The Greater Reality

You people still watching TV?

All the greatest performances ever recorded are now available on the Internet (YouTube) -- for free.

Last night, I thought I'd compare the various renditions of "I Dreamed a Dream," and came away feeling TV peaked and missed a magical moment in the performance of Susan Boyle, when they awarded the top prize in Britain's Got Talent, to a break-dancing team that has already gone down to obscurity.

Maybe Sarah Brightman and Kiri te Kanawa and a few others may have been just as good technically, but nobody in the history of (televised) performances ever electrified an audience as much as when Susan first stunned everyone with her rendition of that song. In that moment, the world of possibility/reality, was transformed -- and while the judges were appreciative, they missed the much greater significance of it -- that a complete nobody, could walk off the street, and "own" the world.

But the judges couldn't give her the prize because it would have been surrendering their control and power -- to arbitrarily make those decisions for everybody else, even in spite of how the rest of the world felt and recognized.

That's when the "Idols" of the world started to descend and become more and more a fraud for even the manipulated mass audiences.

This is the same reason many other mass oriented media are passing into history -- including the newspapers, who basically give us the same thing everyday, rather than the whole world now possible to discover, and when people do, they never go back. It's not a matter of price -- or even media, as much as it is the real range and diversity of the world, not just as determined by one person who has spent their entire lives in the cocoon of the protective powerful media.

The authoritarian perspective of self-designated experts, is no longer sufficient in the era of access to all the information -- and not just that controlled by any autocratic thought-enforcer.

When the people don't have the capacity to discriminate for themselves, the good from the bad, the significant from the trivial, then they get the kind of lowlife Hawaii has lately descended into and is being reported in many of the discussions -- of people camping anywhere they please, urinating and defecating anywhere they please, destroying the bathrooms and public facilities, and now, killing off each other, so that they can have the sidewalks all to themselves.

But instead, what you see on Hawaii news, is the unreality of life there -- that all the bad guys are good, and the good guys are bad, and leadership/citizenship is only about winning elections and jobs, and once they do, they never do a darn thing worth doing anymore.