Susan Boyle rocks

For a fleeting moment, modern society's soul-deadening din of narcissism and superficiality is drowned out by beauty and grace.

YouTube – Susan Boyle – Singer – Britains Got Talent 2009 (With Lyrics)

47 Year old Susan Boyle wows the judges with her performance in the auditions for Britains Got Talent, singing I dreamed a dream from Les Miserables.

The saddest thing is how shocked we all are by this performance.

The New York Times provided some telling commentary in their article on Boyle:

In a blog on The Huffington Post, the feminist writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin said that she had e-mailed multiple copies of the original YouTube clip, with the subject line “Ageism Be Damned,” to the people on her “Women’s Issues” e-mail list. Many of the women who saw it, she said, wept as they watched.

“I’d wager that most of our joyful tears were fueled by the moral implicit in Susan’s fairy-tale performance: ‘You can’t tell a book by its cover,’ ” Ms. Pogrebin wrote.

For me the moral is, Our culture is so life-denying that we can't even conceive of a woman no longer in the bloom of youth to be of any interest or value. What's truly extraordinary about this story isn't her talent–formidable though it obviously is–but how hostile and dismissive we're all conditioned to be towards somebody like her.

Which is doubly tragic, given how plastic and insipid most of the music "stars" foisted on us are. Boyle's more interesting than a dozen lip-syncing pretty young things in tight skirts.