New Jersey has one last chance to keep the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, and we know the rest of the country doesn't care.

Until I moved out here, I too thought the pageant was a joke. That was back when I'd hang out with my hipster friends at the beatnik poetry readings, drinking quadruple espressos and setting ourselves apart from the squares by communicating exclusively by sniffing each other. Back then, the Miss America pageant seemed like a creepy anachronism, somehow akin in my mind to the latest household appliances of 1952.

But now I'm in South Jersey and the pageant is a fixture of local culture. Nearly 200 nearby residents volunteer at the pageant every year, and are trusted to keep quiet about the contestants' whereabouts and personal business. It may be a weird subculture, but like a lot of disturbing things, it runs deep.

Unfortunately, officials at the Miss America Organization (MAO, like the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, whose attitude about women was that, for agricultural production, the state needed to “encourage women to do farm work”) say the pageant likely will lose $500,000 on this year's event, unless Atlantic City increases how much it underwrites the contest. The city already plunks down $678,000, and doesn't want to increase it. So MAO considered ditching the town where it was born in 1921, and moving to the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut – a casino that didn't even exist until 1996, located on land owned by a group that was not federally recognized as an Indian tribe until 1994. Where would your loyal volunteers come from now?

MAO has put off any move for a year. But now Atlantic City officials face the unsentimental question of whether the contest would bring the city that same $1 million the city might have to put into it.

It's a good question. TV viewers haven't been watching the Miss America pageant the way they used to. Ratings in 2000 hit the lowest they ever went in the event's 41 years on television, and 2001 wasn't much better. The way I see it, two major groups don't bother watching this show anymore.

One group sees it as a pre-feminist relic. Yes, I know, the contest is “the world's leading provider of scholarships for women,” as MAO's Web page loudly trumpets. But are we to believe that some 5-foot, 2-inch, 180-pound, high school honors student is going to run across this through a search engine and think “Ah, here we are. Scholarships”? We all know that none of the contestants would be there in the first place if they didn't fit a specific definition of beauty. It puts a dark slant on that prize money: Walk around in this skimpy outfit, little girl, and I'll put you through college.

Yet the other group that doesn't bother watching anymore are those who enjoy looking at women. They might tune in briefly for the swimsuit competition. But then they'll go back to Web surfing for similarly attractive females wearing nothing at all and riding unicycles. These guys have a lot of options.

So if the Miss America pageant is neither realistic nor pornographic, there's nothing left for it to be except an impossible goal – for what women are supposed to be and men are supposed to want. And who needs that?

Well, some places do. Places that need an ideal, something about which to dream. Places like Atlantic City.

Despite its fame, Atlantic City has a lot of neighborhoods that are pretty borderline. And I'm being diplomatic about which side of the border they're on. So it means a lot when something beautiful comes to town – 51 shapely domestic ambassadors and unfairly gorgeous scholarship winners. One among them is the most beautiful woman in America, and she's been gracing that town for 80 years. If she went anywhere else, wouldn't it feel like a betrayal?

“It would have been prostitution,” said Hariann Bernstein – a third-generation Atlantic City resident – in a recent story from the Associated Press about the possible move.

Back in the day, I'd be pounding the table with my shoe over the logic of this. But now that I'm older and softer, one of the things for which I have room in my little universe is a person who doesn't get the irony of that remark.