A truly extraordinary experience - wonderful and, yet, anger-producing,too.

One just has to Google "Susan Boyle" to find YouTube clips of her appearance on "Britain's Got Talent", the Brit version of American Idol. I don't watch it and so had to be alerted by someone to this amazing situation. A very unattractive, dumpy-looking woman of almost 48 years from Scotland applied to this show with the snotty panel, led by the usually-supercilious Simon Cowell, sneering in advance at her professed desire to be a professional singer. Then she opened her mouth and even the musically unsophisticated could recognize that this is a major talent. Even the hyper-critical Cowell was blown away.

It is incredibly touching and one thinks, How nice for this woman! Then, upon reflection, one gets a bit angry. Here is someone who sings like an angel and has remained undiscovered up to age almost 48 probably because she doesn't LOOK the part AND she never got a chance! What an incredibly inefficient market the entertainment industry is!

I've often thought that the reason Hollywood and entertainment types have such contempt for capitalism, despite their wealth, is that they know that they have only been lucky; that there are 1000 others for each of them who have equal or greater talent and worked just as hard or harder but somehow never got the breakthrough chance that propelled them to success. Susan Boyle exemplifies this point.

One can rejoice that she has finally been "discovered" but it is upsetting that she missed the boat for so many years when others, of lesser talent and with obnoxious personal characteristics, succeeded instead. It's great that we now know her name, and it seems inevitable that she will be very successful as a recording artist, but one can only wonder how many other people of similar talent continue to go unrecognized and not only in music but in all fields of endeavor. Worse, how many have native talent that is never developed and represent wasted human potential?