Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [16]
Though Helgren had been awarded a quarter of a million dollars in grants for his research—“more than anyone had ever got in the whole place,” he says—and was up for promotion, he learned the following year that he’d be out of a job in May. A colleague who had stood up for him in the media, Jim Curtis, was dismissed a month later. The university denied that the map-illiteracy kerfuffle had anything to do with the firings. As a consolation prize, at least the Helgren story got the National Enquirer to run a nice, serious piece on geographic illiteracy. It appeared right between an article on a Turkish woman whose left hand weighed forty pounds and an interview with an expert who claimed that 20 percent of America’s dogs and cats are space aliens.
David Helgren wasn’t the first to discover, of course, that lots of people are pretty lousy at geography. In fact, geographical ignorance is such an engrained part of our culture that it’s become an easy bit of comedy shorthand for ditziness, the same way you might show a character wearing a barrel with suspenders to represent poverty. Marilyn Monroe, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, insisted that she wanted to visit “Europe, France”; fifty years later, Sacha Baron Cohen deployed the exact same joke on Da Ali G Show, annoying his United Nations tour guide by complaining about the fact that Africa isn’t a U.N. member. Joey on Friends thought that the Netherlands was where Peter Pan lived, and Bart Simpson was once surprised to discover the large Southern Hemisphere country of “Rand McNally” on his sister Lisa’s globe.
Snickering at the cartographically cloddish dates back centuries. You’d think that, in the more provincial 1600s, everyone would have been a little hazy on geography, but that didn’t prevent the French educator Denis Martineau du Plessis from filling the preface of his 1700 book Nouvelle Géographie with Joey Tribbiani–worthy stories of map woe. He recounts a (probably apocryphal) tale of the English ambassador to Rome in 1343, who caught wind of the fact that the pope had given away the “fortunate islands” (the Canary Islands were then called the “Islas Fortunatas”) to the Count de Clermont. Assuming that the world’s only truly fortunate islands were the British Isles, the outraged ambassador rushed back to London to tell the king that some French count was taking over England! Making fun of the English was a popular French pastime, then as now, but du Plessis takes some shots at his own countrymen as well, citing French authorities who wondered which river the Pont Euxine crossed (“Pont Euxine” was an ancient name for the Black Sea, not a bridge) and assumed that Moors came from Morea (another name for Peloponnesia, in Greece).*
Jokes like these never would have been comic tropes if there weren’t some truth behind them, of course. Real government officials, and not just apocryphal Renaissance-era ambassadors, make geographical gaffes all the time. In his autobiography, Henry Kissinger told the story of the prime minister of Mauritius’s goodwill visit to Washington in 1970. Somehow the confused State Department had briefed the president to meet not with the leader of Mauritius, a tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean, but of Mauritania, a vast Saharan nation that had recently cut off diplomatic relations with the United States. This improbable I Love Lucy setup led to the comic hijinks you might expect: President Richard Nixon led off the discussion by suggesting that the prime minister of a valued American ally restore diplomatic relations with the United States! That way, he said, he could offer American expertise with dry farming. The flummoxed Mauritian, hailing as he did from a lush jungle nation, had little interest in desert farming, so he tried to change the subject, asking Nixon about a space tracking station the United States operated