If you want to know why the fearmongering of the Bush administration works, you don’t have to look at a lot further than this:
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper.
But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.
Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.
The answer lies in the fact that we just are not all that smart. We continue to suffer from poor education, voter apathy, misinformation from the press, and a deliberate policy of instilling fear by the government.
This isn’t even a matter of a recent deterioration of our public schools, because the worst offenders in the poll are elderly Americans. I suppose they can remember more years and have a harder time pinpointing which year 9/11 happened in. How about the five percent that couldn’t identify what day 9/11 occurred on? That reminds me of a Final Jeopardy where the answer was, “Napoleon’s first name” and no one got the question, which would have been, “What is Napoleon?”
I guess five percent thought it was a trick question.
..so if I was asked, who was buried in grant’s tomb, and I answered grant…i would be considered smart..;o) who does know Napoleon’s last name was Bonaparte` [spelling?]? guess I was listening that day in history class….;O)
yes, but they didn’t ask what Napoleon’s last name was. They asked what his first name was.
What is Brenda’s first name?
Bonaparte?
Did I win?
no that’s her middle name.
I believe “Danger” is her middle name [Austin Powers laugh here]
You mean his last name wasn’t Dynamite?
exactly boo, it is called process of elimination..unless you want to say monsieur napoleon..;o)
It came to me today as I heard Skelator’s carefully worded message linking Al Quaeda to the bomb plot: no matter what is proven or disproven later, there is a number of the population who will hear “Al Quaeda” and nothing else. Yep. Dumb as bricks and happy as clams.
“trick question” … LOL.
reminds me of one my favorite John Prine songs.
I’ve despaired over just such apathetic ignorance for years, and a lot of good it has done, lol. Why, just today, I went out for smoke break and was asked by a woman I sort of know in the building (who is a mere year younger than I) … “You seem intelligent, do you know what the Black Panthers are?” I was dumbfounded, as I explained to her patiently their history in brief. We then got to talking politics in general and I was astounded to learn that she had never been to a Party Caucus in her adult life and had no clue how they worked. Here, in the 1st in the nation caucus state, we get to see Preznitdential hopefuls strut their stuff at the State Fair … and she had no clue how the process worked.
Got me to thinking that there’s a humongous amount of work we need to do just educating potential voters on how the process works! Maybe I’ll make her my project and drag her in chains to the 2008 Caucus just to prove my point. As she parted, she said, “Well there’s just so much stuff to learn and I don’t know where to start.” I said, “Hon, that’s what the internet’s for. Get back to me and I show you…”
Sheesh. This woman, a mere year younger than I, didn’t know who ran for president in 1964 and 1968… my formative political childhood years…
seems to have the attention span of a poached egg.
They can tell you who the finalists are on American Idol, or who Erica Kane is sleeping with this week on “All My Children”, or what Eli Manning’s QB rating is, but they’ll have no idea what’s really going on in government…nor do they seem to care…
you are obsessed with Eli Manning. He better not get hurt.
your boy…I’d have written “Alex Smith’s QB rating”, but I’m not sure ESPN.com registers negative digits…
Hell, the way things look for my local teams (Niners and Raiders), I’m waiting for hockey season (go Sharks!)…
I’m more worried about Tom Brady. If Brady gets hurt, the Patriots are in trouble.
this is the Giants’ year baby!
Here’s a fun little test. I’m up to 23 and still going…
http://intelligence-test.net/part1/
Aaargh! I could only get 20. Oh well, maybe its the late hour. I thought I had better quit when I typed “6 bytes of ovum in china”.
Thanks for the link to the fun puzzle;-)
LOL! That’s okay – I tried “23 Pictures of Christ in the Holy Bible”. 😉
Knowing the year of Sept 11 means smart or educated? I doubt it. Some people (moi) don’t do well remembering timelines, like others are bad with faces or names or spelling, blablabla. If this were the worst kind of ignorance rampaging through America I could almost be content. But it ain’t. It’s the ones who STILL think Saddam bombed the WTC, for instance, that make me nuts.
Allow me to top you, Boo, in the race for the most toxic species of ignorance: I was at the local supermart the other day, where they were pushing upon us the opportunity to pay for groceries by registering our fingerprints so all we’d have to do in future is wave our hand over the machine instead of enduring the misery of pulling out a card or cash. Anyway, the young dressed-for-success female at the signup table chatted me up about the opportunity to be among the first and I said something about who’da thought Big Brother would show up first at the food store.
She thought for a second as her spiel went into search mode, failed to find a line, and finally said she thought they only shot the show at the house. She was otherwise well-spoken, neatly dressed, had her priorities straight, and sure as sunshine will one day soon manage many people and make decisions affecting many lives.
That is truly frightening. Fingerprints to buy groceries. Oh my God.
Hey, I had to leave my thumbprint at Howard’s in Texas in the late 70’s when I wrote a check there.
I disagree about the intelligence of the American people. As Noam Chomsky wrote,
I agree with Chomsky and others who point out that Americans (and many other people around the world) are not stupid. They may be pathetically ignorant of things that directly affect them, but have vast amounts of knowledge about sports, TV shows, etc. Part of the problem is the media, which usually is geared towards stimulating our reptilian brain with loud noises, bright colors, sex and violence. Part of the problem is the education system as a whole, which is designed to crank out docile workers, not critical thinkers.
The part of the problem that is quintessentially American though is a mistrust of intellectuals. I’m not sure why that has developed as it has, but many Americans seem to revel in their own ignorance and the belief that being simple is a virtue. Being well-educated makes you prone to all sorts of dangerous thoughts, I guess, things like questioning religious dogma especially.
Bobby Kennedy noted the absence of moral courage, and I think that’s what’s at play. It’s non-threatening and requires no moral courage to learn sports stats. But it takes moral courage to face the worst truths about society, examine one’s role in them, and try to do better.
One moment here… 30 percent of Americans don’t remember when the September 11 attacks happened, yet, of course, they remembered the month and year.
It’s like that Head On Commercial. Repetition is central to the message. We remember 9 and 11 because Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Condi, Giuliani, McCain, and the rest have repeated them over and over again. It’s part of the lexicon. 9/11/2001, however, is not.
I would have loved to have seen similar statistics on the month, date, and year of the Kennedy assassination in polling done in 1968.
only 13% are literate enough to read and understand an editorial.
Sorry, folks, I see this is as a giant much-ado-about-nothing. It’s a terribly done survey, aimed at making people look ignorant, so thereby to persuade us (and others) that there is no point in trying to talk to the ignurt pibbles.
And I think it is hardly the fault of the person who didn’t recognize the illusion to Big Brother, when 1984 was likely removed from her high school curriculum as being too sex-filled. She probably never heard of it. I doubt seriously anywhere she lives or works has involved a run-in related to privacy loss.
We are smart here, all of us. Haven’t read one of you who is dumb – maybe an idea or two I thought were not quite up to snuff, but then I have had a corker or three myself. What I don’t like is being encouraged to assume that less educated or less introspective people, who largely by life circumstance see things differently, are fundamentally unreachable, different, etc. [I think Lamont’s victory kind of puts the lie to being unable to move folks who ordinarily have not much involvement, for example.]
That’s what the right wingers want us to think, and how they want us to talk about people who don’t see things as we do, also. I worry about that because I see a lot of unformed, very bright, eager young and not-so-young persons in my work. And they are being taken by the hand by the right wing, and encouraged to see us as laughing at them. And they are being frightened, and the rightwing have very very good frighteners. They certainly frighten me. But I have you all, and others, and family, and history as a security against that sort of thing.
I think the survey is just garbage in, garbage out. The year isn’t important, the use and misuse of the 9/11 image is.
I just want those folks who don’t know about us, or similar places, or who don’t have friends, family, associates, who can talk with them and listen, to find them, somehow.
Like the mom California who saw the little girl-baby with the Code Pink t-shirt. As I left the sandwich shop, the lady was asking her mother where she got it, and what it meant. . .