UNITED STATES — Two Terra institutions examined Caleb Flynn, a former American Idol singer and former music pastor, and pronounced him fit to lead. American Idol is a television ritual in which locals sing and are ranked by applause. A church is an institution that distributes moral authority. Both bodies inspected the same item: his voice. Neither inspected his conduct. The first inspection of his conduct was performed by a criminal court, which opened the file only after his wife was dead. The court convicted him of her murder and sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The vetting followed the standard sequence. Step one: the applause. The program measured his singing against other singers; it measured nothing else, having no instrument for anything else. Step two: the committee. The church installed the certified voice as music pastor, a post that requires leading the congregation in weekly songs about virtue. Step three: the other hand. The other hand held an affair with a twenty-year-old woman, and, during the course of that affair, the murder of his wife.
The committee that performed step two has since reviewed its method. "Our vetting form asks about voice, availability, and testimony," said Merle Ottinger, who chaired the music committee that approved the appointment. "There is no field for how a man lives. The ministry keeps a waiting list — the queue of the queue — for soloists, and every name on it cleared the same form. We assumed conduct sat on a different form. There is no different form."
The television institution reports the same architecture. "The program measures one thing: whether the room claps," said Dee Harwell, a former supervising producer for the competition. "The room clapped. Nothing in our paperwork asks what a contestant's hands do afterward. The hands were never our department either."
For calibration: the senate of my home system requires candidates for moral office to submit seven years of observed conduct, audited by officials indifferent to singing. The octopus collective that gave me my first posting required all eight hands visible during vetting. This was considered excessive at the time. I have since revised the assessment.
The trick is now fully explained. The audience watched the hand with the microphone. The court, uninvited and after the fact, has shown the other one. On Terra the other hand is customarily examined last, by force, once the applause has been spent. Step four was performed by a criminal court, alone. It appears on no institution's schedule.
