Flub away, Miss South Carolina
Well, it would be entirely unfair to gang up on the poor girl. But this Today Show sycophancy is just retarded. Basically, by saying 'atta girl, Miss South Carolina - it was just an attack of the jitters and you blanked, could have happened to anyone', they are completely ignoring some obvious facts. For starters, she didn't blank. Rather, the girl was actually trying to achieve something incredibly difficult. And no, I am not referring to the task of winning a teen beauty pageant.
As *everyone* knows, a good ol' southern gal would never stoop so low as to criticize her country in a beauty pageant! That there might be social problems in the star spangled home land is taboo! As such, the question was clearly out of order. Bless our heroine, however, rather than fall into the sneaky trap set by the questioner, she decided to try to redirect it. Unable to risk taking the question about poverty here in the USA seriously, she answers by referring to South Africa to 'the Iraq' and ... well, almost anything but what she feels she really must not say.
In a sense, the Today Show was doing much more than shoring up the poor girl's ego. They were actually engaged in a much more sinister activity. That is, they were performing according to a certain sort of text which demands unequivocally that the actual question which provoked the girl's mistake be banished from all thought. Naturally, the interviewers seem to suggest, anyone would crack under *that* sort of pressure. Of course they would, and there is the rub! Nobody would wish to blame such a nice and presentable young lady for trying her best to perform a script that it has taken the American media decades to perfect. So flub away, Miss South Carolina. At least they won't call you anti-American.
A final note: did you see how the revised answer was so careful? No suggestion that anyone in the USA had no access to a map, or suffered from shite education. This is a shame because, in fact, the 'statistics' tell us that over 10% of Americans cannot read or write at all, 20% of the nation has basic literacy issues, and 13% of all American 17-years-olds are functionally illiterate.
See:
http://www.ahalenia.com/id/id11/illiterati.html
http://www.efmoody.com/miscellaneous/illiteracy.html
"One of the great things about books is sometime there are some fantastic pictures." - George W. Bush
Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein: Sin Patrón
http://lavaca.org/seccion/actualidad/1/1593.shtml
Sin Patrón
Stories from Argentina's worker-run factories
Preface, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein
There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent leftwing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies." Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic, worker management. It's an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: "We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages, making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work, we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."