Miss Landmine Pageant Cancelled

The first beauty pageant in America was staged by Phineas Taylor Barnum, the greatest showman of them all. He had success previously staging beautiful dog pageants, beautiful bird pageants, and beautiful baby pageants. Women were next.

It was shut down due to protests, probably due to moral indignation. But the fact that Barnum couldn't make a go of it with a pageant featuring beautiful women is astounding, given the the amazing balderdash that guy pulled off in his life in other areas.

For example, according to the website historybuff.com, in the late 1860s a man named George Hull concocted a great hoax. Hull carved a giant out of stone and buried it at a neighbor's farm. Hull waited a year and then made one of the great paleontological "finds" in all of history -- proving that giants once roamed the earth. Soon, the "Cardiff Giant" was sold to speculators for $30K, was on display in New York, selling tickets at $1 a pop, to crowds as high as 3,000 a day. Printing money.

Barnum first tried to buy the Cardiff Giant for $50K from the speculators and was denied. He then carved his own giant and claimed that the first owner of the giant had sold it to him, that he now owned the true "Cardiff Giant," and that the one on display in New York was a fraud!

One of the speculators, David Hannum, believing his giant to be the genuine article, was aghast that people could be so easily fooled as to believe that Barnum's obviously fake giant was authentic. Hannum summed up his feelings toward Barnum's customers with a famous - and famously misattributed - quote: "There's a sucker born every minute."

So, one wonders, how a genius like P.T. Barnum could pull off out-hoaxing a hoax, but couldn't find a way to make beauty pageants take flight. But the protesters yelled loudly enough and long enough to finish the deed, at least for Barnum. The idea of a beauty pageant was pushed, momentarily, to the side.

It's a feeling that pageant organizers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, could sympathize with. Their pageant, too, has been shut down by protests. Unlike Barnum, however, who's goal was to make money by hook or by crook, the organizers from the south central Cambodian city had a completely different goal: To bring attention to the world on the remaining, devastating existence of land mines.

How is this noble goal accomplished? By organizing the 2009 Miss Landmine contest.

Miss. Landmine. At first blush, I winced, because it sounds like a scene from a Ben Stiller movie. After all, the winner of Miss Landmine wins a tiara - and a prosthetic limb.

But coming off pageants in Angola in 2007 and 2008, the pageant organizers wanted to take the same message to Cambodia in 2009. The pageant features beautiful women who have been maimed by the explosion of land mines, many left in place decades after the war that inspired their placement had ceased.

The Angola pageants, however, were not without controversy:

The first 'Miss Landmine' contest was held in Angola last year, drawing protests from rights activists who viewed it as exploitative and racist.

There are other kinds of "disability" pageants, including the Miss You-Can-Do-It Pageant, The Miss Wheelchair American Pageants, to name a few. Why not a pageant to spread the word about land mines?

Apparently, the powers that be in Cambodia weren't on board, shutting down the pageant as being in "bad taste."

(Norwegian pageant director Morten Traavik) said the exhibition will not take place after Cambodia's Ministry of Social Affairs demanded cancellation of the contest to protect 'the honour and dignity of people with disabilities'.

Traavik is left with the unenviable task of informing the 20 women competing for the crown that the pageant has been pulled :

'I'm not looking forward to breaking the news to the 20 candidates involved, as I know they will be very disappointed in the lack of support from Cambodian authorities,' Traavik told AFP.