In Defense of Beauty Queens

The now legendary response of Miss Teen South Carolina to the question about 1 in 5 not be able to locate the U.S. on a map has been discussed quite a lot in the past few weeks. Sure we can all slam her to feel good about ourselves. We can all engage in that monotonous pastime of trashing a stereotypical icon of Americana: in this case the gorgeous barbie-like beauty queen with the southern drawl. How post-modern! How predictable! How boring!

Let me now stand up in her defense. She was asked to give an instantaneous response to a non-pre-scripted question: something that politicians and other media types have attempted to eliminate precisely to avoid these types of problems. She wasn't given a question about solving a problem. She was essentially asked the question "Studies have shown that 1 in 5 people are complete morons" and asked to explain WHY that was without being told anything further about who took the study, who was surveyed, or anything else that might have helped her formulate a response. I will explain why this is an unfair question.

I have heard plenty of people say that a second grader could have given a better answer. The funny thing is though that I have yet to hear anyone who has criticized Miss South Carolina explain how THEY would answer the question. I can tell you how I would answer the question. The answer as to WHY is because those 1 in five individuals are (a) stupid; (b) senile; or (c) still infants. I am not however, in a beauty pageant where I am being judged on my poise, charm, and congeniality. She would have likely lost a ton of points if she had given the real answer to the question.

Herein lies the difficulty and probably why she started babbling rather than give a coherent response: the only legitimate answer is that every 1 in 5 people who were part of that survey are idiots. I have subsequently heard her carefully considered response that she has stated on morning television shows and it sounds wonderful and is also completely non-responsive to the question because there is no way to answer the question without asserting that people who cannot identify the U.S. on a map are idiots.

As an aside, I would bet you that 9 out of 10 Americans can't identify Madagascar on a map, but no one thinks that this is problem. Why not? Because finding something in the shape of a what a country looks like from outer-space on a small piece of paper is not practical in any way. The same applies to the U.S. Who cares if someone can't find it on a map. When would you need to identify the entire U.S. relative to other countries on an outline map in any useful context? There are none.

So the only argument that can be made is that even if this is not practical knowledge, people must really be asleep at the switch if they cannot locate the U.S. on a map. As someone who can identify about 90% of the world's countries with ease on an outline map of the world, I find it shocking that most people don't know what continent some countries are on, let alone how to identify anything more than Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. To me they are just as ignorant as the one in five since memorization of this type is easy if you have ever read a book or watch the TV news for more than a few days. But since none of this is really practical knowledge, we shouldn't be surprised no one really cares about finding other countries on a world map.

We really shouldn't care about finding the U.S. either. We can look down at our feet if we want to see it. Like the Stephen Wright joke goes, we all carry a scale map of the U.S. around with us wherever we go. Why do we need to identify it on a small piece of paper? We already know where we are.