Reports are that business mogul Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, effectively handpicks the winners to serve his PR purposes. Therefore, he would do well to tap Miss Haiti for Miss Universe this year for all of the international goodwill this would surely engender….
(Miss Haiti: a black nation’s white hope, The iPINIONS Journal, June 3, 2010)
Well, so much for my sentimental pick. In fact, Miss Haiti (Sarodj Bertin) failed to even make the first cut. But I suspect that, with the Pakistani floods now the natural disaster du jour, the Haitian earthquake no longer figures in the consciousness of the opportunistic Mr. Trump or his deferential judges. And, alas, Miss Pakistan did not participate.
In any case, after my jingoistic pick, Miss Bahamas (Braneka Bassett), failed to make the first cut as well, I lost all interest in last night’s telecast from Las Vegas.
Don’t get me wrong, the 15 women who made this cut were hot. It’s just that listening to host Bret Michaels, lead singer for the rock band Poison, continually flub his lines was not. And the way he seemed to deep throat his microphone every time he spoke did not help. Even worse, Bret, looking dazed and confused, kept trying to turn this elegant show into a rock-n-roll concert with his turrets-like yelps of, “let’s rock!” No, Bret, we just wanna see the girls.
Not to mention how stupid he looked wearing his rock-n-roll bandana – a preternaturally vain accessory designed to cover his balding crown. Trust me folks, his ponytail is about as real as Heidi Montag’s boobs.
I hope Donald Trump now realizes that casting Bret to host this pageant was rather like casting The Situation to host the Oscars. But that might be hoping for too much; after all, he cast himself as the show’s announcer. In point of fact, the surreal annoyance of listening to The Donald trumpet his sponsors’ wares at each commercial break was even worse than listening to Bret. Clearly Trump’s hucksterism knows no bounds.
At any rate, before switching (just after the swimsuit competition) to PBS to catch History Detectives, I picked the bootylicious Miss Jamaica (Yendi Phillips) to win. But this only made me a three-time loser when Miss Mexico was crowned as the new Miss Universe. To be fair, though, she really deserved to win.
Still, kudos to our little Caribbean country of Jamaica for producing not only the best athletes, but also the most beautiful women, in the world.
Apropos of this, I am compelled to note that, by being selected as the first-runner up, the very black and proud Miss Jamaica demonstrated to other predominantly black countries that they do not have to send a white or half-white girl (as South Africa and Haiti did, respectively) to compete for this most coveted beauty crown. Indeed, it speaks volumes that none of the five finalists had blonde hair and blue eyes.
Finally, I would be remiss not to comment on the fact that Miss USA (Rima Fakih), a perennial finalist, did not make the first cut either. Yet she was still the most talked about contestant: not only because she was the first Muslim-American to wear the crown, but also because she blithely waded into the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy by declaring that her fellow Muslims should give in to their overwrought, if not bigoted, critics and build their Islamic center elsewhere.
I suppose there really are some women who should just shut up and look pretty….
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Miss Haiti…
A mosque near Ground Zero
Obama wades in on Ground Zero mosque
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