This year, the pre-season auditions

force us to confront a question haunting society:

Where is the line between deluded belief

in one’s talent and actual mental illness?

Or, sadder still, mental handicap?

This is the line that the audition episodes walk

Mocking Voyeur Culture

Shopping & Freak Shows [Radical Left]

What purpose does "American Idol" serve? What interest does billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of the FOX network, have in cultivating an audience of millions that blindly adores something that is without substance?

There comes a point where the aspect of “bread and circuses” could not be more obvious.

The term—“panem et circenses”—was coined by the Roman satiric poet Juvenal in the first century to characterize the mindless pursuits of the populace, thus clearing a path for the Roman Emperor Domitian’s despotic excesses.

In the present context, one cannot discount the ruling elite’s consciousness of the social role played by television to distract attention from worsening social conditions at home and a disastrous, bloody war in Iraq.

In a country where political and ideological confusion coexists with vast social polarization, it is hardly astonishing that people can be found who will commit seriously undignified acts in the hope of obtaining substantial sums of money and others who will sit at home and live vicariously through these contrived “real-life” dramas.

"Bread & Circuses" needs an update. With 70% of America'a economy dependent on consumerism. and wall-to-wall Reality TV, "Shopping & Freak Shows" is a more appropriate term for the 21st century.

Vital to the panaceas is the lie that we live in a country where fame, fortune or some variation of the “American dream” is just one contest away. Where consumerism can bring you happiness and status.

Everybody can play, and anyone can win a beauty pageant or a talent show, be the last one on the island or the corporate shill who gets to help Donald Trump build a “crown jewel of modern living” in New York City, etc. Keep hope alive!

Such programming, it should be said, would not be possible without the tabloidization of American television that emerged, not coincidentally, alongside Reaganism.

It probably also would not be so easily realized without mainstream news outlets having plowed the ground with their obsessive and constant attention to the salacious components—at the exclusion, it must be said, of the deeper, political ones—of the Monica Lewinsky debacle.

This mass exercise in human degradation is precisely the sort of thing Aldous Huxley might have conceived had he lived to witness Reaganism and collaborated with Ionesco.

The lies and illusions inexorably bound up with the bread and circuses of the twenty-first century American Empire cannot prevail. Ultimately, reality will intrude.

Mocking Others to Make Us Feel Better [Show Tracker]

Each season of "American Idol" asks our nation not just to choose our champion, but to decide what kind of people we are. What makes us, American viewers of "American Idol" (as opposed to viewers of "Lithuanian Idol" or "Indonesian Idol" or any other franchise of the worldwide empire) unique?

In choosing an idol, we say what as a people we aspire to be -– are we a whimsical beat boxing people or are we at heart a perky yet sincere balladeering people? The great questions of our age each year sort themselves out on the "Idol" stage.

This year, the preseason audition episodes force us to confront another question haunting society: Where is the line between deluded belief in one’s talent and actual mental illness, or sadder still, mental handicap?

This is the line that the audition episodes walk. We all as a society agree that it is wrong and not endearing to mock the disabled.

We also as a society believe that it is impossible not to laugh at healthy-minded people who nurture catastrophic blind spots about their own abilities.

The show by and large seems to recognize that line, saving its worst abuse for the merely misguided, while the truly, clearly handicapped receive gentler letdowns.

However, in this preseason, I find myself questioning whether this divide can be defined as neatly as we would like to think.

The giant hulking fellow, for instance, who walked in circles talking to himself, protected his excruciating voice on the advice of Christina Aguilera and who reported, “I sing so well my dad would say, ‘I hate you,’ ” clearly seemed to have things going on beyond just acoustic overconfidence.

Philadelphia’s glitter girl who lived with her mother in a one-room apartment and launched into borderline Tourette rantings similarly appeared to be driven by some larger issues.

A less-clear question arose when it came to the Elliot Yamin singing park ranger: Is he just really nice or might he be, perhaps, a little slow?

Could his impossible belief in his horrifying singing be a symptom of something else rather than the disease?

Although -- at least in his backstory reel -- he seemed completely functional, it's hard to believe there is not something more going on there.

And if one is going to go down that slippery slope, is the singing waitress who screeches to the cheers of her model boyfriend really just that out of it? At what point does being that out of it become a problem that we should be worried about?

And what of that other demographic –- the people, like the “Guyshadow”-wearing kindergarten teacher, who seem to be consciously making spectacles of themselves in tragic bids for negative attention but who also still pretty much believe they are going to become the next American Idol.

How can such a rich, multilayered denial coupled with delusion not be a sign of something more scary than funny going on (not that pre-homicidal-rampage scary can’t also be funny).

But at the end of an "Idol" audition episode, what the two hours really bring to light is just how fine a line our society walks every day.

How often in each of our days do we stand beside people who wrongly consider themselves intelligent, beautiful, witty, brave?

Often it seems just about everyone we know (certainly everyone I know) is deeply, horribly deluded in some way or another. And in real life, Simon Cowell never shows up with their glass of cold water.

In the end, don’t the audition episodes really point out to us that, viewed under the lights of network television, much of our world may not be just amusingly misguided but in fact -- as Simon labeled Mr. Guyshadow -- “very menacing”?

"American Idol" may not always have all the answers, but it always shows us the questions to ask.