What do The New Yorker and Susan Boyle have in common? The fact that both are very entertaining, though the first in a high brow sort of way that makes use of popular culture and the second in a low brow sort of way that high brow people have to slander on their way to having a good time.

The cartoon covers of The New Yorker are so good, week after week, decade after decade, that we take them for granted. This week's was particularly good. It suits both the Wulbert principle that the aesthetic form of a cartoon, its discipline, is to make one point at a time out of its disparate elements: to bring them together for a joke. It also suits my preference for cartoons that are topical. There is this appealing green alien in a spacesuit sitting amidst the debris of a fallen New York and reading a book. The cartoon combines a number of themes that have been in the public arena, cultured division, of late. The alien is out of Forties Warner Brothers and so sets the scene for this being a cartoonish form of humor, which means that a serious conundrum will be treated to a hum drum solution. The ivied city shares the fantasy of a city returned to the primeval that is in the recent Will Smith movie I Am Legion and also in an exhibition and book and Discovery Channel program about what New York City would look like if it were literally gone to seed, the fantasy being that all the people just left and so the city was left to run and deteriorate on its own. That is combined with an attention to all the computer detritus that litters the ground that shows the alien free to pick up what is now the latest in electronic gear and settling instead for a ragged book, whether because he finds this delightful or accessible or merely because none of the electronic book reading devices work any more. That is one way to settle on the abiding importance of the book.

I have been very taken by the Susan Boyle fiasco. Most of the finalist acts on Britain Has Talent (did anyone doubt it?) are available on You Tube. They included a ten year old girl with a pretty voice who got stage jitters and broke out in tears before being comforted by the comely female judge who wore a different dazzling outfit for each program but was not shot too close up or for too long because her makeup covered the fact that her skin has begun to wrinkle. (Well, the whole point of the program is to be catty, isn’t it?) The acts also included a guy who dressed up like a Turkish belly dancer and proceeded to roll his extensive belly, then climaxed the act by eating belly button lint, which led to a shot of the aging female judge grimacing, though she went on to vote the act into the next round, while Simon Cowell who here, as in American Idol, from which Britain Has Talent is clearly a spinoff, plays the role of the judge with standards and so voted against the lint-eater because Simon (which is what everybody calls him) thought that the royal family, before whom the winner of the talent competition, such as it is, will appear, should be spared the indignity—this notwithstanding the fact that  the British public has not allowed the royal family to escape any number of indignities over the years. There was also a very bad ventriloquist who was pointedly told that his lips moved and a trio of teenage girl singers who were awful and gave Simon a lot of lip when he told them so, egged on by the behind the scenes commentators who, in heavy Scot accents, acknowledged with a smirk as would befit their role of being on the side of the contestants, that the girls gave as good as they got. That is British independence for you! No sniveling or currying favor with the Americans whose offers Susan Boyle had had the courage to reject (not really).

Humiliation turned into triumph or into further humiliation is the theme of the program and so it is not surprising that a very ugly woman who has been reported to be slightly brain damaged is brought out for an Ugly Betty routine (indeed, she is going to appear on an upcoming episode of that sitcom (!)). She wows them over in her first outing and so the truths of life get lived out under the proscenium arch, just as in old American (and British) musicals. She has a second appearance in the semi-finals, more uneven, as if to suggest her repertoire is limited. Then, in the week before the finals, she curses out photographers who ask her questions reported only as nasty and provocative. She is praised at the final, where she reprises the song she had done in her first appearance (so much for a repertoire), for having had the courage to come back to the stage for the finals and then loses (coming in second to a vaudeville dance troupe) and falls apart and is now in a mental asylum. Boyle had wanted celebrity for a very long time and now see what happens when she gets it. Is there a moral here about avoiding fame or staying within yourself?

There might be any number of morals to be drawn and commentators are not shy about doing so. She was exploited. That is an easy one in that exploitation of the common person is an old charge against media honchos. People don't really like ugly people, whatever they say about them, is another possible moral. Popular culture is trash is another moral, though that runs into the problem that we love it so much that it must have something to it.

What can be said as a matter of fact, though, is this: everybody expresses regret about the fiasco but no one shoulders responsibility: not the press, nor the public, nor the program producers, nor the program hosts. Nor even me for having enjoyed the whole thing. That is its genius. We have all watched a train wreck as mere bystanders and so could enjoy it for all its deliciousness as a horror show.