Yes, I chuckled when I watched Miss Teen South Carolina's response during the 2007 Miss Teen USA Pageant. After the laughter subsided, however, I was left with the strange feeling of familiarity. After some reflection, I realized why I recognized the pattern. Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton's response is the same thing I've been watching on the news. It's the same thing as the speeches I see politicians make to garner votes and the pseudo-academic responses that my Duke peers give in class.
It's nearly formulaic. She begins by identifying her nationality (U.S.-American), as if it were ever in question. She then makes a vague statement that other people in our country are incredibly disadvantaged (in this case, by not having maps). Implicit in this statement is the fact that Miss Teen South Carolina is clearly separate from this disadvantaged subgroup. All this establishes her as a compassionate, socially-aware American.
Perhaps aware that the question is of a political nature, she cites one of the hottest political issues of the moment: education. Of course, this issue is rather safe because there are clear "good" and "bad" sides; no one is anti-education. This allows Miss Teen South Carolina to mention politics without actually being political.
In what must have been a moment of panic where she realized that she hadn't mentioned any poor, foreign country in her response, she makes a quick save by doing a bit of name-dropping. My guess is that she was starting to repeat the oft-broadcasted phrase "The Iraq War" but stopped herself partway when she realized she couldn't mention the messy word "war" on TV. No beauty queen response would be complete without a reference to some African country. Africa is so sexy right now. Asia is mentioned as an afterthought.
To conclude, she refocuses on America, because clearly we can't focus on those other countries for too long. Obviously the point of mentioning them at all was to segue into a statement of how we should munificently help them, this time through our "education," which is apparently superior to theirs, despite the fact that some people out there don't have maps. Miss Teen South Carolina kindly reminds the audience that this is all for the future and children, which kindly implies that if they don't like her garbled response, they also don't like children.
Is that really something that we all haven't heard a hundred times before? Did it warrant 13 million hits on YouTube? Overuse and misplacement of prepositions aside, her answer was perfectly crafted in the style of the day.
Speech has become much less about what the words mean and much more about what the words say about the speaker. Contemporary Americans obviously don't listen for a thesis or any trace of logic in an argument; we just listen for a catchy soundbite. Let us not forget that a majority of the country thought it was a good idea to follow President Bush into war because he told us he was fighting for "freedom."
Miss Teen South Carolina is just the confused product of a culture that has taught us that it is more important to make it seem like you're saying something than to actually say something.
It's so easy to laugh at the blonde chick. Oftentimes our classmates don't answer questions any better than Miss Teen South Carolina. Why don't we crack up when they respond to a professor's question by trying to imitate some academic pattern of speech instead of focusing on the content of their argument? For example, one student in Professor Erwin Chemerinsky's constitutional law class produced the following gem: "I think the important thing about the religion clauses is that when people disagree about religion, it's usually about things they don't agree on." Perhaps the reason no one laughed is no one was listening; everyone was busy planning what they were going to say next. Perhaps the reason is that the student made this statement in such a confident voice that people just assumed he was right.
We all speak like Miss Teen South Carolina. The structure of her response could have easily been the structure of the State of the Union, the keynote address at a fundraiser or a presentation in a Duke classroom. That's why she was saying those things in the first place-she was trying to mimic the type of speech she had repeatedly heard earn applause. I'll agree that Miss Teen South Carolina sounded like a fool, but then so do we all. Perhaps we should start judging our peers, politicians, leaders and selves as harshly as we've been judging a beauty queen.
Julia Torti is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Monday.
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