Travel Blog

Because of my interest in the foreign I rarely miss a Miss Universe pageant. Watching last night I was once again struck by how similar all the contestants looked, with their sculpted faces and cascading hair and tanned skin, everything slavishly modeled on a generic ideal of pulchritude that ignores, to its detriment, Francis Bacon's observation that "There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in its proportion."

It's as depressing as it is astonishing to see a collection of women from 89 countries who, for the most part, all look the same. If, like the majority of Americans, you were never to travel outside the U.S., the Miss Universe pageant would convince you that you're not missing anything. It is the homogenization of globalization taken to the human level.