Winner of this week’s award for “Person You Definitely Don’t Want To Be” has got to be Lauren Caitlin Upton. Caite holds the Miss Teen South Carolina title, and Friday night on the Miss Teen USA pageant she became a part of internet history. Miss Upton was asked, “Recent surveys have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?” (Not true, by the way. See page 26 of this report.) The video of her answer must be heard to be believed, if not understood. Yoni Goldstein provides a transcript, and a not entirely successful translation into human-speak.
Right now the YouTube video has probably had more viewers than the original telecast, and Lauren is hating life. So I’ll offer a few words in her support. First, I don’t believe that she or anyone else is really this dumb. It was an awful question to get in the context of a vapid beauty pageant, and it doesn’t really have a vague, upbeat answer. Basically, Miss South Carolina suffered a meltdown. (Just for comparison, pageant winner Miss Colorado got the tricky question of picking her favorite from Paris, Nicole, and Lindsay. She said that none of them were very good role models.) She’ll get a second shot at the question Tuesday morning on the Today show, and hopefully she’ll do better. If not, I might have to reconsider her stupidity.
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The thing that caught my ear was the liberal fall back position of bashing South Africa, although since apartheid ended more than 10 years ago she’s a bit behind the times. Seemed like she was trying to mouth some popular lefty trope, and figured she couldn’t go wrong with South Africa.
It shows 1. that she’s even more ignorant than it first appeared, I mean, why even mention S. Africa other than to make some tired point from 1990. and B. that she was trying to pander, she’s just too ignorant to do so believably.
I’m not inclined to cut her any slack. She’s in the pageant, so she’s obviously done well in school, and its apparently due to playing the right game and the fact she’s an attractive girl. Getting by being pretty but ignorant is kind of despicable. Its why everyone hates John Edwards, for example, but at least he has the redeeming quality of deviousness and hateful, calculated mean-spiritedness, which is why he’s pretty and rich, even though he’s ignorant and thick.
Deviousness and dishonesty will get a stupid, attractive person by in the world, as many of our celebs prove daily.
The thing that caught my ear was the liberal fall back position of bashing South Africa…
I believe the new liberal fallback position is that South Africa is full of AIDS, therefore we must Do Something. Your liberal playbook must have gotten lost in the mail. You should request a new one. (Their positions are changing so fast, though, that they can hardly keep up. I hear they’ll be switching to a spreadsheet format soon.)
I believe that stupid, attractive people can lead useful lives in such fields as acting, wearing clothes, pointing to prizes in game shows, taking off clothes, and marrying rich old goats. It’s when they start hankering after intellectual respectability that the mischief begins.
You have a too sunny view of humanity, Mr. Atoz, if you believe that no one can be that dumb.
You have a too sunny view of humanity, Mr. Atoz, if you believe that no one can be that dumb.
More like denial, actually. I work at a university, fer crissakes. The assertion that no one can be that stupid flies in the face of my daily experience, but it’s one of the few things standing between me and utter despair.