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Thanksgiving morning I was tooling around the TV dial as I waited to see if Heather would find her way out of bed. In her defense, we were having a small get together in a few hours and, as always, she was way ahead of the game. The house and most of the food was impeccably prepared the day before. All she needed to do was slide the turkey into the oven.
So there I was...
At one point I flipped to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The last American Idol winner, Scotty McCreery, was being introduced as the next entertainer. But there was a problem...the song, including his voice, started without him. His embarrassed lips caught up rather quickly, and he did ok the rest of the way.
I filed it away as an "oops" and didn't think much more about it...until the next day when I read this headline in MSN Music News: "Scott McCreery's Thanksgiving Parade Lip Synching Fiasco."
Fiasco? That was a fiasco? I felt the need to consult Noah Webster's fine dictionary on this one. Fiasco: A complete and ignominious failure. Funny. I don't think that's at all what I witnessed.
Underneath that misguided headline was Bret Lang's trite and stupid article that ended with: "Thank goodness there were cameras on hand to capture his Macy's Day mistake."
Thank goodness? Really? Why?
Lang does know that every single singer at the parade lip synchs right? Neil Diamond was there. I heard his music, but I didn't see his band. Was it hiding behind Santa's big jolly ol' belly? The Broadway numbers are all lip synched too.
Heather told me that she recalls in 1992 Peabo Bryson and Regina Bell singing their Aladdin hit "A Whole New World" on a moving float. The float crashed-it c-r-a-s-h-e-d! They stopped singing as one might imagine, but the song-with their voices-rolled on.
Of course, if singers don't lip synch, they are castigated for that, too. Another American Idol alum, Lauren Alaina, messed up some words to the National Anthem last week at a football game and outlets plastered the news everywhere that she had "flubbed" the anthem. Remember Christina Aguilera at last year's Super Bowl? The ridicule and venom spat at her for her National Anthem mishap was shocking. Personally, I thought it took guts for them to sing it live.
Here's my question: Why do some people so relish finding and pointing out other people's mistakes? Why is that so much fun? What's the thrill? Some people slobber over the possibility like a dog slobbers over the possibility of a thick drippy steak. What's the fascination?
My god, we're back in the school yards with bullies laughing at the smallest perceived deficiencies in others simply to feel superior. Is it any wonder we get so few bold proposals from our elected officials?
Sadistic mistake mongers who get off on other peoples' smallest failures seep into the societal conscience. People are naturally less willing to risk when they are punished for it. Where there is no risk, there's no progress. Indeed, overcriticism is progress' snuffer.
And we're left with a receding society run more and more by cowards in which courage becomes an afterthought and the status quo our poison.
Now that is a fiasco.
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