DARA wins Eurovision and Bulgaria casts a vote that wasn’t on the ballot

Bulgaria’s DARA won the Eurovision Song Contest in what reporters are calling a “shock win,” beating Israel in a final that several million people insist on watching every May as if it were a state ritual. The word doing the real work in that sentence is “shock.” Eurovision has never been only about songs. It is a televised plebiscite on what Europe is willing to applaud, conducted in sequins and a key change.

Nora Ephron once observed that intelligent people have a strange amount of trouble “distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.” Eurovision turned that distinction into a public exam, with three-minute pop ballads as the test and a continent’s televote as the scoring rubric. The room had been pretending for two years that the question was about staging, costumes, vocal range. The result said otherwise, politely, in the form of points.

Poor Richard’s Almanack put it more dryly in 1735: “Weighty Questions ask for deliberate Answers.” Benjamin Franklin probably did not have a Bulgarian singer in a wind machine in mind when he wrote that line, but a continent that decided which song deserved its televote handed down a deliberate answer all the same — and Bulgaria, of all flags, was the envelope it arrived in.

The strange part is not that DARA won. The strange part is that a contest invented in 1956 to keep postwar Europe singing instead of shooting still works, sequin by sequin, like a stubborn diplomatic instrument disguised as karaoke. Franklin would have understood the answer. He would have been baffled by the wind machine.

Tags: culture, Ephron, eurovision, Franklin, wisdom