Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 80

The End of Politics for Brazil's 'Frank Underwood'

NEWS BRIEF The Brazilian Congress that former House Speaker Eduardo Cunha revved up to oust President Dilma Rousseff has now turned against him. At nearly midnight Monday, lawmakers voted to expel Cunha, a move that could lead to a trial against him for his alleged role in a corruption scandal.

The Chamber of Deputies voted 450 to 10 to dismiss Cunha for perjury, corruption, and obstruction of justice. Cunha has been called the “Frank Underwood” of Brazilian politics—a reference to his supposed trove of political secrets he wields like weapons—and he had once dominated the House that turned on him. For the past year, he has been closely watched by investigators amid accusations he stole $1.3 million from the state oil company, Petrobras, and hid it in Swiss bank accounts. Before Monday’s vote, the ethics committee overseeing the investigation reported that strong evidence tied Cunha to those overseas accounts, in which he’s accused of laundering millions.

Cunha, as the Associated Press reported, denied any wrongdoing:

"This was a political process because I kicked off the impeachment proceedings. They wanted a trophy," he said at a news conference.

"The current administration adopted the agenda of removing me from office," he said, adding that he planned to publish a book telling about the behind-the-scenes dealings that led to the impeachment of Rousseff.

The vote to oust Cunha also came with a temporary ban on him holding public office. That’s significant because it takes away legal protections for sitting lawmakers and sets him up to be tried for the allegations of stealing money and lying about his overseas bank account. Cunha has already been indicted on some of these allegations, including money laundering and illegal currency dealing.

Along with the $1.3 million Cunha is accused of stealing from Petrobras, he is also accused of receiving many more millions in bribes. Cunha came up through political ranks after hosting a radio show on an evangelical station. He became House speaker, and he enjoyed strong public support. But that support began to wane after prosecutors released his family’s credit-card statements. Amid the bribery allegations, Cunha claimed only to have made $120,000 each year. But his family’s spending habits suggest he’s accustomed to a much more extravagant lifestyle than that salary affords. As The Guardian reported:

On a nine-day family holiday in Miami at the end of 2013, the speaker and his family are said to have spent more than $40,000. This included his wife Claudia Cruz’s shopping splurges on designer goods – $1,595 on Giorgio Armani, $3,803 on Salvatore Ferragamo and $3,531 on Ermenegildo Zegna – and restaurant bills that often ran to more than $1,000. In the two months that followed, there were similar blowouts in Paris, New York and Zurich.  

In June the investigation of Cunha’s income and Swiss bank account was put on hold by his political ally, who was also the vice president of the Chamber of Deputies, during Rousseff’s impeachment proceedings. The irony of this, of course, was than while Rousseff was accused of fudging numbers to make the economy seem stronger that it was, Cunha was being investigated for stealing, hiding the money, and lying about it to prosecutors.

There has always been some political reluctance to go after Cunha, because it’s said he knows many of his colleagues secrets, including others who’ve been implicated in the wide-ranging Petrobras scandal. After the vote Monday, he said: “They are charging me the price for leading the impeachment process,” Cunha said. “Tomorrow, it will be you.”

Obama's Veto Threat on the Saudi 9/11 Bill

NEWS BRIEF President Obama hasn’t changed his mind about a bill that would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia—despite the overwhelming support of both the House and Senate.

The House on Friday passed the bill, which would create a special exception to a 1976 law that grants foreign governments immunity from lawsuits in cases where those governments were found to have played a role in a terrorist attack. The Senate passed the bill in the spring. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest reiterated on Monday that Obama intended to veto the bill. The New York Times reports:

“The president feels quite strongly about this,” Mr. Earnest said of the legislation, which Mr. Obama has said could dangerously undermine the United States’ interests globally, opening the country to a raft of lawsuits by private citizens overseas.

“The concept of sovereign immunity is one that protects the United States as much as any other country in the world,” Mr. Earnest said, referring to the rationale behind a 1976 law that gives other countries broad immunity from American lawsuits. “It’s not hard to imagine other countries using this law as an excuse to haul U.S. diplomats or U.S. service members, or even U.S. companies, into courts around the world.”

The issue places Obama in a tough political spot. U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, traditionally a key, if flawed, regional ally in the Middle East, have become strained during his term in office, but that has not changed his determined stance against the 9/11 bill. My colleague Peter Beinart in April made the case for why Obama should override it.

But the bill has bipartisan support in Congress—notably from Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the presumptive Democratic leader in the Senate starting in January. Obama has vetoed fewer bills than any president since Warren Harding, but Congress has never overridden one of them. The 9/11 bill could become the first override of his presidency—though Earnest said he’d lobby legislators not to try.

Did Chicago Cops Try to Cover Up the Shooting of Laquan McDonald?

NEWS BRIEF The killing of Laquan McDonald resulted in first-degree murder charges against Jason Van Dyke—the first on-duty Chicago cop to be charged with a homicide in more than 35 years.

Those charges were one of the many results of a video of Van Dyke shooting McDonald, a 17-year-old who was walking away from the officer, in October 2014. The incident revealed deep systemic issues within the Chicago Police force. When officials released the clip, there were days of protests, the police superintendent was fired, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, on the defensive, agreed to major changes to the department. District Attorney Anita Alvarez, who was seen as dragging her feet, lost a primary in March.

But even with those steps, some important questions about the shooting itself remained unresolved. There were at least another eight officers on the scene, but initial written reports absolved Van Dyke, with police saying that McDonald was shot after he refused to drop the knife and advanced on officers. The video showed that McDonald was walking away. Van Dyke also shot him several times after he had fallen to the ground.

Now Patricia Brown Holmes, a special prosecutor appointed in the McDonald case has asked for a grand jury to investigate whether police officers were involved in a cover-up. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Holmes declined to say Monday how many officers were under criminal investigation, but she emphasized there would be "no rush to judgment."

"We want to make sure that they are treated fairly ... and that we're doing things the way that they ought to be done," she said.

A judge said the grand jury would convene within two weeks. Holmes declined to say how many officers could face charges. In August, Superintendent Eddie Johnson began the process to fire five officers—four patrol officers and one sergeant—whom he accused of lying in the McDonald case.

Holmes said she wanted to have a grand jury investigate rather than decide on charges herself.  “In a decision that’s this weighty and important, I think the public would want to have some oversight,” she said. “It’s fair and it’s impartial and it lends credibility to the process.”

In fact, grand-jury proceedings are secret, and their track record in recent cases involving police violence is not especially strong. Grand juries declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown; New York City officers who choked Eric Garner; or Cleveland police officers who killed Tamir Rice. Contrary to Holmes, many advocates say they think grand juries are a poor way to handle police cases, because a grand jury is opaque and easily swayed by a prosecutor. Activists in Minneapolis successfully lobbied the district attorney there to decide whether to charge officers in the November 2015 shooting of Jamar Clarke, instead of taking the case to a grand jury, but were disappointed when he opted not to bring charges.

There’s no set timeframe for the grand jury to complete its work. Regardless of what decision it reaches, federal prosecutors and the city inspector general’s office are also investigating a potential cover-up. Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty.

Upholding Michigan's Emergency Manager Law

NEWS BRIEF The state of Michigan can continue using emergency managers to solve local financial crises, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The court upheld Michigan’s law that allows the state to take away local power and appoint emergency managers to serve for 18 months or more. The law was signed by Governor Rick Snyder in 2011 and notably used in Detroit Public Schools and Flint, where thousands of people were poisoned from lead-tainted water. Local NPR affiliate Michigan Radio reports:

Federal appeals court upholds MI emergency manager law; says there's no 'fundamental right' to vote for local officials.

— Rick Pluta (@rickpluta) September 12, 2016

The law has been unpopular in local communities that have been assigned emergency managers. The New York Times highlighted some of that concerned earlier this year:

In Flint, emergency managers not only oversaw the city—effectively seizing legal authority from the mayor and City Council—but also pressed to switch the source of the financially troubled city’s water supply to save money.

In Detroit, the schools are on the brink of insolvency after a series of emergency managers dating to 2009 repeatedly failed to grapple with its financial troubles, while also falling short on maintaining school buildings and addressing academic deficiencies. The current emergency manager for the schools, Darnell Earley, previously served in that role in Flint.

Under the administration of Snyder, who has held office since 2011, seven cities or school districts have been declared financial emergencies and placed under appointed management, state officials said. During the eight-year tenure of his predecessor, Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, five cities or school districts were given emergency managers.

Earley stepped down from the Detroit Public School post in February.

A task force in March found that emergency managers appointed in Flint, along with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, were the primary culprits for Flint’s water crisis. The task force found the state’s actions “inappropriate and unacceptable.”

Saturday Night Live Hires Three New Cast Members

The Saturday Night Live cast reshuffle is an annual tradition, one reflecting the show’s confidence in its future. Some years more than half of the ensemble will turn over, a sign of a transition between eras; at other times, like last year, there are barely any changes made. This summer is falling somewhere in the middle: After the somewhat surprising firing of Jay Pharoah, Taran Killam, and Jon Rudnitsky, the show will add three young comics as featured players for its 42nd season premiere on October 1. They include the show’s first Latina performer, Melissa Villaseñor, as well as Mikey Day and Alex Moffat.

The fact that SNL has never employed a Latina performer in its 42 years perfectly illustrates how slow it’s been to acknowledge demographic changes in comedy. The show has featured two performers of Latin descent: Horatio Sanz, who is Chilean-American, and Fred Armisen, whose mother is Venezuelan and whose father was Japanese and German. Villaseñor, an L.A.-based comedian, was a competitor on America’s Got Talent in 2011, where she showed off her skills as an impressionist; she should prove a valuable addition for a show that often calls on its white performers to impersonate Latina women. From a demographic standpoint, the only surprising move among the hires was the lack of a younger black actor to replace Pharoah; his wide range of impressions, from Barack Obama to Will Smith to Jay Z, will be difficult to replace.

Day is a member of the L.A.-based improv troupe The Groundlings (which has produced dozens of SNL alums including Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig) who has written for SNL since 2013. Over the summer, he was a cast member and head writer on Maya & Marty, a variety series starring Maya Rudolph and Martin Short. Though that show didn’t make much of an impression with viewers, it featured the same basic live TV elements that make up the building blocks of SNL, something some performers can struggle to adapt to. Day is a proven talent at this point, and should slide into some of the roles Killam previously took on.

Moffat is a Chicago-based performer from the Second City, the improv empire that produced talents like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Tina Fey. His web series “El Show with Alex Moffat” is an odd pastiche of a comedy talk show, but aside from that, he’s likely the biggest unknown quantity among the cast. In previous years, SNL’s honcho, Lorne Michaels, has taken flyers on stand-up comedians like Brooks Wheelan or Rudnitsky, clearly impressed by their presence during auditions, but they’ve struggled to fit into sketches, only standing out during segments on Weekend Update adapted from their stand-up act. This year’s hires are more improv and sketch-focused, which bodes well for comedy that relies on group dynamics.

The loss of Pharoah, however, will be tough to bear. There were that the show had hired Chris Redd, an African American comic who broke out as the demented rapper Hunter the Hungry in Andy Samberg’s film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. They were denied by SNL insiders, and the season 42 cast now appears to be set with no obvious replacement for Pharoah lined up. The show’s other male African-American actors are the longtime veteran Kenan Thompson, and the Weekend Update host Michael Che, who rarely appears in sketches.

The clear impetus this season is for newer cast members like Beck Bennett, Pete Davidson, and Sasheer Zamata to step up and make a bigger impression among an ensemble that currently has only one obvious star (Kate McKinnon). Though SNL’s ratings are relatively steady, it hasn’t enjoyed the typical bump that comes from an election cycle, which is particularly surprising given the hoopla that’s accompanied the Clinton and Trump campaigns. This fall, the show will be five years removed from the departure of many of its biggest names, Samberg and Wiig among them. If this season is as muted as the last few, Michaels will surely be looking for a more dramatic shake-up.

Son of Zorn Mocks the Cartoonish Alpha Male

The muscled hero of Fox’s new sitcom Son of Zorn is a knock-off version of He-Man: a bare-chested, sword-wielding animated hero with flowing red locks and a penchant for violence. He’s also a fish out of water, living in the (extremely un-animated) suburbs and working an office job to be closer to his estranged son. Meanwhile, his retrograde view of the world seems mired in the previous century. Midway through the pilot episode, Zorn describes his new job with a sense of wonder. “My boss looks and talks exactly like a woman … he wears skirts, he’s carrying a purse, he uses tampons,” he marvels. “Honestly, if he wasn’t above me in the chain of command, I’d swear he was a woman.”

Sitcoms have always relied on the meathead for easy laughs—the handsome, lunkheaded, skirt-chasing fool who remains unflappably self-confident no matter how often he’s the butt of jokes. But as times have changed, it’s been harder to poke fun at toxic masculinity while keeping the audience on the character’s side. For Zorn’s backward nonsense to fit into the modern world in 2016, he has to be a literal cartoon, a sword-wielding troglodyte whose behavior is excusable because he’s basically from another planet.

Son of Zorn, which debuted Sunday night, jibes interestingly with the rest of Fox’s Sunday animation block, which has been dominated for the last decade by Seth MacFarlane’s particular brand of humor (Family Guy, American Dad, The Cleveland Show). Though he has his self-referential moments, MacFarlane is still the man who sang “We Saw Your Boobs” at the Oscars; Zorn, it seems, operates at about the same level of wit. The pilot episode takes the same tack as the recent 21 Jump Street reboot (both were shepherded to the screen by the directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller) by satirizing a world that’s leaped forward while its protagonist has stood hopelessly still.

In 21 Jump Street, Channing Tatum’s character was a high school meathead who always got the girl; but when he went back to school years later as an undercover cop, he was shocked by a world where “nerds” were more venerated than jocks and his cockiness was plainly written off as sexism. In Son of Zorn, the hero flies from his cartoon fantasy-land to Orange County, California, because he wants to be closer to his heroic son Alangulon (Johnny Pemberton). Expecting a buff hero, he’s horrified to find that he goes by Alan and is a staunch vegetarian (whereas when Zorn is asked how he’d like his steak cooked, he answers, “Not”). Son of Zorn does well to avoid the argument that something has been lost in this new, progressive world—Zorn is very much a buffoon from start to finish—but the gag has nonetheless started to wear thin by the end of the first episode’s 22 minutes.

The closest analogue to success for Zorn might be FX’s animated hero Archer, another toxic bro who leads his show as both a hero to root for and an idiot to deride. Like the super-spy Sterling Archer (played by H. John Benjamin), Zorn is voiced by a comedic actor (Jason Sudeikis) who knows how to shift from a heroic, booming voice to beleaguered sarcasm without undercutting the character. But unlike Archer (a fully animated show), Zorn has to interact with real people, including his ex-wife Edie (Cheryl Hines), through simple CGI trickery. It lends an unfortunate flatness to most of the jokes—when the characters lecture Zorn about his latest bit of cartoon tomfoolery (at one point, his office’s conference table is cleft in twain), it doesn’t feel like they’re acting against anything except a tennis ball to fix their eyes toward.

The meathead (in all his varieties) isn’t going anywhere, but he is evolving—How I Met Your Mother’s Barney and New Girl’s Schmidt both settled down into serious relationships in their sitcom runs, The Big Bang Theory’s Howard is happily married, and even Archer has become a father trying to take more responsibility for his child. Son of Zorn is instead moving in a weirder direction, hoping the absurdity of its premise is enough to wring jokes from every week. Its hero is a fish out of water not only because he’s a cartoon but because he’s drawn straight out of the early ‘80s. The more the show pushes at the darker aspects of that conflict, rather than make goofy jokes about vegetarianism, the funnier it’ll be.

In an attempt to win his son over, Zorn presents him with an oversized cartoon falcon to ride to school; when Edie objects, he jabs his sword through its neck with hilarious carelessness, then starts hacking it to pieces so he can put it out with the rest of the garbage. That’s toxic masculinity for you: Grim and hard to clean up, but still an easy punchline.  

The Blissful and Strange World of Radiohead's Short-Film Contest

Anyone feeling taxed by current events, the change of seasons, or the question of what to eat for lunch this week might appreciate some time spent on Radiohead’s Instagram page. There, the band has been posting short videos set to snippets of instrumental music from their new album A Moon Shaped Pool, allowing viewers to make quick escapes into other worlds.

The most recent clips featured are the finalists for an open competition in which Radiohead invited the public to provide visuals for an alternate version of the song “Daydreaming.” The sound snippet is all swirling piano and violins, and the contest’s vignettes apply the pastoral mood to a variety of surreal situations—wheat fields, city streets, dark abstract spaces.

A video posted by Radiohead (@radiohead) on Sep 3, 2016 at 7:00am PDT

A video posted by Radiohead (@radiohead) on Sep 4, 2016 at 7:16am PDT

A video posted by Radiohead (@radiohead) on Sep 9, 2016 at 6:59am PDT

Today, the band announced a winner: the Instagram user Affintia’s psychedelic and dizzying take on the Powers of Ten concept, zooming the viewer ever-deeper into a geometrical world. The official, full-length “Daydreaming” video, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, looks nothing like this one. But the feeling of slipping between places is shared by both clips and might be a key to the song’s meaning. Or maybe Radiohead just was thinking about what looked cool.

A video posted by Radiohead (@radiohead) on Sep 12, 2016 at 7:00am PDT

You can scroll through the Instagram hashtag #rhvignettes to see more submissions for the contest, clips that the band didn’t end up shortlisting but that are nonetheless lovely ways to spend a minute. Even something as simple and obvious as raindrops on a window becomes a bit magical with this music:

A video posted by Hesam Rahmani (@hesam.t.rahmani) on Sep 6, 2016 at 11:57am PDT

Earlier in the year, the band posted mini videos it had commissioned from established filmmakers for other songs on the album. Many seemed to have a political edge, commenting on environmental destruction or hinting at corporate horror in graceful, striking ways. There were also pure aesthetic experiences in the mix, like this ravishing dark-to-light visualization for “Glass Eyes”:

A video posted by Radiohead (@radiohead) on May 13, 2016 at 6:59am PDT

Radiohead has experimented with the short-film format before, releasing a bunch of “blips” for Kid A in 2000, a time when such efforts online were novel. Today, it’s normal for musicians to offer an avalanche of visual content alongside their music, and it’s normal for them to hold social-media contests. But these new clips don’t feel like promotional gimmickry or trend chasing; they just feel like examples of real communion between artists and fans. Though A Moon Shaped Pool was the band’s most viscerally pretty album yet, it was also knotty, remote, and hard to love. These videos offer a new way in.

Jeff Bezos's New Rocket, Built to Carry Payloads and People

NEWS BRIEF Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, has unveiled the design of a new rocket that will carry satellites and astronauts to space, fly back to land on Earth, and stand almost as tall as the rocket that launched Americans to the moon nearly 50 years ago.

Bezos said in an email Monday that the orbital rocket, known as the New Glenn, will be ready for a test launch before the end of this decade. The rocket is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.

Here’s a look at New Glenn, alongside other rockets—past, present, and in development:

Blue Origin’s next step…meet New Glenn #NewGlenn #GradatimFerociter pic.twitter.com/p4gICKZRfi

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) September 12, 2016

New Glenn will measure 23 feet in diameter, with 3.85 million pounds of thrust. It will be powered by seven Blue Engine 4 rocket engines, which Blue Origin has spent more than four years developing, that burn liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen. The same kind of engine will power the new Vulcan rocket (pictured above) from United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which is scheduled for test launch around 2019.

The New Glenn family will include two variations. The two-stage version of the rocket will be 270 feet tall. The three-stage version will stand 313 feet high, with a “high specific impulse hydrogen upper stage” that will allow the rocket to fly further into space, beyond low-Earth orbit.

The image Bezos shared on Twitter was meant to drive the point home—to both the public and his competitors—that the New Glenn will be huge. The rocket will also be powerful; with 3.85 million pounds of liftoff thrust, the New Glenn will surpass the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy, the most powerful rocket in operation, at 1.6 million pounds. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, seeks to surpass them both; its Falcon Heavy, whose first launch is scheduled for November, will generate 5.13 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Here’s some more perspective on power, from Eric Berger at Ars Technica:

By way of further comparison, the space shuttle’s main engines had an individual thrust of 470,000 pounds. Along with its solid-rocket boosters, the shuttle had 7 million pounds of thrust at launch. The Saturn V rocket, with five F1 engines, had about 7.5 million pounds of thrust. So Blue Origin’s very first orbital rocket will have slightly more than half the thrust of the rockets that carried humans to the Moon.

Bezos said Monday his company’s reusable rocket, New Shepard, “has taught us so much about how to design for practical, operable reusability.” In November 2015, Blue Origin launched New Shepard—named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space—and returned it to Earth for a soft, vertical landing, becoming the first to successfully land a reusable rocket on the ground after launch. But observers—especially Bezos’s competitor, Musk—pointed out that while New Shepard reached the boundary where outer space is understood to begin, it did not enter orbit.

North Korea's Deadly Floods

NEWS BRIEF Heavy flooding triggered by Typhoon Lionrock over the weekend prompted an unusual appeal for help by the government of North Korea, which called the deadly natural disaster the “the strongest storm and heaviest downpour” the country has experienced in decades.

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported Sunday the governing Worker’s Party called on its members and service personnel to help respond to the flooding that has caused the destruction of tens of thousands of homes, public buildings, roadways, power systems, and other critical infrastructure located primarily in the country’s Northeastern Hamgyong province. At least 133 people have been killed, according to a report by the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and nearly 400 remain missing.

OCHA, citing North Korean government data, estimates at least 140,000 people are in need of emergency assistance, three-fourths of whom have been internally displaced.

The natural disaster prompted the government to redirect its 200-day loyalty campaign, aimed at mobilizing national support for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, to assist those affected by the floods. Such public admissions of needing help by North Korea, however, are rare. CNN explains:

"It's not unheard of, but it's rare for the North Korean government to make an open and public call for assistance," Bradley Williams, a international relations professor at City University in Hong Kong, told CNN.

…

"Considering North Korea made this call in English, perhaps there is a distant hope that given the scale of the disaster, maybe the international community might respond," said Williams.

The news of the natural disaster follows North Korea’s announcement Friday that it had successfully conducted its fifth nuclear test, which drew widespread international condemnation. Though further sanctions were threatened against the country, the North Korean government called the warnings “highly laughable.”

Miss America's Q&A Segment: The Most Absurd Pageant of All

Here is an incomplete list of events that transpired during Sunday night’s Miss America competition:

Fifty-one women walked the stage in rhinestone-encrusted evening gowns, on a set decorated with several enormous crowns.
Fifteen women walked the same stage in bikinis and stilettos.
The Bachelor’s Chris Harrison, a host of the event, gleefully informed the pageant’s television audience that they would, if they remained tuned to the program, soon witness the remaining contestants’ “crowning dresses.”
Erin O’Flaherty, Miss Missouri, competed as the show’s first openly gay contestant.
Miss Washington, Alicia Cooper, tap-danced to Jennifer Lopez’s “Let’s Get Loud.”
Miss Tennessee, Grace Burgess, sang “Desperado.”
Gabby Douglas, one of the event’s judges, repeatedly made this face.

And also: Miss South Carolina, Rachel Wyatt, answered a judge’s question about U.S. immigration policy. Miss Maryland, Hannah Brewer, answered a question about the ostensible liberal bias of the political media. Alicia Cooper was asked about Colin Kaepernick—and, specifically, whether “you sit with him or stand against him?” Other questions included “Hillary Rodham Clinton: What do you think?” and the slightly more aggressive “Donald J. Trump: What do you think of him? You have 20 seconds, go.”

Miss America’s question session—the segment comes late in the competition, which ostensibly means that it plays a significant role in determining who wins the crown—involves its own kind of pageantry. It exists to prove that the women competing for the coveted crown are not merely spray-tanned meat-pieces, but instead thinking, feeling, news-reading, opinion-having citizens. The Q&A segment insists, with a wide, gleaming smile, that the Miss America franchise is precisely what it so desperately claims to be: not a beauty contest, nooooo, but a Scholarship Competition. Sunday night’s questions, though (other topics included Fox News’s financial settlement with Roger Ailes and, given the date of the pageant, 9/11), highlighted the extent to which the segment defeats its own purpose. The questions that are meant to make the pageant relevant serve, in the end, only to highlight how regressive the whole Miss America franchise really is.

Certainly, the Q&A segment is Good TV. The questions, whose content is ostensibly a surprise to contestants, are the aspect of the pageant that, short of a wardrobe malfunction or trip on the stage, can go most easily awry for the women involved. (Remember Miss South Carolina, in Miss Teen USA, and her U.S. Americans”?) And they do lend an air of the non-ridiculous to the otherwise sequin-happy, Vaseline-shiny proceedings. They’re the one element of the pageant that serves as a reminder that it is indeed taking place in 2016.

The problem, though, is the pageantry. Even the event’s superficial nod to “substance” has a lurking kind of nihilism. There’s the fact, on the one hand, that the competition allots 45 seconds for contestants’ bikini-struts, but only 20 for the Q&A section—a discrepancy made more glaring by the fact that the swimsuit competition involves 15 contestants, while the Q&A involves only seven.

All the contestants really want, they must find a way to make clear, is world peace.

But there’s also the fact that the questions are nearly impossible to answer in any way that reveals a woman’s knowledge or her nuanced understanding of current events. (Could you, on live TV, come up with a satisfying, 20-second answer to the question, “This is the 15th anniversary of 9/11. What is one thing the new president should do to protect us?”) They demand, via their 20-second time limit, soundbites; and yet the bites must be pleasingly bland. Ideal answers will seem passionate but reveal themselves, upon closer inspection, to be nonpartisan (Miss America, after all, is meant to reign over all Americans); they will suggest familiarity with the issue at hand but not get lost in the issue’s pesky details. The answers, in the end, will be the real-life answer to Miss Congeniality’s running joke: All the contestants really want, they must find a way to make clear in their assessments of immigration policy and sexual harassment suits and the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, is world peace.

And then there’s the most frustrating element of the Q&A segment: the fact that the quality of the women’s answers, under all these constraints, don’t seem to make much difference to the outcome of the competition as a whole. Take last year’s winner, Miss Georgia, Betty Cantrell. She flubbed her answer—the question concerned Tom Brady’s complicity in #deflategate—pretty spectacularly, changing her conclusion halfway through her answer and generally not making a lot of sense:

VIDEO: New #MissAmerica says Tom Brady cheated. Our nation is doomed. pic.twitter.com/i4k1UzQ3m6

— Obnoxious Boston Fan (@realOBF) September 14, 2015

This time around, Miss New York, Camille Sims, who for my money gave the most skillful answer out of the seven women who made it to the Q&A, got the Trump question. Look at the 20 seconds’ worth of impressive diplomacy on display here:

I think that he’s a bright reminder of how our country needs to come together. If you don’t agree with his message, then it’s time to decide where you stand in this debate. As Americans, we need to make sure that we come together, represent what it means to be American — which is celebrating all people from all backgrounds whether you’re an immigrant, or a Native American, or an African American, or an Asian American.

“If you don’t agree” and an acknowledgement of the benefits of diversity culminating in, essentially, “world peace”! It’s not grand rhetoric, but for 20 seconds, it’s hard to imagine better.  

Sims, though, ended up the competition as the second runner up. Compare her answer to the one given by Miss Arkansas, Savvy Shields, in response to the question, “Hillary Rodham Clinton: What do you think?” Shields answered it thusly:

(laughs) Sorry, that’s kind of funny. If you’re trying to be leader of the free world, everything you say and do matters, and all of your actions are held to a higher standard. And unfortunately, the media does love to sensationalize everything, and it’s hard to tell what is truth and what is truly scandal. I think going back at what my previous contestant said, both of these contestants have done a great job. Er, both of these candidates have done a great job in competing, but they also need to watch what they’re doing, and—(gets cut off for time limit)

Shields went on to win the crown.