There she ... well ... isn’t

OK, EVERYBODY: This should be an easy one. What has just been swept off the American cultural landscape? Something that’s been a fixture in this country for decades upon decades? Something that had grown a little threadbare and shopworn but was still quintessentially and vividly American?

Not New Orleans. Not just New Orleans. The Miss America pageant.

For 50 years on network TV and for 84 years in Atlantic City, the beauty pageant that insists on being called a scholarship program paraded itself before a guiltily ogling nation. Every autumn since the Harding administration, Miss America rolled out the new model of young American womanhood, just as Detroit rolled out its new line of automobiles.

This Saturday evening, instead of watching women in sashes and satin endorse world peace on ABC, you can watch a movie about the world getting blown to pieces. It’s called “Armageddon,” which is what life must feel like at the Miss A headquarters these days, since ABC pulled the plug on broadcasting the pageant, and the pageant pulled the plug on Atlantic City. Miss America 2006 will be crowned but not until 2006 and in a city yet to be named. Miss America, like thousands of New Orleanians, is now homeless.

Back in 1960, 85 million Americans watched the pageant; last year, it attracted fewer than 10 million. Nineteen-sixty was also the year of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election, and I read that when Miss America was asked which candidate she thought was better looking, she answered diplomatically but idiotically that gosh, she couldn’t decide.

There’s your problem, right there. Miss America’s appeal became its liability. The nice, well-brought-up, can-we-all-get-along Miss A had to survive in a Fox News-Howard Stern-WWE nation. Any computer screen offers more female flesh; “American Idol” has better amateur performers (and more cutthroat competition); Oprah carries weepier triumph-over-adversity stories; religious broadcasters deliver more wholesome cheer; “Jeopardy!” airs smarter women. Whatever you might want from Miss A, you could find more of it and better somewhere else.

Americans were voting Miss A off the must-see-TV island, which sent the pageant into an identity crisis. It tried audience votes and multiple-choice quizzes (What country gave us the Statue of Liberty? What Emmy-winning diabetic actress spoke before Congress about stem-cell research?). The contestants embraced a “platform,” as if they were candidates for office, but the platforms -- like adult literacy -- sounded more like the inoffensively laudable ideas of the candidate’s spouse.

In the swimsuit competition, Miss A finally kicked off its ridiculous high heels for bare feet, yet it still defends the skin promenade as fitness, not sex. (It never ceased to appall me that to tap into “the world’s leading provider of scholarships for young women” -- as Miss A bills itself -- you have to perform well on T&A; rather than the SAT.)

And just after ABC broke up with Miss A this spring, that heartbreaker Donald Trump moved in on the poor bereft thing, offering to buy out the pageant on behalf of the partnership that runs Miss USA and Miss Universe. Miss A, not to be lumped with such nip-and-tuck meat fests, thanked The Donald politely but refused his suit.

The irony is that the pageant that lost its broadcast audience and its home has been attracting the kind of heavy-hitter contestants a scholarship organization longs for -- the last two Miss Americas were a Harvard Law-bound student and a Rhodes Scholar finalist. Now it heads for cable and Country Music Television. Cable! “South Park” is on cable! Paris Hilton is on cable!

Perhaps Miss A signed too hastily, without exploring how the pageant could play on other cable networks. On BET, at least there’d be something to air. In the bad old days, Miss A contestants had to be “of good health and of the white race”; the first black contestant showed up in Atlantic City in 1970, and the first black woman won in 1984.

On Animal Planet, Miss A finalists could ride to the rescue with Houston SPCA and concoct cruelty-free menus. On C-SPAN, red state contestants could debate blue state contestants on the burning issues of the day. On Al Jazeera, contestants could compete as usual, split-screened with a woman in a burka (at least we think it’s a woman) ranting denunciations of America.

The next Miss A pageant won’t be until January, and in a host city yet to be named. The South still loves its beauty pageants, so perhaps some city in the Bible Belt or the Sun Belt will propose to Miss A. It probably won’t be in California. In the 1980s, hilariously imaginative feminist protests ran the pageant’s Miss California contest out of Santa Cruz, its home for 62 years. The old businessmen’s bar ornamented with pageant photos, so my Santa Cruz friend tells me, is now the hangout of irony-minded punks who like its red decor. Ann Simonton, the former model who led the protests and now runs a sex-and-violence-monitoring website called Mediawatch, told me that the pretense of Miss A -- “pretending to be something other than what it really was” -- did it in. Nowadays, no one believes “that a woman who wants to be a lawyer has to sing some stupid song.”

Still, it’s a shame about the Miss A gap in September’s TV lineup because, this year, the runway crowd-pleaser, the hometown favorite without a hometown, would surely have been Miss Louisiana. And for once you’d know exactly why she’s wearing a swimsuit.