Really, we were sort of hoping to avoid this whole topic altogether. Because there's already been a raft of soaring, philosophical odes and acidic, who cares?? rebuttals. And gosh, most of the coverage is just so exhausting and insanely thorough and into itself. Take EW.com, which has gone from a mandate of all Twilight, all the time to Boyle Me Up, Scotty! (Because she's Scottish). They've analyzed her slight makeover, about her pre-makeover homeliness, and about how she's made fun of.

And, you know, we don't blame anyone for being interested—we maybe, hypothetically, welled-up a bit when we first saw the clip of her opening that maw of hers and the way-sweeter-than-expected sounds of Les Miserables come pouring out. But we're also resistant to the idea, maybe even repulsed by it, of going in for the real deep dive on this one. Why? Mostly because we should be wise to this song and dance by now, shouldn't we?

Not that Boyle's lying about who she says she is—a spinster and a caretaker who recently lost her mother and has always dreamed of the West End—or that the studio audience's reactions were calibrated, you can't fake that surprise. But everyone else, man. Those two smirking hosts—we'll call them Sunkelman and Deacrest—who smugly said "Weren't expecting that, were you?" The judges, including master of the reality sleight-of-hand Simon Cowell, were probably briefed that something exciting was going to come boundering out from behind those curtains, but were kept just enough in the dark to register genuine, warm, cash-registery shock. But still, despite the obvious machination, or maybe in some perverse devil's bargain kind of way because of it, the hungry cameras descended, and soon after them their wraith-like remorae, the inter-blogs.

And everyone crowed about difference and spinsterdom and challenges and underdoggism and all that stuff that gives us tinny, buttery hope. That stuff that slicks across the surface and disappears just as quickly off the other end. All the while, you know, this woman is being mostly eaten alive, picked apart and poked at and looked over to see what can be extracted. There's gold in that there pill! You know. And not that Boyle herself is some unwitting rube—she's been on shows before, she played a good game of savvy country mouse in relaxed backstage interviews. But still we wonder if you don't quite know what you're getting into before you get into it, even if you dream about it, obsesses over it.

Could Boyle possibly have expected that South Park would make fun of her, and so soon? Or that she'd become the raison d'écrire for many a mainstream pop culture website (ahem) to bang out Way We Live thinkies (Choire Sicha's favorite kind of pieces)? If she did, then the world is more cynical and calculating than we'd previously imagined. Even a little middle-aged Scottish gnome lady wants to be a queen of the blogosphere. And if she didn't, then it's still pretty cynical and calculating, but it's also aggressive and dismayingly opportunistic, for taking a simple woman's hopes and blowing them up to unwieldy proportions.

Don't worry, this isn't some maudlin plea to leave the old biddy alone. Because she has happily signed that contract. What we find a bit uncomfortable, a pebble in our shoe, is how quickly and giddily and with wild abandon everyone threw themselves into this damn vortex. Shouldn't we be past this by now, shouldn't we be all too aware that nothing about these heavily orchestrated Events is ever quite as innocent as it seems? Susan got kissed! The producers knew! Susan got a leather coat! And a movie offer, and a bodyguard, and a duet with Elaine Page, and all manner of things, so don't worry, she's just fine. And that's good. Because she seems like a nice lady.

But when all of this comes crashing down or at least sadly disappears, as it inevitably will, we'd better not fall back on old habits and blame Britain's Got Talent, or the bad, shadowy, anonymous other internet that we, somehow!, have nothing to do with. No, we should be adult enough after this decade or so of the nü-fame game to willingly shoulder the blame for this one. All of us. For the overexposing, for the de-humbling, for the ruining, the backlashing, the annoying ruminating (pot, kettle, I know). Because we messily ran with it, because we let it get out of hand. Because we always do this! And we don't ever seem to learn. This will always happen.

You could say we've got a talent for it.

I mean the whole list is kinda bullshit, they have Jon Stewart at like 24 or something while Family Guy simp Seth MacFarlane is number 1. (Though, I guess he should get some credit for hoodwinking 17-year-old boys into thinking that long, repetitive pauses and useless non sequiturs are high comedy.) Not to mention the fact that the whole idea of the "25 Smartest People in TV" sounds like a complete oxymoron unto itself. Most TV is ruined and empty at this point. And the only "smart" people left are the ones clever enough to feed off its carcass with rehash muck like The Mentalist. And we shouldn't be celebrating that! You know who the actual smartest person on TV is?

Jeff Foxworthy.

Think about it.

Jossip offers names like Biggie, Tupac, and Anna Nicole Smith as comparison, but we've selected three other figures (Lennon included) who died famously and tragically to compare to Russert's death. We'll measure the impact (socially, on the media, etc) of each passing on a scale from 1-10.

The Respected Institution: Tim Russert, Heart Failure, June 13, 2008
Russert was a fixture of Washington press and politics. He was both jovial and stern, pleasant and probing. He was the kind of reporter who gave a good face to politics. To that end, every news media figure had some fond remembrance of Russert, some anecdote. Every news show in the land had (or is having) a special Russert retrospective. A "private" memorial service will be broadcast by MSNBC tomorrow.
Impact: 4. I suppose all of this is just something of a twenty-one gun salute from his colleagues. Some people, like Shafer, may criticize the coverage for being indulgent. Of course it's indulgent, these people are his friends and have newscameras in front of them. Whether some sinister network exec is standing in the shadows, rubbing his hands together, with dollar signs in his eyes seems mostly inconsequential. The lamentation and celebration seems genuine, heartfelt.

The Rising Star: Heath Ledger, Drug Overdose, January 22, 2008
The young actor, who had received critical raves for his portrayal of a repressed gay cowboy in 2005's Brokeback Mountain, was getting large buzz for a number of upcoming films, including this summer's The Dark Knight, in which he stars as The Joker, Batman's arch nemesis. Ledger's death, from a bad mixture of sleeping pills and other medication, was originally thought to be a suicide, but tests quickly disproved that. It seems as though it was just a dumb bit of bad luck. As the paparazzi was largely responsible for Princess Diana's death (see below), the paparazzi made themselves well known here too, this time as rabid spectators and (ahem) gawkers. When the news broke, legions of photographers rushed to the SoHo apartment where the 28-year-old's body was found, hoping to see the body brought out. And they did.
Impact: 5. The instant explosion of news about Ledger's death showed the blogosphere at its full, bellowing power. It mushroom clouded very quickly, with people speculating, trading gossip (was Mary-Kate Olsen involved?), and eventually criticizing the media's lasciviousness toward the whole matter. But news moved on fairly quickly, and it was all over within a week or so.

The Poet: John Lennon Shot and Killed, December 8, 1980
The strange, swirling brain of definitive rock band the Beatles, Lennon was as iconic a figure of the Western world's social, sexual, and political awakening as any other in the 20th century. Naturally, news of his death reverberated enormously with his fans and followers. A crowd of a 100,000 or so gathered in memorial in Central Park, not far from the scene of the shooting. News outlets covered the story non-stop, dogging the surviving Beatles for reactions. Central Park's Strawberry Fields was dedicated in his honor.
Impact: 8. As shocking a death as possible, given the nature of the incident and Lennon's iconic status. Though it had been ten years since the Beatles broke up, Lennon and wife Yoko Ono remained fixtures of the progressive music scene. Grief over his death was genuine and profound, and substantial and enduring media coverage reflected that. In the past two years two films about the assassination have been released.

The Heroine: Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales Killed in Car Accident While Trying to Avoid Paparazzi, August 31st, 1997
The death of Diana, ex-wife of the United Kingdom's Prince Charles, rocked the entire world. A grand tragedy in all possible ways — a lovely young mother of two little boys, a beloved activist for peace to boot, killed in the stupidest and most avoidable of accidents — 2.5 billion people watched her funeral. My mother, who had woken up very early in the morning years before to watch Diana's wedding to Charles, woke us up in the middle of the night to tell us what had happened. The world felt immediate then, everything felt close by — even though we were in a small summer house in Rhode Island and the tragedy was farway on a busy Paris street. I imagine that's how many others felt, as well.
Impact: 10. As big and devastating as these deaths get, one hopes. Loved for her kind nature and down-to-earth sensibilities, for many people Diana represented something universally good and hopeful in the world. When that was taken away, quite suddenly and under such frustrating circumstances, the sense of loss lingered for some time. That sadness, compounded with the scandal of the Queen's relative silence on the matter, made the frenzy over the story reach unimaginable heights. It seemed to go on for months and months (aided, I'm sure, by Elton John's "Candle In the Wind" redo). And who can forget that dreadful, defining footage (shown over and over and over again) of her two boys, William and Harry, walking in the funeral procession?

The real fact of the matter, though, is that many people have died since Friday, since this morning, since I started writing this post. Like I said earlier, nearly every one of those deaths deserves recognition and memorials and all manner of other things. As our world doesn't quite work that way, we're left here with the famous deaths and, strangely, I've been tasked to quantify the reactions. I'm certainly not assessing the import of the actual life, of the actual grief, but rather what the media and its followers did when they stumbled, carelessly or not, upon it.