Like many other people who walk this planet, I too well up a bit when I see Susan Boyle, that unemployed frumpy English spinster who shambled onto the stage of a British television show a couple years ago, faced a scornfully uppity audience, and then turned jeers into cheers within the first verse of her “I Dreamed a Dream.” What’s not to like? Her story has all the appearances of a modern-day Cinderella. A musical Rocky who triumphs against the odds. The rock that was once cast aside has become the cornerstone.
I’d like very much to just leave it at that. But there does seem to be another dimension to the Boyle story—especially that first public appearance that now has over 58 million hits on YouTube—and this other dimension doesn’t entirely fit the Cinderella template. In the case of Cinderella and Rocky--the classic underdogs--the audience is always on the side of the outsider. What else is the wicked stepmother for if not to give us a pretty significant hint right from the get-go that we should cast our lot with the downtrodden and nurture our benevolent suspicions that the forces of poetic justice will turn the tables before all is said and done?
That’s not exactly the way Susan Boyle’s drama plays out. In the Britain’s Got Talent spot, the audience is both the wicked stepmother and then, in a sudden flash, the faithful confidante of the downtrodden. On display in that video is Miss Boyle’s crystal voice, but so is our remarkable capacity to, at one moment, indulge in the pleasure of demeaning someone who is comically vulnerable—and, fess up, there is pleasure to be had there—and then, when the situation alters, recast ourselves as the champions of the outsider. Truth be told, we have the ability to pull this off so abruptly that it’s startling that we all don’t all settle to bed most days with nasty cases of whiplash.
At least we’re in good company. I suspect just about everyone is familiar with that very similar sudden reformation that utterly transforms a dog, from tail to snout. One minute it’s all bark and threat and fang, and then the moment that Muttly figures he can’t win the battle, the head drops, the tail wags, and aggression turns into the kind of eager social invitation that risks embarrassment, like a kindergarten kid offering his classmates a dollar to be friends.
If my tone sounds disparaging, it's not out of any contempt for our canine sistren and brethren. Little could be further from the case. But my affection for dogs isn’t enthusiastic enough to render me fully blind to the deficits in their character. Unfortunately, neither is my own egotism sufficient to keep me from seeing bits of myself in the uncanny canine capacity for conversion. What's more, those patterns also seem to be writ large in our national politics. What, for example, lies behind Barack Obama’s recent swings in approval ratings, hitting 68% about a year ago, then dropping to 43% around election time—when attack adds fill our collective consciousness—and then unaccountably rising back to 50% according to Gallup surveys?
Maybe there’s some part of us that actually likes the drama of the swing, some part that enjoys the dizzying pleasure of moving our positions and that isn’t much troubled by inconsistency. So we build celebrities, and we tear them down. Or maybe we’re always negotiating the best way to be on top, forever calculating and recalculating whom to be for and whom to be against. Maybe the winning is all.
