In scheme of things, `Idol' irrelevant

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

It's entertainment. Fluff, not to be taken seriously. And yet, as I watch "American Idol," the contestants all teary because Simon or Paula laugh at their performance or bluntly tell them they can't sing, I find myself thinking about my father at 18.

He didn't get to cry on national TV because he was rejected, or moan into a microphone that being a star was his dream and what would he do now? He was a man at 18, fighting a war on the other side of the world, one of hundreds of thousands of boys and men with real reasons to cry.

Maybe it's because times are tough - people losing their jobs, their homes, their way - that Idol feels irrelevant this season. How are you supposed to feel sorry for a kid who loses it because he is not allowed to play his guitar while he sings? How are you supposed to empathize with an 18-year-old who believes that this is the worst thing that will ever happen to him?

Maybe it's because young people are still being killed in Iraq. Private First Class Matthew Pollini from Rockland, just 21, and Sergeant Kyle J. Harrington, a 24 year-old from Swansea. Four others dead in a helicopter crash as the war goes on, 4,236 American men and women killed since March of 2003 while I've been watching season after season of "American Idol."

Or maybe it's because the 65th anniversary of the Normandy invasion looms. I've been to Normandy and have seen the cemeteries that stretch for miles, and in that context, falling apart when you don't ace a singing contest is ridiculous. People have real problems, and being told you can't sing is not one of them.

I'm a big "Idol" fan. I even vote. But this overstaged, overhyped, overwrought season with its weeping and wailing and group hugs and quest for the golden ticket is over the top.

A golden ticket? Happily ever after? Think Jennifer Hudson. Fame didn't protect her from losing her mother, brother, and nephew to violence.

I wonder how it is that we live on the same planet but on such different planes?

Simon tells a girl who sings well that she needs to do something with her looks. And though she looks OK to me, the girl leaves the room, puts on some eyeliner, fusses with her hair, comes back, and gets a thumbs-up.

I think about what Kathleen Conroy, a nurse from Canton, told me. For 10 years she has traveled to Colombia with the medical group Healing the Children. There is a 12-year-old child, Ana Yesenia Ruiz, who has touched her heart. Born with a facial deformity, abandoned by her mother, Ana is dirt-poor and doesn't go to school, because the kids make fun of her, but she is a "sweet, sweet girl." She needs major craniofacial surgery, more than a visiting team can do, but she could be helped in the United States.

"I have spent the past six years trying to find medical care for Ana," Kathleen Conroy wrote.

Think about this: A pretty girl isn't pretty enough for "American Idol." In our country, in these times, no one is pretty enough. Ana Yesenia Ruiz could be pretty. You can see this if you look only at the left side of her face because her left side is perfect.

While my father followed General Eisenhower through Africa and into Italy, France, and Germany, as he turned 19, 20, and 21 on battlefields, while he ducked bullets and slept in trenches and buried too many friends, I know there were people like me, shopping and making dinner and singing and laughing and having a grand old time

Because we live not just on different planes, but in different orbits.

"American Idol." An old war. A current war. A child who needs help. Unrelated or, like us all, in different worlds, in different orbits, yet connected somehow?