer, and the foundation of the Paradox (which I swear I’m getting back to) is that Cliff Huxtable was a doctor married to a lawyer, while Fred Sanford ran a junkyard with his idiot son. The Huxtables weren’t just an atypical African-American family; they were an atypical American family, period. Disregarding race for a moment, how many affluent medical/legal power couples do you know? And how many of them have time to be the World’s Greatest Parents for five kids?

Exactly!

And therein lies the Huxtable Paradox: in order to be accepted as real human beings, minorities must often transcend mere humanity and demonstrate superhuman talent. Probably the same deal for women, too, and if Hillary Clinton had won the primaries, I’d be writing that post right now.

We’re witnessing this phenomenon play out in much of Obama’s press coverage. As much as George W. Bush relied on his regular-guy image in 2000, I don’t recall hearing much about George W. Bush, the regular guy. He’d had his “youthful indiscretions,” and he cleared a hell of a lot of brush after he got elected, but I’ve never seen his baby pictures. I’ve seen tons of Obama’s baby pictures (seriously, scroll down to the one where he’s dressed as a pirate — so cute!). I’m sure pictures of Baby Dubya exist, but they were never considered newsworthy.

Barack and Michelle Obama are moving into the White House in less than a week, and one could argue that they’ve bested Cliff and Clair Huxtable in terms of superhuman feats. To a certain portion of the population, the Obamas will always remain too “unknown,” too “distant,” and too “foreign.” For many others, though, seeing Obama as President has finally allowed them to admit that yes, they would probably enjoy hanging out with that guy.

And who knows? Maybe, on some glorious day in the future, Americans will also be capable of being friendly and open-minded to non-Presidents.

*Distinct from the Huxtable Effect, which claims that the Cosby Show laid the groundwork for America’s acceptance of Obama.

11:00 PM:
Since New Year’s Eve is one of the two nights of the year (the other being St. Patty’s Day) when all the pubs are guaranteed to be overrun by tiresome amateurs who don’t know how to hold their liquor, I decided to stay in out of the cold this evening and watch television. Now, I was all ready to write a post about Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston being high school drop-outs, as was reported earlier this week, but the Associated Press is now reporting that the whole thing was a lie, and young Levi is “enrolled in high school through a correspondence program.” A bit of a technicality, yes, but all-in-all, a nonstarter.

So, lacking the motivation for much of anything else (and if you’re sitting at home reading The Beak I can only assume that you, too, lack motivation), we’re going to sit down and watch some New Year’s coverage on the TV. We’ll start with The Silver Fox, live from Times Square.

11:06 PM:
So. We’re six minutes into Anderson Cooper 360, and Kathy Griffin has already requested a pap smear from Dr. Sanjay Gupta. This is going to be a long hour.

11:10 PM:
Ooh, Kathy Griffin just busted on the Jonas Brothers and their stupid little virgin promise rings! Zing!

11:18 PM:
I switched over to the local (for New York) NBC station, and learned that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Year’s resolutions are: 1.) Work on his golf game; 2.) Learn Spanish; 3.) Lose weight. Fuck… yes, those are nice resolutions, if you’re already retired. On the other hand, if you’re the mayor of one of America’s largest cities, and that city is currently home to a decaying Wall Street and a mounting budget deficit, I’d recommend setting some different fucking priorities.

11:23 PM:
Anderson Cooper is letting a drag queen named Sushi talk, presumably to fill air time. You know, Anderson walks a strange line with these annual New Year’s Eve shows. On the one hand, this is an opportunity to cut loose and be fabulous. On the other hand, he still needs to be considered a serious news man tomorrow. Which is why he spends most of the program looking nervous.

11:26 PM:
“Has Jack Cafferty ever gotten so mad that he just punched Wolf Blitzer in the face?” OK, that’s fucking funny. I guarantee, that is the funniest thing Kathy Griffin will say all evening.

11:30 PM:
Moving on. Fox is running some sort of music show. Good lord, is that Scott Weiland? Apparently, according to the host, this is part of his “solo act.” Somehow, I keep forgetting that some grunge musicians from the early ’90s are still alive and working.

11:38 PM:
There’s a light on my remote control that makes every single button glow bright red. Seriously, that’s the button’s sole function. For a moment, I thought the fucking thing was going to melt.

11:46 PM:
Who the fuck is Lady Gaga? Codger Corner, I’m looking in your direction.

11:50 PM:
So over at ABC they’ve got the usual “Rockin’ Eve” program, and this year Dick Clark is joined by Ryan Seacrest. And it occurs to me that, though I’m sure I’ve heard the name, I don’t actually know who the hell Ryan Seacrest is. Honestly, I swear I’m under thirty.

Sweet Jesus, Dick Clark looks and sounds absolutely horrible. Apparently he suffered a stroke in 2004, which accounts for the slurred speech. For some reason, ABC thinks that parading the poor man out every year is something other than extremely sad.

11:57 PM:
A stoned teenager is outside my apartment screaming, “I want to get laid!” over and over. Back on TV, Ryan Seacrest is talking to the Jonas Brothers. I’m changing the channel now, before Dick Clark makes me start crying for my grandfather.

11:59 PM:
Bill. Hillary. Bloomberg. Giant dropping ball.

12:01 AM:
Aaand it’s 2009, Eastern Standard Time. Um… I hope this year doesn’t completely suck. Also, the calendar on my wall is now useless.

12:07 AM:
OK, so, for everyone who’s going to read this tomorrow whilst sore and hungover, I just want to point out that, having never left the comfort of my chair, I don’t have to go out in the cold or spend an hour on public transit to get home, and I won’t feel nauseous in the morning. Suckas!

12:14 AM:
Granted, there’s a beer in my hand. But staying up past midnight and drinking booze? Around here, that’s not a holiday. That’s any day that ends with the letter “y.” You people fail to impress me.

12:16 AM:
Anderson Cooper just explained to Kathy Griffin that real New Yorkers don’t go to Times Square on New Year’s, they stay home and avoid the crowds. Aha! Vindication is mine!