…or the ones from England, Sweden, Canada, whatever. How many of these franchises are there? And what do they all mean?

I’ve said before in conversation that the Idol franchise is remarkable in that it proves that young people aren’t apathetic about voting – they don’t seem to mind voting with their cell phones for pop singers. Further, this willingness to co-opt democracy for cultural workers says something about how we don’t live in a Spartan (Greek/Athenian) or Philistine (Hebrew) culture. We live in one that cherishes a certain kind of art, rather than the lame foolishness of galleries.

I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes lately. And some of Aesychlus – I’ve never had that much interest before and remember ten years ago listening to some friends in uni talking about Oedipus Rex and I couldn’t believe anyone would want to read Greek plays nowadays – too old fashioned. But what one gets out of ancient Greek literature is a recognition of some constants of human nature, and a better understanding of the theatre and through this, the attractions of film and television.

But one notes that the playwrights were competing, that the theatre evolved out of a presentation or ritual and a festival. It seems that the same impulse that gave rise to the theatre in ancient Athens is the same that gives rise to American Idol. An audience, voting for the performers in their spectacle. The Greek playwrights told the stories of the city, commenting and alluding to things in a way that we see in sketch comedy shows today, especially something like Saturday Night Live. But SNL is known to be the result of a collective effort, and there’s no voting for the best skit or skit writer.

If the theatre expressed the beliefs of the Athenians, and held a mirror up to their city-state civilization, what does the Idol franchise express? That consumerism is a functional religion for an otherwise collective secular civilization. Because the Idol franchise operates in more than one country, it shows that our civilization is no longer confined to individual nation states, but is spread across a lingu franca English world which we usually call Western. We could just as easily call it the Idolic, given our love of idol worship (see John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards Chapter 11).

Our animated images function as gods, ghosts, angels … we have a whole pantheon of celebrity that goes back to this Greek heritage. This Idolic civilization claims to be secular, but is so in practice only, because each nation state has a population of believers within it. It also seems clear that the human being must take a position on a matter of belief: either they’re for a spiritual life, or their not; either they believe in some god, or they don’t; but that’s to say that spirit cannot be a vacuum: something will rush into to fill that void.

Our secular society, which in uncomfortable with open displays of belief, encourages everyone to be in the closet about these matters and functionally consumerist in public. This is what most often fills in that void. But it’s also not that simple … as I write I’m thinking of teenage girls in sneakers and lip gloss, caught up in that superficial world, and asking where does an idea of god fit into that? It’s another aspect of our Idolic civilization: everything is image, everything is mediated by the potential presence of the camera, to look hot is to praise whatever. Is sex our secular god? We all want to look hot to play with the image of sex?

Too often we use the word consumerism, implying that buying stuff is what we want. It seems that we all want style, beauty, cool, attractiveness … things that live up to a religion of image rather than belief. As I write this I’m also trying to figure in the stupid people who gossip about the love lives of their friends at work, who invest in Disney DVDs, whose entire lives seem cliché ridden and empty of what we could call culture in an elitist way. Not that these are bad people, and it seems a given that they’ll always exist, but they’re boring and distasteful. They’re probably quick to identify as Christians as well, so they’re caught between two belief systems: the one they live, and they one they think they live: that is, what they’d tell you despite the evidence. Such a disparity is a sign of unconsciousness, and perhaps that accounts for their appearance of stupidity and the dullness of their conversation. They’re really quite asleep. Or watching the flickering shadows of the television.

The Idol music festival is not designed to praise Dionysus or one particular pantheonic god (accept for maybe Simon Cowell) but is instead designed to generate a market for a forthcoming CD by the winner chosen by the cell-phone voting audience. It’s brilliant marketing, and has unfortunately been copied by everyone. But the willingness to adopt this method to sell speaks of what we consider to be important: living up to an image we come to know through marketing.