It's not surprising that the Miss America pageant is being yanked from the cold, dead hands of Atlantic City. Broadcast television gave up on the pageant after ratings progressively tanked throughout the 1990's, and for good reason: if we wanted to see beautiful women engage in scantily-clad self-promotion, we'd watch Fear Factor. At least those women are eating cockroaches and not boring us with how they're going to achieve world peace. Everyone knows that world peace can only be achieve by bombing the crap out of innocent brown people.
The bigger point is this -- Atlantic City is going to lose the pageant, likely to some locale in the South. CMT is going to televise the event for the foreseeable future. It's a brilliant play by the CMT folks because Southerners Love Pageants. I used to date a girl from Tennessee who was involved in these things at an early age. It's disturbing stuff.
Things I learned while Googling for this post:
- Oprah Winfrey was Miss Fire Prevention and Miss Black Tennessee in 1971.
- Pennsylvanian Sharon Stone was 1976's Miss Crawford County.
- Imelda Marcos was Miss Manilla 1953.
None of this information will earn either of us a promotion. Sorry.
