I know this is a bit “old” by internet standards, but so is anything else that didn’t happen in the last 5 hours.  Besides, I’m new at this “hot topic” crap, so fuck off.

Anyway, last month a contestant in the Miss Teen USA pageant was asked the question (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Why do you think that 1 out of 5 Americans can’t find the US on a world map?”  She then proceeded to ramble on about how people don’t have maps, and how our education system needs to help people in South Africa and “the Iraq.”

Here’s the video for posterity:

Now, don’t get me wrong…the footage of her confused tangential answer was pretty damned hilarious.

What I don’t understand, though, is why her answer is the national focus here.  What about the stupid question that she was being asked?  Thousands of people are making fun of this chick, but I haven’t seen a single one of them come up with a better answer than she gave.  The fact is, there was no good answer to that question.  The only accurate answer is that 1 out of 5 Americans are fucking morons.

Was that what she was supposed to say?  I’m fairly certain the judges wouldn’t have been pleased.

This was the Miss Teen USA pageant, and she was expected to rationalize why 20% of US residents are too stupid to find 3.7 million square miles on a map?  That’s the problem right there.  We shouldn’t be mocking some poor teenage girl for not being able to sugar-coat a national epidemic…we should be mocking the more than 60,000,000 people referred to in the question.