The United States of Stupid

Recently Bill Maher said on CNN, and again on his own HBO show, that America is a stupid country. And even though that got a lot of right-wingers angry, Maher was armed with plenty of evidence. Among the facts supporting his opinion:

Polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain the Bill of Rights.

Seventy percent of Americans thought in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001. While it's now down to one out of three Americans (about 34 percent), that's still too high, and it corresponds with the number of people who still approved of George Walker Bush's job at the end of his Presidency.

Nearly a quarter of Americans could not name the country we fought in the American Revolution. (Well, we know it was an English-speaking country, that should give 'em a hint!)

Nearly half of Americans don’t know that each state has two senators, and more than half can’t name their own congressman.

A Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, a theory disproved by Copernicus, a Polish astronomer - that's right, a dumb Polack! - in the sixteenth century.

And these are just statistics on what passes for common knowledge. Consider examples of America's dumbness in the big picture. Look at our living pattern. We spent the past sixty years and may spend another sixty years building human settlements that are accessible and easy to get around in by car, leaving no opportunity for public transportation and walking, as if everyone in America can own and drive a car. And what kind of vehicles do many of us drive? Big cars and SUVs, the kind of cars that Heinz Nordhoff, Volkswagen's CEO in the fifties and sixties, said had more power than could be used and "thus violate every principle of engineering and technical science."

Among other American feats of engineering are bridges that collapse and domed stadiums with roofs that cave in.

How about all the money invested in the athletic programs of colleges and universities, which made many of our institutions of higher education more expensive to attend because of all that overhead and turned them into health spas where literature and math are only occasionally studied? That's what makes Title IX in the 1972 Education Act an example of American stupidity. Instead of giving women more opportunities in scholastic athletics, why not give them more opportunities in education?

And don't get me started on our obsession with violence, from handguns to nuclear missile warheads. Or our belief that weapons keep the world safe. What other country could have developed a cannon in the 1840s (a faulty demonstration of which almost killed President John Tyler and did kill his Secretary of State) and a long-range missile in the 1980s and called both the "Peacemaker?"

It doesn't surprise me that Americans are so dumb. Back in 1987, high school seniors were polled on questions of common knowledge. Asked who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath," many said Ernest Hemingway. (It was John Steinbeck.) Asked who wrote "A Christmas Carol," many named the story's character, Ebenezer Scrooge, as the author. (It was British author Charles Dickens, who famously satirized Americans in one of his novels.) And many thought the Civil War began in 1492. Well, I got news for you; these high school seniors of the late eighties are adults on the edge of turning forty, and they're just as dumb. Their high school diplomas and, where applicable, their college degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

And some of them may even vote.

Many of them have parents who oppose health care reform because they don't want the government taking over their Medicare plans.

We may be of different races, creeds and colors, but we Americans are uniformly dumb all over.