Pageant News Bureau - Miss Kazakhstan

As of mid-autumn 2006, a comic film with the abbreviated title "Borat" has become the talk of the cinematic world. It has risen quickly to become the top movie in America.

The movie purports to show the experiences of a man from Kazakhstan visiting the United States. The character of "Borat," though admittedly funny, is utterly unlike any actual resident of Kazakhstan, a large and increasingly important nation in Asia. He is not even a crude caricature.

Of course, movies do not have to be accurate to be entertaining, but the reaction to "Borat" illustrates a serious problem in American culture. According to media accounts, most U.S. moviegoers don't think the film is offensive to Kazakhstan because they don't realize Kazakhstan actually exists. And movie critics, in their mostly laudatory reviews, suggest that the film's depiction of that country is somehow based on reality

With the reigning Miss Universe, Zuleyka Rivera

It's a situation analogous to the U.S. boom in "satirical news" programs, which increasingly compete with real news broadcasts for viewers and even for awards. Increasingly, viewers skip the traditional news and simply watch the satirical programs. They get "coverage" that is not merely biased but deliberately fictionalized.

We at PNB can't pour reality down the throat of an unwilling world, but we can make mention of one very real woman -- the new Miss Kazakhstan, Gaukhar Rakhmetalyeva. She was crowned at about the time "Borat" was debuting in theaters, and she will represent her country at Miss Universe in 2007.

If "beauty is truth," as Keats wrote, Ms. Rakhmetalyeva is the perfect retort to "Borat."