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It's been said that, ultimately, who and what you vote for is emotional. Even if you're voting your ideology (i.e., from your head, not your heart), the values you hold dear are yet clung to for reasons having a lot more to do with powerful unconscious feelings than abstract ideals.
So how does this repeated finding pertain to Bristol Palin's surprising success on "Dancing with the Stars"? Let me count the ways:
Bristol's Profitability
When ABC invited Sarah Palin's daughter to be a contestant on "Dancing with the Stars," their motive appears unrelated to Bristol's star status. After all, she's hardly a celebrity in her own right. Not unless being a teen who conceived a child out of wedlock casts an otherwise unknown as illustrious. Plainly, she's famous (if that word can legitimately be employed here), for much the same reason that Paris Hilton is. It's who she's connected to, not her talent, that's placed her in the spotlight.
In Bristol's case, it's probably ye olde "last name syndrome." And the producers at ABC knew perfectly well what they were getting when they took her on the show. Knew that because of her mother's extreme right-wing politics, as well as her radical Tea Party followers, she came "pre-certified' to add controversy to the show. After all, her mother was a very lightening rod for controversy. Calculating brilliantly, the network made a choice virtually guaranteed to evoke the greatest partisan reaction--or emotion--imaginable.
TV producers generally do know what's best--at least for their ratings--as Bristol's at times embarrassing presence has culminated in the show's Nielsen ratings going through the roof. She's exactly the "cash cow" that the network predicted. So even before the final competition takes place, it can safely be said that this year's surprise winner is . . . ABC! Remember, their main criterion for putting her on in the first place wasn't based on finding the best talent to premier on the show. It was about heightening the show's dramatic interest and, in doing so, add to its profits. In essence, a moneymaking venture, the goal was to create as much spectator excitement, or emotion, as possible--rather than, say, "advocate" for the fine art of dancing.
Bristol's (Seeming) Popularity
But let's consider some of the ramifications of the network's deliberate stirring of the viewers' emotional pot. I've reviewed scores (if not 100s!) of internet comments (the majority of which are unusually heated, even inflammatory), written by the program's spectators after the semi-final results were reported. This is the show wherein voters decided that Bristol bested Brandy, despite the panel of judges on DWTS evaluating the latter's performance as clearly superior. But because audience preference across the country--or at least among those who actually voted--allegedly preferred the contestant from Alaska, Bristol was the one who got to stay on the show.
When the results of the voting were first announced, apparently millions of viewers gaped and gasped that Bristol's most recent performance would have been appraised as a cut above Brandy's. But as many of the lay commentators have accurately noted, fans aren't required to vote on the basis of artistic merit. It's simply who they like the best, who they'd prefer to see return the following week.
In short, DWTS would appear to be a talent show but really isn't (similar to "American Idol," where the more gifted vocalists not uncommonly lose). The show's judges may be instructed to vote on the basis of the dancers' technical and expressive skills, but viewers (who constitute 50% of the vote) are under no such obligation. So actual artistic accomplishment can easily take second place to what amounts to a popularity contest.
Or to something else equally unrelated to talent--as suggested by one follower of the show's theatrics who spoke about rooting for Bristol because, after all, she was the underdog, right? (In which case, the question arises as to whether such votes might be construed as an indirect way of voting for . . . oneself!) Other voices proclaimed that Bristol deserved to win because, week to week, she showed more improvement than the others. But it might just as well be argued that given the low point at which she started, there was much more room for improvement.
Anyhow, my point should be obvious. Voters in no way feel bound to vote for the best dancer--merely the performance or performer that moves them the most. In analyzing viewer reaction, I was forced to conclude that more than anything else those who voted for Bristol did so to express strong personal feelings.
Additionally, it can hardly be forgotten that Bristol is the daughter of Sarah--an exceptionally popular political figure. As such, Bristol must certainly have had a fair amount of her mom's indisputable celebrity "rub off" on her.
But more important than all this, the very number of votes Bristol received must be regarded as suspect (as I'll now explain).
The Politics Behind Bristol's Success
As I said at the outset, political voting can best be appreciated as driven by emotion. An ever-increasing number of pundits have written about how what we decide in the voting booth is finally far less rational than emotional. Whether it's voting from our heart or gut, that organ known as our brain is only secondarily involved in our judgment.
The morning after Bristol was declared "safe" and Brandy eliminated, rumors circulated that the Tea Party had been responsible for her survival (not to mention the entire state of Alaska!). Since it's generally recognized that only a minority of DWTS watchers actually bother to vote for their favorites, the question becomes, "So who does vote?" And, as reporter Jocelyn Noveck opines, "Obviously, people who really, really care"--citing conservative activist Kevin DuJan, whose website, Hillbuzz.org, has fanatically promoted Bristol's cause.
Noveck even quotes one of DuJan's posts as inquiring: "Are you planning on hosting a Team Bristol Monday Night Dancing Watch party? You . . . can actually vote together and send Bristol over the top . . . while sending Leftist heads into meltdown." And in an interview, DuJan defends a voting strategy that, frankly, from almost any ethical perspective would be considered cheating. Namely, using fake e-mail addresses and multiple phone numbers that permit people to far exceed their voting limit (currently set at five).
DuJan, who obviously REALLY cares about Bristol's emerging triumphant has been known to sit at his computer well into the night, voting . . . and voting . . . and voting. His reasoning is, to say the least, curious: "Isn't the winner supposed to be the one who has the most passion behind them? Well, this is passion." A passion, I might add, so over the top that he recommends, after calling the maximum number of times on one's phone, and then on someone else's, "randomly knock[ing] on neighbors' doors and us[ing] their phones to call, call, call, and . . . call some more." Hmmm. This sounds less like passion than absolute monomania.
One irate commenter on Bristol's questionable success (a Mary Jane Urlaub) echoes the words of many others when she proclaims: "The far right has turned a fun dancing competition into a political sign board. We know the Tea Party is out there in great numbers. You don't have to cram yourselves down our throats by ruining an otherwise perfectly entertaining dance competition."
Suggesting that ABC could care less about any flagrant violations of their already so-flexible voting "rules," Conrad Green, the executive producer of DWTS, said in an interview with the Associated Press, ". . . If someone really wants to sign up for a million e-mail addresses . . . well, so be it." But my own (cynical, I admit) paraphrase of Green's comments generally might look something like this: "Hell! this is great for our ratings! So what exactly is the problem here?!"
To conclude, the program's audience participation controversy is, in itself, trivial. Hardly worth writing about. After all, it's just a show, right? . . . Except that, indirectly, it reveals something deeply disturbing about our political system today.
How? Well, for one thing right-wing activist DuJan's almost comically self-righteous perspective on his prerogatives as voter can be stated simply as "the end justifies the means." And how often have our politicians distorted--even made up--"facts" (or what Stephen Colbert, with biting sarcasm, calls "truthiness") for purposes of persuasion? The willingness to illicitly alter, exaggerate, misrepresent, or otherwise pervert what's true for the sake of influencing public opinion, and ultimately controlling elections, has already corrupted our democratic process. (And I'm not even talking about the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, allowing corporations to contribute unlimited funds to support the candidates of their choice--and anonymously at that.)
The arbitrary "rule" (really, non-rule) about breaking rules comes down, once again, to the highly disputable belief that the end justifies the means--which propels us down a most slippery slope. This is the rationale that's commonly given for illegal torture and surveillance, and many other controversial governmental policies as well--including the latest outrage to personal privacy perpetrated on the American people by the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA). To see this dubious point of view taking far-flung root, to the point that it even pollutes the world (or should I say," industry"?) of entertainment, is not a very good omen.
. . . So, whether or not Bristol actually wins the finals, should her mother be chosen as the GOP presidential candidate in 2012, I can only hope that as Americans go to the polls, this apocryphal political philosophy (cf. "might makes right") doesn't end up trumping all fairness and justice.
---I invite all readers to follow my psychological/philosophical meanderings on Twitter.
