The Morning After - American Idol: Week 9 Eliminations

I’ve spent a long time thinking about what I would say when this day finally came. Weeks ago, I would have been righteous and jeering, screaming, “TAKE THAT, YOU CREEPILY-GRINNING LITTLE BOBBLE HEAD!” At first, weeks and weeks ago, when there were still multiple dozens of these songbirds crowding my week with their “music,” I would have been pensive, wondering, “What might he have accomplished, had he not been cut off in the blossoming youth of his musical career?” Now, as I amble through the shattered dreams of the likes of Gina and Stephanie, hands in my pockets and kicking absently at the debris of forgotten lyrics and sour notes that litter the stages in America’s collective memory, I pause as something glittering and triumphant catches my eye in this graveyard of broken dreams and fleeting personalities: ahead, in the center of this haunted battlefield, emerges the brilliantly illuminated, towering mausoleum of Sanjaya’s idolatry. It is massive and defiant and hairstyled differently from week to week. At is base burns an eternal flame fueled by Simon’s hatred and the admiration of hundreds of thousands of teenage girls. The priests who attend this shrine wear the cloaks of unapologetic anarchy. They are revolutionaries; they have arrived in hordes to practice their democratic right in this last bastion of American voting over which they can still exercise some power: the reality television contest. Sanjaya has been their false James Dean, their rebel pawn, their metaphorical cigarettes and mohawks and rock n’ roll music and beat poetry. An army of sexually frustrated Catholic school girls guards the entrance to his temple. War protesters with their guitars, PETA members with their red paint, and those motherfucking wet blankets from truth.com with their self-important orange signs form a picket line guarding this solitary, miraculous entity from the licentious eyes of would-be assassins. Not since 9/11 has this country banded together so unanimously on a single issue: Sanjaya sucked. And millions of people very week made damn sure that no one forgot.

(I’ll probably post a video later, but I didn’t want to rush it. I need time to work on this. It’s going to be the Citizen Kane of American Idol farewell videos.)