Sense and Sensibility

The Way We Work Now

My father’s best friend of 50 years grew up in a tenement in Dorchester, Mass. They fit 13 families in those cramped digs, which were decrepit almost as soon as they were inhabited. The area was saturated with gangs; John, my father’s pal, was in two of them. At 17, when John moved to Medford, a city just north of Boston, he saw a tree for the first time.

In the evenings, when John’s mother served him dinner, he got milk in a measuring cup. His mother poured the milk sparingly, up to the three-quarters of a cup line. That was all he got, and John learned to make it last.

When John got a job, at 16 as an apprentice printer at The Boston Globe, where he met my father, he wasn’t thinking about his passion. He wasn’t thinking about finding his bliss. He wasn’t thinking about self-actualization. He was thinking about that measuring cup. He was thinking about his stomach, and he was thinking about getting a roof over his head.

At the gym, working out on the treadmill, my friend tells me she feels like a factory worker. The team spirit that used to make work rewarding has vanished. Management is looking only at dollars and cents. The feeling of accomplishment has been supplanted by a suspicion of exploitation. Nobody actually cares about you anymore, she says. You’re just a cog in a set of gears whirring faster than ever. No one appreciates you.

“There’s no pleasure in work any more,” she says.

When the Dow was chugging along over 10,000, it was easy to wallow in the indulgences work offered. Large companies had gyms where they could monitor their employees’ well-being. They took them on touchy-feely outdoor ropes classes where they could advance their team spirit. They put in day-care centers and cafeterias where the chefs changed weekly.

At Google, the search-engine company, employees got free haircuts, subsidized massages, an in-house laundry, a gym, pool and game room full of ping-pong, foosball and billiard tables. At its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, it ran 11 gourmet cafeterias where all the food was free to employees.

Not to be outdone, the Container Store, which has benefited handsomely from all that stuff we’ve amassed, instituted a “family friendly” shift from 9 am. to 2 p.m. to allow for school drop-offs and pickups. At Gentech, a San Francisco-based company, employees earned a six-week paid sabbatical for every six years of service.

When labor is scarce and money flows freely, it’s heartening how indulgent management can be. In the pre-August days, we could all pamper ourselves with books about following our bliss, with Oprah leading the way. We were living our best life. We were seekers, finding our spiritual path. If we could believe it, we could become it.

This “delusional optimism” of mainstream America, Barbara Ehrenreich has written, has made thousands for its megachurch preachers and slap-happy pseudo scientists. Is there any more intoxicating snake oil than the power of positive thinking? It has worked for everyone from Dale Carnegie to the Little Engine That Could.

 “[T]he idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because ‘visualizing‘ something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen,” Ehrenreich wrote. “You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can.”

That way of thinking wove itself deliciously with the credit markets push for Americans. Frost this confection with generous managers and the de-clawing of debt and you’ve got today’s financial morass.

Perhaps we were so inebriated with the illusion of our own mythology that we forgot that work really was, well, work. It was labor performed for a price. We did it not because it enhanced our self-esteem or gave us goose-bumps of empowerment, but because it filled our milk glass.

If there is any upshot of this deplorable parable it may be that we understand that work does not define us as it provides for us. It is toil for which we are remunerated. We are all mercenaries now.

A Dog With Lessons Still To Teach

      For a long time, I had an old dog.

My old dog didn’t run any more.

His leg buckled one day about 5 years ago, and he became lame. He had been fielding a tennis ball, among his favorite amusements, and he looked up at me in a mixture of fear and apology and I knew he would never run again.

We had it repaired – but it was never the same. He never did run again with that ferocious fluency he had as a young dog. The way his shoulders muscled forward and the lean sinews of his belly stretched elegantly over the grass. Oh, he was beautiful to watch.

But when his left leg went, his right swiftly followed, so that when I touched his hind quarters his bones felt like dozens of little stones zippered into a purse of fur.

When he looked up at me, after he tore his ligaments irreparably, I remembered the first time I took him to the forest to run and he frolicked so hard and wantonly that he didn’t notice the ravine until he was chest deep in it. He yelped, and I ran, finding him sitting plaintively in a pool of mud, his right front paw proffered up to me as if in supplication.

I scrambled down the embankment and held his paw in my hand, feeling his coarse, plump paw pads to assess the damage. He looked at me with his chocolate brown eyes as if inquiring how extensive was the damage. I rubbed his paw and nodded reassuringly. With that, he leapt up the embankment, clawing at the rooted clay and sprinting ahead to the copse, free and exultant.

Never before or since had a touch from me healed any living thing.

So when he became old and limped and panted and slept so much more than he fetched, I found new, less exhausting ways to love. That is what you do when your loved ones age. You don’t ask about hikes or tours or concerts or diversions more exhausting than comforting. You ratchet down. You soften. You nuzzle against their belly and scratch their ears. You see their snouts widen in what you think resembles a smile.

We all know how these stories end. We know it from the beginning. But we do it anyway.

When I got Sam from a shelter 14 years ago, my beloved father, now gone, said to me, “I want you to know that if you get a dog, you’re going to have a lot of dogs.” Sam was only a puppy but my father was trying to steel me, to protect me, inure me from inevitability. To love, he was trying to say, is to lose.

But in those days, Sam was so young and spry and invincible and abounding with curiosity and life. He could hear then, and every wail of a siren was followed by his yawning, plaintive howl, such that I could not think of a fire engine without instinctively waiting for his response.

So, too, with yogurt, which I probably shouldn’t have given Sam, but did. Not a lot‑ just the dregs of the plastic container my spoon could not reach. Sam would take it in his teeth to some dark lair, where he would prop the yogurt cup between his two paws and ravage the insides with his long, elastic tongue.

When he went deaf and could no longer react to words like “squirrel,” no rhythm was lost between us because by then we knew each other better than most living things could. He could no longer lunge upward to the bed and lay his wet, bearded chin on my chest. But he would sidle up to my legs and with a low, hesitant wag; offer an ear to nuzzle or a belly to rub.

Not long after we got him, I realized that Sam was a better Christian than I’d ever be. He was devoid of temper, or pride or envy. He forgave promptly and completely. His instinct was love. It was not something he had to work at.

Mostly, Sam taught me how to be old and that being old and brittle is not a cause for pity or regret, but an opportunity for solicitude and growing place for love.

What did he know about death, I wonder, that I have yet to grasp? He knew that at some point, it is time to accept with grace an inevitability that spares none of us.

I still listen for him, the tap of his claws on the wood floor, the painting of an old dog exhausted by the effort. I am hollow in the place he filled, longing for the lessons he still had to teach.  

Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com

Rain, Rain, Make My Day

Did I get off on the wrong plane and land in Dublin?

No, no, it can’t be. In Dublin the sun actually shines in the summer.

The sun. That’s right. That large, honey-lemon orb that’s gone AWOL since Memorial Day.

The sun has made fewer appearances this summer than Whitey Bulger in the North End.

As of Monday, rainfall totaled 8.35 inches this month in New York’s Central Park, more than triple the normal 2.17 inches for the period. In Hartford, there has been 3.61 inches of rain this month, compared to a normal of 2.26. If you look really, really hard at the weather icons in the upcoming days, you do see some sunshine ahead. (Oh, wait, those are lightening bolts.)

Television meteorologists are trying really hard to explain why we are getting saturated this summer, showing you their super cool Doppler and their high-tech Accu-this and Accu-that, but it all boils down to the same thing: “Rain happens.”

I don’t even bother to check the forecast any more. It’s like waiting for the results on a test you know you bombed.

Every now and then the sun shows up on a video, like Osama bin Laden. (Here’s a conspiracy theory: Is it just a coincidence that both Osama and the sun have bin> missin’?)

I was really going to try to be good this summer and avoid the sun. Can you believe it? I was afraid of ultraviolet rays. I didn’t think rust would be the real risk.

And not only rust but despair. Yes, good, old-fashioned, bleak, dismal, gloomy, alarm-clock-what-alarm-clock despair<$>.

No one is happy. OK, maybe immigrants from The Scottish Highlands are happy, but unless your idea of tropical involves mud and mushrooms, you’re pretty miserable. The only way to get rid of misery is to share it. So you hear a lot of conversations that go like this:

“This weather<$>.”

“Don’t even say it.”

“Have you ever<$>?”

“It’s just so ‑

“No kidding.”

“You said it.”

“What can you do?”

In fact, we in New England have a right to be extra miserable because we know that this parenthesis between mud and frost is truncated enough as it is.

Now that we can scratch June off the beachcomber radar, we’re looking at two months before we have to haul the turtlenecks out again.

In fact, some of us are sorry we put ours away.

In Greek mythology, the sun was personified as Helios, a hot-looking dude who drove a chariot drawn by horses from the East to the West, bringing light to the Earth.

Clearly, Helios took a wrong turn and because he’s a man, he refuses to ask for directions.

Not Another Politician With His Pants Down?

South Carolina Gov. MArk Sanford

The best part of last week’s blubbering apology by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford – besides the rich vein of satire it offered late-night comedians ‑ was the absence of his wife at the press conference.

For once, in what has become a conga line of confessionals by wayward politicians, a beleaguered wife did not dutifully march to the public kneeler with her cheating spouse.

For enraged wives everywhere, nauseated by the public humiliation of compliant spouses standing by their men, it was a pyrrhic vindication. OK, the guy cheated with Eva Peron, but at least his wife didn’t stand by him as he belted “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”

At least she had a little dignity.

Since infidelity has become the most popular hobby of the political elite, it is no longer the shock of the revelation, but the drama of the confession that has audiences riveted. Did they cry? Did they whimper? Did they invoke scripture ‑‑ or Rudyard Kipling? What about the other woman? Was she a looker ‑ or a hooker? Or a man? What about the e-mails? Was it Charles and Camilla or Abelard and Heloise?

And what about the wife? Did she quiver with a Stepford Wife stare like Dina McGreevy or turn steely-eyed and brittle like Silda Wall Spitzer?

Outside of the hackneyed and elliptical apologies of the offenders, one of the great unifying themes of cheating politicians is the lumbering clumsiness of their romantic overtures. You get a transcript of some of these emails and cell phone conversations and you understand why Nora Roberts has sold 8 million books. Have none of these men seen “The English Patient?”

Nevertheless, as tedious as these hypocritical homilists have become, there are signs of a New Dawn. Not only did Mrs. Sanford absent herself from her husband’s public farce, but the Italians – the Italians, no less – are tiring of Silvio Berlusconi’s dalliances. What will they tire of next? Olive oil?

The Italians, like the French, are a good deal more indulgent than we in matters of indulgences of the flesh. As long as the trains run on time and the bread is fresh, what happens in Rome stays in Rome.

That, of course, was before Berlusconi began attending the birthday parties of baby sitters. After his wife – a luscious vixen who posed topless in that gem of the Italian cinema “The Magnificent Cuckold” – began chastising him in the Italian press as a chicken hawk, Italians began to take note. It was not just that he was gallivanting about with floozies young enough to be his granddaughters; he was actually plying them with money and jewels. Berlusconi fruitlessly denied this, helpfully telling the Wall Street Journal, I’ve never understood what would be the satisfaction if there isn’t the pleasure of conquest.”

That’s the kind of answer you want from a married man.

Perhaps it is not outrage but fatigue that has bled this story dry. When The New York Times reported that a former White House intern who had an affair with John F. Kennedy would publish a memoir of her experience, all I could do was suppress a sigh. Is it still news that any estrogen-bearing creature within 10 miles of Pennsylvania Avenue had sex with JFK? Wouldn’t it be more newsworthy if you had been a female member of the White House staff who didn’t sleep with him?

If these sagas about finger-wagging cads and sermonizing southerners teach us anything is that we’ve got the wrong bunch of people authorizing canards like the Defense of Marriage Act. When they only real turn of the screw to a political sex scandal is the spouse who didn’t show up, it’s time to move on.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com.

Is Summer Boredom Worse in the Techno Age?

About this time of year, I start getting the summer question: “What are you going to do with your son this summer?”

The question always makes me flinch. Firstly, it makes P.J. sound like a sofa —- “Oh, I thought I’d put him in the basement with the Christmas ornaments.”

Secondly, it reveals a profound maternal deficit on my part. The truth is, I haven’t thought about my son’s summer activities. I figured P.J. would spend the summer pretty much as I had —- shooting lay-ups, catching tadpoles and watching reruns of “The Big Valley.”

But that’s not the way kids spend their summers these days. Today, kids’ summer activities are routinized, categorized and plotted on an Excel spread sheet. Nobody spends their summer lying around on the neighbor’s hill, as I did, searching for animal shapes among the clouds. Today, there’s sport camp, science camp, drama camp, art camp, Scout camp and, my favorite, imagination camp.

Brochures for all these camps clot my mailbox like pollen on the windowsill, making me feel derelict and impoverished. These camps are expensive, but, as their sales department tell you, they’re imperative. The average kid loses 2.6 months of educational advancement during the summer, making you feel as though you should sue the school department for ever considering the idea of summer vacation. If it’s not bad enough that popular culture is trying to turn your child into a cabbage whose only aptitude is shopping, the unstimulating repose of the summer is actually eroding your child’s brain cells. If you don’t sign him up for the camp where kids play hopscotch on the periodic table, you might as well buy him the Taco Bell smock now.

It’s enough to make you wonder how on earth you got through your own summer without a Blackberry.

The summer I was 11, I drafted a play called “The Giant’s Chair,” and cast every neighborhood kid in different roles. We performed it late one August afternoon, with me, standing on a tree stump, acting as narrator. I can recall nothing of the plot but we charged 25 cents to sit on the lawn and watch the thing, and when it was all over we had enough for several bags of Wise potato chips and a six-pack of Fanta grape soda.

The next year, I decided to hold a block party. True, I was only 12, but I had seen the neighbors on Paul Revere Road do it and it looked like a cinch. I rode my Columbia bike down to the police station and filled out a permit. I went around the neighborhood with a clip board and asked who would bring what. I sat down with my neighbor, Jeannie Collins, and we figured out a series of games for the little kids. I believe most of the neighborhood came just to see if a sixth-grader could pull off something like that.  

After that, junior high was a snap.

I read that the recession is forcing families to cut back on vacations and summer camps. On the front page of the New York Times I read recently that a couple is having to trim expenses but hasn’t had the nerve to cut the $545 monthly bill for dance lessons.

All over the news I see stories about “The New Frugality,” and tips on how to get by in tough times.

A friend of mine, who lived through the Depression, told me recently about how his family used to make dinner for seven out of a can of soup and loaf of bread.

“Drop an egg in the soup and you’ve got your protein,” the guy said.

Meanwhile, my brother, planning my niece’s sixth birthday, tells me he’s not sure he can afford the Moon Walk this year, but he’s pretty sure he can still spring for a clown.

The other day my son came home from “field day” at school, a sort of free-for-all of obstacle courses and relay races. He spent two hours in the den with 24 stuffed animals and a dozen pencils, arranging some sort of elaborate stuffed-animal Olympics whose regulations eluded me. He kept track of the winners on a piece of paper, meticulously calculating points and scores for each team. “Mommy,” he said. “Plats’ team is up by 35 points!”

I suppose I’ll send P.J. to a few day day camps this summer; a couple of weeks won’t hurt him. I’m sure he’ll make great friends and terrific memories. One day, perhaps he’ll tell his children about them. Or perhaps he’ll still remember, as I do, the summer he tried to top his mother’s personal record for successive pogo stick jumps [Dash] 1,110.

That’s a number, like the surprisingly imaginative fertility of summer boredom, that stays with a person.

Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com.

Written by Tracey O’Shaughnessy, c. 2009 Republican-American

Chinese Take the High Road to Whiskey

 I’m so happy about the Chinese buying Hummer.

Maybe McDonald’s will be next.

Too bad they passed on Linens ‘n Things. What a cultural coup that would have been [Dash] His and hers towels in organic bamboo.

I’m already feeling the Chinese Tiger blowing hot against the back of my neck.

But I’m not sure all this off-loading to China is all bad. After all, how smart could a country be when the first item on their shopping list is Hummer?

Yet Hummers are surprisingly popular in China, where sales of SUVs have jumped more than 43 percent over last year. Well, somebody’s got to buy those leviathans and we’re running out of 98-pound suburban mothers to skipper them.

China, where the richest 10 percent of the population controls 45 percent of the country’s wealth, is feeling its oats. As its per capita income soars and its percentage of nouveau riche swells, China is beginning to show all the signs of a disease that first incubated in the U.S.: Affluenza, defined by author John deGraaf as “a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”

Perhaps you know someone who’s had a bout or two.

We all know the symptoms of affluenza [Dash] the $21,000 per year spent on consumer goods, the flat-screen TVs in the bathroom, the DVD players in the back seat, the home additions the size of a strip mall, the $9,000 in credit card debt. Oh, the thrill of it all. Just thinking about how much money I could spend without having any gets me teary-eyed with nostalgia.

I wonder how the Chinese will take to it.

China, a country that has lurched from reinvention to reinvention, has become so acquisitive that entrepreneurs have inaugurated foreclosure tours to the U.S., National Public Radio reports. Chinese bargain hunters are scouring our foreclosed real estate like bridal parties at Loehmann’s. When of one of these Chinese tour agencies advertised for 40 spots, it was inundated with 400 applications. No, the Chinese are not trying to take advantage of our mortgage rates; NPR reports that, in most cases, they just pay cash.

How could the Chinese have so much dough?

Simple. They’re cheaper than your grandparents.

The personal savings rate in China is about 30 percent of household income, compared with a U.S. rate that is 3.6 percent. In the U.S., where credit card card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, our personal savings rate fell from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to 0.5 in 2005. It has since inched, like our anxiety, upwards.

The Chinese have become so thirsty for Western style decadence; they’re beginning to suck up all the whiskey in Scotland. The Chicago Tribune reports that Chinese imports of Scotch whisky have skyrocketed from $2.9 million in 2001 to more than $90 million in 2005.

As you might imagine, these Dionysian pleasures are rewriting the social dynamic of China. Chinese children, already an indulged lot by virtue of the country’s one-child-per-family policy, are spending like Ruth Madoff in the port of St. Thomas. Within the byways of Shanghai’s finest neighborhoods, annual per capita consumption of Chinese children reached $1,565 [Dash] this in a city where each resident’s disposable income is a mere $2,309.22

According to the English-language People’s Daily, in nearly 80 percent of working-class three-member households, the monthly consumption of the child is even greater than the adults.

When kids are spending more than their parents, China begins to look more and more like us. I’m holding on to my Apple Dippers. In this race, he with the last Happy Meal wins.

Reach me at TraceyOSh@tracey.com

Dan and Sadie’s Magnificent Journey

No, it’s not your imagination.

That bicycle was hauling a dog. Sadie, a 3-year-old golden Labrador retriever, is enjoying the cozy accommodations while her owner, Dan McCrady, bikes 850-miles from Annapolis, Maryland to Portland, Maine.

The pair has been pedaling through Connecticut this week.

McCrady,, a 61-year-old federal government retiree, is riding a recumbent bike, complete with a commodious trailer typically occupied by toddlers, from his home in Annapolis, to Portland to raise awareness for the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which links major cities between Maine and Florida, often using old rail or canal lines, like the linear path in Cheshire, where McCrady biked Wednesday. While the Greenway is a recreational boon for fitness buffs, McCrady’s goal was not to be the poster boy for the Greenway Alliance. Not at first, at least.

McCrady, who was an Information Technology specialist with the government, is simply a guy who likes to challenge himself. Since his retirement from federal service at 55, he has returned to college to get his bachelor’s degree, run a marathon, obtained his pilot license and become a magician. And, oh, yes, he also took culinary classes at his local community college so he’s chef to his wife of 33 years.

Biking from Maryland to Maine just seemed another challenge. And what better way to do it than with man’s best friend?

“She learned how to get in the trailer instantly,” says McCrady, a medium-built man with a short-cropped gray beard. “But it took her about a week to get used to riding in it.”

Lest anyone imagine Sadie is just a trailer potato, McCrady notes that Sadie jogs alongside the bike for at least 10 miles of what is typically a 55-mile daily ride.

McCrady, who has biked a three-day, 200-mile ride with a friend every year for the last several, expects the entire bike trip will take 22 days, with two days off a week to rest. After all, he says, “I’ve never done anything like this before. The first time I got off the bike I slept for 22 hours.” Initially, McCrady figured his challenge would just be a bonding experience for him, his dog, and the bike. But he figured that it would cost more than $2,000 for accommodations alone. So he contacted the Greenway Alliance, and suggested his ride could help raise awareness of the East Coast Greenway. Only 20 percent of the Greenway is off-road; the Alliance would like to make it 100 percent.

The Alliance agreed and supplied post-card size informational cards, which McCrady hands out to interested observers, as well as flags and a shirt emblazoned with the Alliance’s name. McCrady’s recumbent bike which was donated by Sun and Solvit products donated the trailer.

McCrady travels with a computer and blogs about his experience daily at www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie. That site also allows supporters to make donations to the Greenway Alliance. Since he began his ride on May 23, McCrady says he’s raised nearly $4,000. He hopes to raise $10,000 for the organization by June 13, when he expects to finishe in Portland. On Wednesday, McCrady stopped in to Cheshire Bike and Repair Shop to adjust his bike and true his wheels. Sadie ambled over to the sidewalk, where she slept, her chin resting on the cool cement. “The first week was awful,” McCrady said of the ride. “It was hot; it was humid; there were hills. By day eight it was fun and it’s still fun today.”

While riding through a sketchy section of Bridgeport earlier this week, McCrady said he noticed a toothless, gesticulating man running toward him, shouting. “I seen you!” the man hollered. “I seen you.” McCrady was alarmed but the man said, “I seen you on the 12 o’clock news.” McCrady stopped, shook the man’s hand and let him pet Sadie. As the man walked away, McCrady heard him mutter, “I done caught me a celebrity.”

For more information, visit www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie.

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Boyle’s High Price of Fame

I wanted Susan Boyle to win.

I wanted Susan Boyle, the zaftig Scottish spinster with a penchant for Andrew Lloyd Webber to win Britain’s Got Talent.

Instead, she had a nervous collapse.

Boyle, the dowdy old maid whose frowzy looks and blistering alto bowled even the misanthropic Simon Cowell over, was hospitalized at the Priory, a mental-health clinic, after coming in second in the top-rated British TV show. She joins a list of celebrity alumni like Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, all of whom had a longer tenure with fame than has she.

Who couldn’t have imagined it would end up this way?

There were really only two ways for this story to end and we all knew it.

First, there was the romantic notion that I and millions of others harbored – that Susan Boyle, representative middle-age frump, would crawl up that stage in her mother-of-the-bride dress and low-heeled pumps and blow all those pneumatically enhanced airheads out of the park. Talent triumphs over Botox. Virtue vanquishes vacuity.

Or something like that.

But the reality was equally imaginable: 48-year-old maiden aunt with learning disabilities succumbs to the merciless machinations of fame.

Which story is better?

In Forbes, Quentin Letts blamed the prurient public, which feasted on her freakishness with an avidity that bordered on the predatory. “The guilty party is, surely, all of us–all the members of a society that fell on an un-photogenic virgin as though she were the last tribal bush woman in the Amazon,” he wrote.

For all its fairy tale potential, popular reaction to Susan Boyle reeked of our basest instincts. Would she have been nearly the success if not for the freak-show nature of her success? If she hadn’t been so maladroit, if her bio had not shriek with anachronisms (48-years old and never been kissed!), would we even know Great Britain had a counterpart to “American Idol?” More to the point, had she looked her idol, Elaine Paige, (a name infrequently invoked in these circuses) would her story been nearly as interesting?

As the daughter of a large woman with a big voice, I have a soft spot for Susan Boyle. But, perhaps because I am the daughter of a woman with talent, I know what a double-edged sword such a gift can be. 

The trouble with talent is that you have to do something with it. Not to seems the height of ingratitude. But fame is not only fickle, but Faustian, and more often than not, fatuous. The famous are not always the most talented, but the neediest, the least secure and the shallowest. Indeed, if you were anything but shallow, the price of fame would be crushing.

“Anybody asked to sing live without professional training will face immense pressures, and then follow that up with a barrage of public comments about her looks, talent and behavior from all over the world and it’s incredibly intrusive,” Chris Thompson, medical director of the 14 Priory hospital, told The Associated Press. “It is an ethical problem for producers.”

An ethical problem for producers? Can those two words be invoked with a straight face? The only thing producers of “Britain’s Got Talent” were vexed about was the lack of revenue Boyle’s 225 million YouTube web views were generating.

“Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive” lamented the New York Times, itself at pains to figure out how to make money on the web.

Meanwhile, the British public appear to be in active penance. “Never in our fast-changing history, until Susan Boyle, have we managed to quite so swiftly canonize and then pillory another human being, for our own titillation,” wrote the London Observer.

I wanted Susan Boyle to win because I want to believe in fairy tales. I want to believe that a chubby church volunteer with a voice like a trumpet could sweep the world off its feet and remind it that looks don’t matter. I wanted her to win because I’m a romantic and a softie, and, like so many of us, root for the underdog.

But perhaps victory is not measured in YouTube votes or the approbation of the sneering Simon Cowell. Maybe it’s just going home to the place they know you best, snuggling up with your cat, turning on the telly and knowing you could knock the pants off them – if only the price weren’t so high.