Yes, It Makes Me Proud To Be An American

Reading the International Herald Tribune in Lausanne this morning. Yet another book coming out that proves that Americans are know-nothing buffoons, as if I didn’t already know. Only 37% of Americans believe in evolution, for crying out loud.

[from Susan Jacoby: Bemoaning an America that values stupidity - International Herald Tribune By Patricia Cohen]

[…]

Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

[American Idol platinum blonde Kellie] Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Don’t forget the other European countries: Sneezy, Dopey, Bashful, and Doc.

The article touches on Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason” which sounds interesting. But the other book mentioned in the same breath somehow seems to be placing the blame for American’s stupidity on the Internet, which is just, well, stupid:

Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization.

Yeah, and it causes warts and dandruff, too.

Siegel was the idiot dumped from the New Republic when he was outed using a sock puppet identity to trash those that made little of his contributions.

But the best vignette is the motivation for Jacoby’s book:

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused [on 9/11], she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Oh, may all the little and many gods make me strong in a world like this.

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