Beto O’Rourke: you make me proud to be an American! Well, not really. But there you are anyway.
(h/t to whoever posted this video the other day, sorry my aging brain can’t remember)
My first thought after viewing that was “Sheep…how perfect.” My second thought was he’d be a natural contestant on Fox’s new hit show, The Masked Singer. Not familiar? I wouldn’t have been either but for a story I caught on the local Fox affiliate while waiting for the local weather. It’s a talent show that features “celebrities” disguised as, well, furries/feathers of one sort or another singing pop songs. No, I’m not making this up. That was someone else’s job.
“Based on an international format, and already a viral phenomenon with over half a billion fans worldwide, THE MASKED SINGER features celebrities facing off against one another with one major twist: each singer is shrouded from head to toe in an elaborate costume, complete with full face mask to conceal his or her identity.”
The “international format” they reference is the Asian market. The prototype was a Korean TV show called King of Mask Singer which appears to have been inspired by Japanese anime.
Thailand has its own version called The Mask Singer, where as far as I can tell the contestants dress up as fruit, here the stinky durian, and sing American pop songs:
It would be fair to describe all versions of The Masked Singer as a sort of dystopian take on the world that could best be explained by extreme radiation exposure. Too bad there isn’t a Japanese version, because it would provide the perfect subject for Gerard Van der Leun’s perennial question – “The Japanese: Nuked too much or not enough?”
So you see, the show is perfect for Beto, as well as a huge swath of his contemporaries. But fair warning, I will give 10 demerits to the first person who suggests that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would make the perfect dystopian donkey: too obvious and it’s already been done.
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