COLUMN: Miss America and Uncle Sam

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98When you tell me that I'm not so pretty, dear --From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98When you tell me that I'm not so pretty, dear --Hell, my looking glass and I agree;From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98When you tell me that I'm not so pretty, dear --Hell, my looking glass and I agree;In the contest in Atlantic City dear, Miss America I'd never be. From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98When you tell me that I'm not so pretty, dear --Hell, my looking glass and I agree;In the contest in Atlantic City dear, Miss America I'd never be.That was then, this is now. Last week, at the contest in Atlantic City, dear, Gershwin's lyric seemed almost outdated. In this post-feminist age, don't you dare call Miss America? beautiful. The essayist Gerald Early calls the Miss America pageant "the worst sort of 'Americanism,' the soft smile of sex and the hard sell of toothpaste and hair dye ads wrapped in the dreamy ideological gauze of 'making it through one's own effort.'" Maybe so, but if the pageant is the "worst sort of 'Americanism,'" then most of America is the worst sort of Americanism. Whatever its faults, the contest embodies our country and our times more succinctly than any other institution. These cultural parallels revealed themselves as I watched from my seat near the catwalk in Atlantic City last week. Like corporate America, the pageant sells political correctness. This is appropriate to a decade in which PC has evolved from a First Amendment threat to a marketing concept. In Atlantic City, as elsewhere, affirmative action has become a growth industry. In the past five years, there has been a deaf Miss America, a (third) black Miss America and, this year, very nearly a Hispanic Miss America. (The Latina from Florida was the odds-on favorite until she told her interviewer she would never lie -- about anything. Post-Monica, neither the crowd nor the judges swallowed this.) This year's crown went instead to an insulin-dependent Virginian who never tired of plugging the American Diabetic Association. The pageant also has all the artificiality, and banality, of modern representative government. Like Washington, D.C., Atlantic City has its streets named after states. The pageant itself evokes a political convention. The contestants even read "platforms," which sound much like their political counterparts. Miss North Dakota promised "to encourag[e] our children to delay sexual activities." One contestant simply stated she would "be an advocate for all of America's children." Hearing the contestants recite their cliched platform statements was a bit like watching congressional floor speeches on C-SPAN. Backstage, an eight-foot-high plastic cutout of the United States graced the press gallery. Each contestant left her inscription on the state she represented. Miss Massachusetts quoted Longfellow. Miss Michigan cheered a local hockey team ("Red Wings! Back to Back Stanley Cup Champs!"). Some plugged a product ("Got Milk? We do!" -- Miss Vermont). Some inscriptions were bathetic ("Home of the Best 'Mall of America.' God Bless," wrote Miss Minnesota). Others were shamelessly political ("Celebrate Cultural Diversity," wrote Miss Florida.) Miss Maryland quoted Proverbs 31:30 -- "Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, shall be praised." The pageant seems to embody all the vulgarity of American popular entertainment. Though created by Atlantic City merchants in 1921 to prolong the tourist season, today's show is designed primarily for television. As with recent Olympics coverage, every contestant has a short, melodramatic video biography, which retails extraordinary and ordinary personal tragedies. ("I lost my three grandparents," lamented Miss District of Columbia.) For the "talent" portion, one contestant sang an aria in what sounded like sotto voce. One did a sassy tap dance to country-and-western music. For no apparent reason, Miss Louisiana wore a blue feather in her hair. All wore sequins. Many of the costumes and performances were as un-selfconsciously campy as a Liberace show. It was very Atlantic City. It was also very American. As Gerald Early notes, the pageant is ultimately about the insatiable middle-class desire for education and professional advancement. Unlike the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, the Miss America pageant awards scholarships. Miss America "is now the contest that signifies the quest for professionalism among bourgeois women," Early writes. "And the first achievement of the professional career is to win something in a competition." In its obsession with material progress, the pageant is actually quite feminist. Perhaps the best description of the pageant is as bourgeois performance art. It is watched in both the heartland and the Ivy League. (On the way to the pageant, I met two enthusiastic Penn grad students, one of whom was a Miss Pennsylvania finalist.) It represents the yuppie America of Bill Clinton, our first truly meritocratic president. Indeed, when Clinton shook President Kennedy's hand in 1963, he was competing in Boys Nation, a sort of patriotism pageant run by the American Legion. In an abandoned press gallery backstage, minutes before the finals began, I ran into Pam Carlberg, Miss Indiana 1981. She pointed to a high-backed wicker chair and potted fern in the corner. Seventeen years ago she sat there for a publicity photo. She wore cream-colored bloomers, a hat with a feather and a brown cape. (It must have seemed chic at the time.) She was the third runner-up, and her $7,000 scholarship put her through college. Today she owns her own business. She has also learned to relax. "Photographs don't age," she told me. "I'm not any younger, but I'm a lot smarter. I've learned to laugh a lot more." Gershwin would have approved.