stupid Americans?

I came across some ranting today about how Americans are so embarrassingly stupid compared to the rest of the world. I hear this sort of stuff all the time, whenever I’m outside of the U.S. Actually, not just outside the U.S. Certain segments, e.g., academics, of the American population enjoy deriding their fellow citizens.

I can go along with some of the sentiments involved here to a certain point. I rather resent that the rest of the world is overflowing with American products, for example. I also intend to spell it ‘colour’ until my dying day. More seriously, I do meet a significant number of Americans who seem to have let the fact that they are citizens of the most powerful country in the world get to their heads. Not most Americans. But there are definitely some who fall into this sort of obnoxiousness.

But when the critics become strident, i.e., when they start becoming very serious and pontificating about how Americans are so stupid that they don’t even know what country London is in and can’t tell Obama apart from Osama and don’t know who won the Vietnam War and so on and so forth … well, then I find it embarrassing how the critics are parading their own bigotry and ignorance just while they are criticizing others’ ignorance. In case there’s somebody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, search Google with ‘stupid Americans’. You should easily be able to find plenty of video clips of people going around asking Americans simple questions and receiving really stupid answers from the Americans.

Now anybody with a shred of intelligence should know that such videos constitute exactly no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Americans are more stupid than other people. Given that people producing these videos often go on to explicitly present them as evidence for that claim, I suppose the videos do at least provide evidence that their producers are stupid. Not evidence that they are more stupid than the Americans, but just stupid in an absolute sense.

Anyway, there is, of course, no lack of evidence that Americans are abominably ignorant of many things. But … so are people everywhere else. So, to balance the tables a little bit, here are the results of two polls:

1)  Nearly half of Britons are unaware of Auschwitz.

2) Nearly half of Germans under 24 do not know that the Holocaust involved the killing of millions of Jews.

So, yeah, when people get tired of stupid Americans, perhaps they might want to consider going and hanging out with those oh-so-knowledgeable Britons and Germans.

Sydney