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So if you live in a country where forty-four million can’t read and perhaps close to another two hundred million can read but usually don’t—well, friends, you and I are living in one very scary place. A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID is a nation that should not be running the world—at least not until a majority of its citizens can locate Kosovo (or any other country it has bombed) on the map.

It comes as no surprise to foreigners that Americans, who love to revel in their stupidity, would “elect” a president who rarely reads anything—including his own briefing papers—and thinks Africa is a nation, not a continent. An idiot leader of an idiot nation. In our glorious land of plenty, less is always more when it comes to taxing any lobe of the brain with the intake of facts and numbers, critical thinking, or the comprehension of anything that isn’t ... well, sports.

Our Idiot-in-Chief does nothing to hide his ignorance—he even brags about it. During his commencement address to the Yale Class of 2001, George W. Bush spoke proudly of having been a mediocre student at Yale. “And to the C students, I say you, too, can be President of the United States!” The part where you also need an ex-President father, a brother as governor of a state with missing ballots, and a Supreme Court full of your dad’s buddies must have been too complicated to bother with in a short speech.

As Americans, we have quite a proud tradition of being represented by ignorant high-ranking officials. In 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s nominee as ambassador to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was unable to identify either the country’s prime minister or its capital during his Senate confirmation hearing. Not a problem—Maxwell Gluck was confirmed anyway. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for deputy secretary of state, William Clark, admitted to a wide-ranging lack of knowledge about foreign affairs at his confirmation hearing. Clark had no idea how our allies in Western Europe felt about having American nuclear missiles based there, and didn’t know the names of the prime ministers of South Africa or Zimbabwe. Not to worry—he was confirmed, too. All this just paved the way for Baby Bush, who hadn’t quite absorbed the names of the leaders of India or Pakistan, two of the seven nations that possess the atomic bomb.

And Bush went to Yale and Harvard.

Recently a group of 556 seniors at fifty-five prestigious American universities (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Stanford) were given a multiple-choice test consisting of questions that were described as “high school level.” Thirty-four questions were asked. These top students could only answer 5 3 percent of them correctly. And only one student got them all right.

A whopping 40 percent of these students did not know when the Civil War took place—even when given a wide range of choices: A. 1750-1800; B. 1800-1850; C. 1850-1900; D. 1900-1950; or E. after 1950. (The answer is C, guys.) The two questions the college seniors scored highest on were (1) Who is Snoop Doggy Dog? (98 percent got that one right), and (2) Who are Beavis and Butt-head? (99 percent knew). For my money, Beavis and Butt-head represented some of the best American satire of the nineties, and Snoop and his fellow rappers have much to say about America’s social ills, so I’m not going down the road of blaming MTV.

What I am concerned with is why politicians like Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin want to go after MTV when they are the ones responsible for the massive failure of American education. Walk into any public school, and the odds are good that you’ll find overflowing classrooms, leaking ceilings, and demoralized teachers. In 1 out of 4 schools, you’ll find students “learning” from textbooks published in the 1980s—or earlier.

Why is this? Because the political leaders—and the people who vote for them—have decided it’s a bigger priority to build another bomber than