Had Miss South Carolina Teen USA played her cards right, she’d be fast on her way to a presidential nomination right now—that’s how starved we are for honesty and accountability in U.S. America. As for her intellect, well, this isn’t Holland, or some other wonky nation where they expect their gorgeous blondes to defy the load-bearing limits of contemporary bikini design and extemporize like high-school debate nerds.
Nope, this is America, the place where you can earn a million bucks if you’re smarter than a fifth grader, and where half the nation would starve to death if McDonald’s menus did not have pictures. If you can identify your ass on a map of your ass, that’s actually more than enough.
So when Miss South Carolina Teen USA was asked, during the question-and-panic portion of the Miss Teen USA pageant, why one in five Americans can’t locate the United States on a map, no one was expecting that much from her. Sure, she would’ve seemed a lot smarter had he said something like, “Bitch, this ain’t Jeopardy!, how the hell should I know?” Or, “Hellooo, I’m a teen beauty queen? Let’s leave the saving-the-world stuff to Bono and Kofi Annan, okay?”
Still, what her reply lacked in pith, it more than made up for in nouns. And idealism. (Verbs, not so much.) “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because some people out there in our nation that don’t have maps,” she exclaimed, sounding exactly like a beautiful robot programmed by Jessica Simpson. “And I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should—our education over here in the U.S., should help the U.S., should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future.”
Once a video clip of this performance hit YouTube, the millions of Americans who can’t name a single Supreme Court justice had a new reason to feel good about themselves, and Kellie Pickler had a challenger to the crown of Ditz Laureate. But instead of capitalizing on her new notoriety, Miss South Carolina decided some crisis management was in order and scheduled an appearance on The Today Show.
In at least one way this was a noble move—it would’ve been so easy for Miss South Carolina to declare herself dumber than Paris Hilton’s dumbest chihuahua and rake in millions as MapQuest’s newest spokesperson.
Unfortunately, her explanation for her Miss Teen USA performance was less convincing than Britney Spears’ latest hair weave. “I seriously think that I only heard about one or two words of the actual question itself,” she told Matt Lauer.
Which of course begs the follow-up: Which one or two words, exactly, prompted such a comprehensive assessment of U.S. America’s map gap and its impact on the Iraq, unspecified Asian countries and our future future-building efforts? And how might she have expanded her answer had she heard, say, five or six words of the actual question itself?
Miss South Carolina went on to insist that she and all her friends totally know what maps are, and where their country is on them, and no doubt they can all spell “U.S.A.” too. Instead of making her sound smarter, alas, her assertions just made her sound disingenuous, another shameless phony in the long line of excuse-makers who seem congenitally unable to say, “Yep, you got me. I did it! I wasn’t drunk or temporarily insane or fondled by a priest when I was young. I’m just that dumb, that horny, that warped, and I did everything you’re accusing me of, and more!”
Obviously, Miss South Carolina didn’t cannibalize pit bulls or go trolling for extramarital toilet love amongst crapping heterosexuals. Compared to the hypocrites and liars who’ve enervated and enraged us over the last decade, she’s a 117-pound pillar of tanned, nominally sensate rectitude. But that’s what makes her case so discouraging. By now, we’ve come to expect that our politicians will claim they haven’t had sex with that woman, even when they’ve actually had sex on that woman. We take it for granted that our pastors hate the sinners but love the sin. We assume our sports heroes are cheating on their wives, their drug tests, their defense attorneys and their mistresses. When even our teenage beauty pageant contestants can no longer be trusted to stretch a thong of integrity over the giant ass of deceit that moons us every day, what is left for us to believe in?