No Rhyme nor Reason

The Voice baffles me because I thought the premise is that the person with the best voice eventually wins; however, last night, the first of the “battle” nights, a couple of the final 24 stayed in the game after less than wowful performances. Blake Sheldon apparently was overwhelmed with nostalgia when he kept the 17-tear-old bleached-blonde waif who reminded him of a “young Miranda” because the contestant clearly is a shower singer who struggled to make it through the (battle) song, not a stage dynamo who can hold her own without Daddy Blake’s help. And, ah, wasn’t it cute that the former Mouseketeer won his round with a lot of stage presence, but an average “commercial” voice, after Christina confirmed that he worked at Disney with her, Justin, and Britney? Talk about prejudicing the outcome!

What I picked up is that the battles are staged to manipulate who goes to the finals, rather than on the present public performance. Because the coach has already decided which of the two contestants will go to the next round before the performance begins, the actual stage performance does not matter. Thus, in two of the battles last night, the strongest performance lost the battle because the coach wants the other performer to continue the process, perhaps to become a toss-away at a later date. This strategy is okay if that’s how everyone plays the game, but how does this work for the contestants who believe that the best Voice wins each week, as well as at the end of the contest?

Why does overt manipulation become covert strategy and personal bias serve as impartial judgment? Singers are literally a dime a dozen in today’s market, so who cares which singer out-sings another singer when it’s ultimately all about which coach wins? The four coaches could skip the elimination process and just pit their favorites against each other in a winner-take-all battle and save the contestants a lot of time, energy, and anguish.

Ditto The Bachelor, who, I guess, picks the dreaded psycho bitch who stripped naked for a quick ocean dip early on, the one female all the others hate. What did he see in her other than quick/easy/no cost sex? Is that really the way men select a wife or just the way guys put another notch on their personal bedpost? How would it feel for the world to know for the rest of your life that you’re just a quick, easy lay who used sex to make a name for yourself on a TV show? How would it feel for the rest of your life to reveal to the world that you picked your spouse on a TV show because s/he was sexually available?

There are parts of our lives that need to be kept private; as I used to hear, “Fool’s names, like fool’s faces, always show up in public places,” a warning to think about what you want to do BEFORE you do it.

Perhaps Lush (spelling intended) Limbaugh could have taken another nanosecond to think about his word usage before he condemned a young woman as a slut because she thinks her medical insurance provider should cover the cost of female birth control; after all, government sponsored clinics hand out free male birth control: condoms. Not to beat a dead horse, but Lush opens his mouth all the time without self-censoring, so why would this comment be different? He apparently fails to understand that if his insurance company pays for his male sexual performance enhancing pills, it should also pay for a woman’s birth control. Ultimately, not paying for woman’s birth control leads to society paying for the abortions, the births, and the cost of public programs to support the women and their children when the men pull off the (free) condom, zip up and walk away after ejaculation.

While listening to the Sirius radio that came with my RAV, I realized that many of the regular commentators use the Sirius option to say “fuck” and other obscenities with impunity and laugh about it. Hey, man, you don’t have to censor what you say: it’s public radio! Look at Coward, Imus and Lush, man, radio personalities with no self-censor mechanism in place who established the standard for all those who follow! It’s analogous to using the bitch-slapping women on The View to establish the standard for all women panelists on TV talk shows! There is a demographic that doesn’t want to hear the constant bickering, the shrill, screaming women trying to establish vocal dominance, nor the self-righteous justification from the outspoken arbiter of all things racist, especially in defining who can use the word “nigger” (all black people) and who may not (anyone who is not black) and, in the process, confirming that racism is alive and thriving on The View!

There is no rhyme nor reason in today’s society, no strong ethical foundation upon which we all depend for knowing what’s right and what’s wrong – nor the reasons why we need to know that difference. We don’t take the time to think before we act, and there is no way to say sorry for much of what we say and do, so we have become a litigious society that demands cash remuneration for the least, as well as the most offensive remarks and behaviors. It’s only a matter of time before one of these early-off TV contestants takes a copy of the TV broadcast to court to demand payment for damages incurred when their coach picked the lesser talent/performance and denied them a potentiall profitable professional career.
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And, there may be no rhyme nor reason for my thoughts this morning! Just thinkin' and sayin' while I maybe should be doin'!