“The Miss America Organization might be saying adios to Atlantic City after this year’s pageant,” Debra Saunders points out in her latest column. “Its board of directors has been looking at other cities.

I nominate Berkeley.”

[…] Of course, limiting the pageant to young ladies is likely to violate Berkeley’s refined sense of diversity. The City Council, of course, could pass a resolution inviting the organization to broaden its standards ‘as much as possible.’

Start by changing the title. Miss America is so retro, so Old World. It evokes an age when society wrongly distinguished between married and unmarried women.

Make the pageant Ms. America. Or, to eliminate any hint of jingoism, Ms. Amerika.

Saunders points out that the good progressive folks of Berkeley (at least, the ones she’s interested in for purposes of ridicule) anchor all of their arguments to the likelihood of “world peace” (“Tax cuts? I don’t know… Will they bring world peace?”) — a sentimentalized wish-calculus quite familiar to both Miss America contestants and viewers of the pageant (who’ve become accustomed over the years to the dream of global bliss, as articulated by girdle-cinched and smiling huge-haired honeys with petroleum jelly slathered over their teeth and lips…)

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