Say What?

I've been working with the news on in the background this morning. One story that keeps coming up is the Miss Teen pagent contestant. Did you see this? If not, here's a quick recap:

A young lady in the pageant from South Carolina was asked this question: One fifth of Americans cannot identify the U.S. on a map. Why do you think this is?

For the next 30 seconds, this poor girl talked-but said absolutely nothing. I heard her say Ussama, education, South Africa,, Iraq, Iran and a whole, whole lot of gibberish in betwixt.

This is all over youtube and break.com and that's where it belongs. It doesn't need to be continually hammered and exhausted by cable TV. Granted, I should know not to expect more from cable news, but c'mon! There are some major news stories happening and what is our time filled by? Embarrasing a teenage girl.

So, I ask, two questions:

1. Uh, why are we paying so much attention to this girl's flub instead of who won the pageant?
and
2. Why do we still have beauty pageants? Isn't this something that had it's day a few decades ago? Why is stuff like this still so important to American culture?

If I had the opprotunity to answer the question posed to the young South Carolinian, here'd be my answer:

Because Americans spend too much time on youtube and MySpace and watching reality TV. How can people be expected to know anything of even elementary importance when so much of the day is taken up by feeding our brains with pure crap? It can't. And I'm almost surprised the number isn't higher!