Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [17]
During the 2008 presidential race, both campaigns dealt with elementary school–level geography blunders that could have come from the pen of any sitcom hack. At a rally in Beaverton, Oregon, Barack Obama told the crowd, “Over the last fifteen months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in fifty-seven states. Just one left to go.” (He was apparently channeling the Friends episode in which Joey crowns himself the winner of Chandler’s name-all-the-states game, with a high score of fifty-six.) Then John McCain, when asked by a Spanish radio interviewer if he would invite Spain’s President José Zapatero to the White House, seemed amenable, stressing “the importance of our relationship with Latin America.” (Hey, just like that Arrested Development episode where Gob thinks his brother has fled to “Portugal, down South America way!”) And that’s not even counting Fox News’s report that Sarah Palin believed that Africa was a country, not a continent. See, she’s a real-life Ali G, only with—respek!—more stylish eyewear. On those rare occasions when a politician does display a knack for geography, he’s treated as a sideshow freak. Al Franken’s favorite party stunt has long been his ability to draw a near-perfect map of the United States freehand, a skill he’s used to great effect doing electoral coverage for Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” and on Comedy Central. In 1987, he amazed a Letterman audience by whipping off one of his Sharpie maps in less than two minutes. When the former comedian somehow got elected to the Senate in 2008, his onetime Stupid Human Trick got rebranded as a wonkishly patriotic bit of Americana and became a staple at campaign events and fund-raisers. But the audience result is still the same: shocked gasps that a U.S. senator might actually know what the United States looks like !*
You know that geographic ignorance is a serious societal problem when even Miss Teen USA candidates are grilled about it! In 2007, South Carolina’s Caite Upton was asked, “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?” Upton finished only fourth in the pageant, but her answer to that question made her an international celebrity overnight.
“I personally believe,” she answered with absolute confidence, “that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.”
In the much-watched YouTube video, even host Mario Lopez can’t quite swallow his grin at the gratuitous “for our children” tacked onto the end, as he mercifully pulls away the mike.
But educators are worried too, and have been for a while. In 1857, Andrew Dickson White, who would go on to cofound Cornell University, was put in charge of assessing the geography acumen of the University of Michigan’s sophomore class. Michigan took great pride in the geography curriculum in its public high schools, but White wrote that “in the great majority of my students there was not a trace of real knowledge of physical geography, and very little of political.” White told his students to throw away their rote lists of memorized place-names and browse atlases instead, with great success. During World War II, a Harvard professor named Howard Wilson was featured in The New York Times, insisting that German geographical expertise gave the Nazis a leg up on the United States. “Geographic illiterates cannot be counted on to create a public mind alert to the geographic