Ignorant Americans - I minored

Ignorant Americans - I minored in German in college, and spent some time overseas. I've never been overly burdened by the old European (and elitist American) trope that "Americans are ill-informed/provincial/ignorant about anything that happens outside the US."

Of course we are.

Humans - most people - have a saturation point for information. That point is different in every single person; it's the difference between people who ask you what state North Dakota is in, and people who have never lost a Trivial Pursuit game in all of history (pats self on back).

If you travel in Europe, you learn - it's a small place. The countries there are the size of states in the US; Minnesota is the size of the old West Germany; add in Wisconsin, and you have the reunified Germany. On our northwest border, of course, North Dakota is nearly triple the size of Belgium and the Netherlands. South Dakota is at least as large as France. It's a fair bet that the average Minnesotan knows a fair bit about the culture of Wisconsin, or the Dakotas.

In fact, while Europeans are proud of the fact that many of them are bilingual, think about it; if the Dakotas spoke three different languages, and Iowa yet another, and all those folks in Illinois and Ontario two more, and Minnesotans needed to know these languages for their economic survival, I think it's a fair bet you'd see a lot of multilingual Minnesotans.

I bring this up because of an email I got from David, at Davids Medienkritik. Trans-national ignorance is hardly a one-way street:

" 'Still observers point to the fact that a short visit in Iraq will not change everything with one blow. The American troops in Iraq have to reckon with continued resistance and the expected rise in popularity for Bush could also be over very quickly. They point to former US President Lyndon B. Johnson who visited the troops on a spectacular trip to Vietnam but then clearly lost the 1968 election to his opponent Richard Nixon.'

David notes

A mistake of this magnitude might lead some to reach the conclusion that most of the 'America experts' in the German media were too busy throwing rocks at police and getting high back in 1968 to pay close attention to the US Presidential election.

Just to clear things up a bit, Lyndon B. Johnson didn't even run for the Presidency in 1968 after announcing he would not seek re-election at the beginning of the year. Not only that, but the 1968 election between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey turned out to be a hotly contended race which Nixon won by the thinnest of margins and was by no means 'clearly lost' by the Democrats.

German journalists frequently and gleefully report on the 'ignorance' of the average American, always with a hint of condescending superiority of course. It seems, though, that they aren't quite the brilliant know-it-alls they fancy themselves to be either..."

Many of us have known this since Adenauer won the World Cup in 1980.

Posted by Mitch at December 2, 2003 05:57 AM