You Call This a Time-Honored Tradition?

So distraught was the nation over Katrina this past September that they somehow failed to notice who won the Miss America pageant on the third Saturday of the month. The answer, of course, was no one. Once the Country Music Television cable station picked up the pageant from ABC, the pageant's directors decided to move it to Las Vegas and reschedule it to the third Saturday in January, effective immediately. The beauty ideal will be played up once again, and the Miss Congeniality award will be reinstated. In other words, they're doing what Republicans in Washington are doing - trying to set the calendar back eighty years. (Just continuing the pageant itself sets the calendar back fifty years.) Such efforts should please Cal Thomas, who characteristically found time to complain about efforts at modernizing the pageant in his column but didn't find enough time to offer suggestions on how to provide 46 million Americans with health insurance.

Some New Jerseyans still grumble about the pageant being moved from Atlantic City, though moving it from one gambling mecca to another is hardly anything to bitch about with a straight face. After all, they argue, the pageant is betraying a sense of tradition. Yes, but many traditions - Latin Mass, doctors' house calls - have also faded away with little attention, and other traditions - like lynchings - are not the kind you want to bring back. Beauty pageants are an idea whose time has long since gone - at least in the blue states - and anyone who doesn't have CMT on basic cable (or has it but doesn't watch it) will hardly miss it. Still, there is a bittersweet pang of rue in seeing the Miss America pageant move to Las Vegas. On the morning after the pageant, the newly crowned Miss America always took a ceremonial wade in the water at the beach outside Atlantic City's Convention Hall. With that 83-year-old ritual consigned to history, Miss America 2006 dipping her feet in a wave pool at a Strip resort just won't seem the same. :-O