Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [42]
I hate writing these words. I love this big lug of a country and the crazy people in it. But when I can travel to some backwater village in Central America, as I did back in the eighties, and listen to a bunch of twelve-year-olds tell me their concerns about the World Bank, I get the feeling that something is lacking in the United States of America.
Our problem isn’t just that our kids don’t know nothin’ but that the adults who pay their tuition are no better. I wonder what would happen if we tested the U.S. Congress to see just how much our representatives know. What if we were to give a pop quiz to the commentators who cram our TVs and radios with all their nonstop nonsense? How many would they get right?
A while back, I decided to find out. It was one of those Sunday mornings when the choice on TV was the Parade of Homes real estate show or The McLaughlin Group. If you like the sound of hyenas on Dexedrine, of course, you go with McLaughlin. On this particular Sunday morning, perhaps as my punishment for not being at Mass, I was forced to listen to magazine columnist Fred Barnes (now an editor at the right-wing Weekly Standard and cohost of the Fox News show The Beltway Boys) whine on and on about the sorry state of American education, blaming the teachers and their evil union for why students are doing so poorly.
“These kids don’t even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!” he bellowed, as the other panelists nodded in admiration at Fred’s noble lament.
The next morning I called Fred Barnes at his Washington office. “Fred,” I said, “tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are.”
He started hemming and hawing. “Well, they’re ... uh ... you know ... uh ... okay, fine, you got me—I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?”
No, not really. You’re one of the top TV pundits in America, seen every week on your own show and plenty of others. You gladly hawk your “wisdom” to hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting citizens, gleefully scorning others for their ignorance. Yet you and your guests know little or nothing yourselves. Grow up, get some books, and go to your room.
Yale and Harvard. Princeton and Dartmouth. Stanford and Berkeley. Get a degree from one of those universities, and you’re set for life. So what if, on that test of the college seniors I previously mentioned, 70 percent of the students at those fine schools had never heard of the Voting Rights Act or President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives? Who needs to know stuff like that as you sit in your Tuscan villa watching the sunset and checking how well your portfolio did today?
So what if not one of these top universities that the ignorant students attend requires that they take even one course in American history to graduate? Who needs history when you are going to be tomorrow’s master of the universe?
Who cares if 70 percent of those who graduate from America’s colleges are not required to learn a foreign language? Isn’t the rest of the world speaking English now? And if they aren’t, hadn’t all those damn foreigners better GET WITH THE PROGRAM?
And who gives a rat’s ass if, out of the seventy English Literature programs at seventy major American universities, only twenty-three now require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare? Can somebody please explain to me what Shakespeare and English have to do with each other? What good are some moldy old plays going to be in the business world, anyway?
Maybe I’m just jealous because I don’t have a college degree. Yes, I, Michael Moore, am a college dropout.
Well, I never officially dropped out. One day in my sophomore year, I drove around and around the various parking lots of our commuter campus in Flint, searching desperately for a parking space. There simply was no place to park—every spot was full, and no one was leaving. After a frustrating hour spent