Posted by Nicholas | First of all, take a look at the video below. Some of you may have seen it before. It has been all over the net in the last couple of weeks; all over the media in the USA and, for all I know, in other countries too. I first saw it on Bill Maher’s program "Real Time" on HBO last week.
Now, before you all shake your heads in disbelief, let me quote to you something that comes from the September 10, 2007 edition of Newsweek. The writer is their columnist George Will.
"Last week, there was nationwide merriment at the expense of an 18-year-old participant in a South Carolina beauty pageant. Asked a question about why many Americans might lack elementary knowledge about the world, she got lost in syntactical tangles and spoke nonsense. Although there was not a shred of news value in it, Fox News and CNN played the tape of her mortification, and by last Friday YouTube's presentation of it had generated more than 10 million hits. The casual cruelty of publicizing her discomfort, and the widespread entertainment pleasure derived from it, is evidence that standards of decency are evolving in the wrong direction."
With respect to Mr Will, I can not find it within myself to agree. This woman, for that is what the law says she is, has passed through the education system of this country and I think we are entitled to believe that after all that schooling she should at least be able to speak in actual sentences. She was taking part in a contest of a kind that encourages the belief that if you look pretty you are somehow better than other people, of a kind that has been jettisoned in so many countries, but even beauty contests usually do make a pretence of including intelligence and character as part of the winning criteria (which is why it was a running joke for years that beauty contestants used to say that their ambitions were to work with children or animals and to help bring about world peace) when in fact of course they simply provide an excuse for middle aged men to leer at attractive young women.
If the contestants and audience understand that, and are happy with that, then by all means let’s have these shows. On the other hand, if you are going to pretend that the girls taking part have to have reached a certain level of intelligence, then surely creatures like this one shoud be weeded out during the selection process. Is she really the best that South Carolina can do? Does anyone feel that she does her state credit? Those are two perfectly valid questions, I feel. And in deciding the answers to them, I believe we are entitled to see how this girl answered what was, after all, a very interesting and important question. Nothing to do with standards of decency – all to do with the way the system prepares young people to face the world today.
This post also appears at A Gentleman's Domain.
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