Paul PottsWHO?: Cell-phone salesman who, in 2007, became an everyman Britain's Got Talent winner and a ubiquitous YouTube sensation by singing arias in a vibrato-heavy tenor.
PROS: Brings opera to the masses.
CONS: Middlebrow entertainment posing as high art. Repertoire consists of the most overplayed of opera's "greatest hits" mixed with pop schlock. Is currently on tour in the U.S. with several other, even schlockier vocalists.
Pol PotWHO?: Cambodian leader of the Khmer Rouge, a brutal Communist movement dating from the mid-'70s. Set high standards for truly insane, violent dictators that today's truly insane, violent dictators only dream of matching.
PROS: Is currently dead.
CONS: Believed to have killed 21% of his country's population, as many as 2.5 million people, by some estimates.
WINNER: All things considered, I've got to go with Paul Potts, even though the Times reports that in a recent NYC appearance he sang "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in Italian, with an operatic arrangement--which, last time I checked, violated the Geneva Conventions. Pol Pot's singing voice was reportedly quite "pitchy," but genocide is worse than the death of taste.
3 comments:
Glad you picked Paul! We visited Cambodia in 2004 and saw the Tuol Sleng genocide museum (former prison.) I could feel the evil hanging in the air.
I can imagine. Will and I visited Terezín when we were in the Czech Republic a few years ago, and I could say the same thing about that awful place.
Aww, gotta love them evil dictators! Stalin was a REALLY happy fellow! He had drinking contests just to ferret out "crimes against the party!" And I don't mean the Communist Party, I mean the all-night bash at his house!
A staff of six stalwart troops all fired up near the wall behind his dacha just oiling their triggers!
Pol . . . Pol . . . . Pol. Well, there's gotta be SOME kind of scale of "The Worst Evil Dictators, Child Molesters and Serial Killers," doesn't there? He's allowed an 8.76!
Uhh . . . are you sure he's currently dead? Could be a Pol-ter-geist.
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