Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [40]
It’d be nicer, though, if we could make Amy and others feel more at home right here where they were born. I’m open for suggestions....
Chapter 4 notes
4-064
Excerpt from the Fourteenth Amendment
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due, process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
4-082
Excerpt from the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 (suitable for laminating and carrying in your wallet)
Section 2: No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied to any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.
FIVE
Idiot Nation
D0 YOU FEEL like you live in a nation of idiots?
I used to console myself about the state of stupidity in this country by repeating this to myself: Even if there are two hundred million stone-cold idiots in this country, that leaves at least eighty million who’ll get what I’m saying—and that’s still more than the populations of the United Kingdom and Iceland combined!
Then came the day I found myself sharing an office with the ESPN game show Two-Minute Drill. This is the show that tests your knowledge of not only who plays what position for which team, but who hit what where in a 1925 game between Boston and New York, who was rookie of the year in 1965 in the old American Basketball Association, and what Jake Wood had for breakfast the morning of May 12, 1967.
I don’t know the answer to any of those questions—but for some reason I do remember Jake Wood’s uniform number: 2. Why on earth am I retaining that useless fact?
I don’t know, but after watching scores of guys waiting to audition for that ESPN show, I think I do know something about intelligence and the American mind. Hordes of these jocks and lunkheads hang out in our hallway awaiting their big moment, going over hundreds of facts and statistics in their heads and challenging each other with questions I can’t see why anyone would be able to answer other than God Almighty Himself. To look a these testosterone-loaded bruisers you would guess that they were a bunch of illiterates who would be lucky if they could read the label on a Bud.
In fact, they are geniuses. They can answer all thirty obscure trivia questions in less than 120 seconds. That’s four seconds a question—including the time used by the slow-reading celebrity athletes who ask the questions.
I once heard the linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky say that if you want proof the American people aren’t stupid, just turn on any sports talk radio show and listen to the incredible retention of facts. It is amazing—and it’s proof that the American mind is alive and well. It just isn’t challenged with anything interesting or exciting. Our challenge, Chomsky said, was to find a way to make politics as gripping and engaging as sports. When we do that, watch how Americans will do nothing but talk about who did what to whom at the WTO.
But first, they have to be able to read the letters WTO.
There are forty-four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level—in other words, who are functional illiterates.
How did I learn this statistic? Well, I read, it. And now you’ve read it. So we’ve already eaten into the mere 99 hours a year an average American adult spends reading a book—compared with 1,460 hours watching television.
I’ve also read that only 11 percent of the American public