Are You Dumber than an American?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

241. Here's the sense in which the article is true:

There are dumb people everywhere. The Japanese have a reputation for being highly intelligent and well-educated, and it is true on a basic level. I've never met anyone who couldn't spell my name in katakana characters after I said it. I've never met anyone who can't make change. When some people asked me to explain fundamentalist Christianity and I said that, among other things, they don't believe in evolution, everyone thought this was incredible.

However, somebody is watching all those inane talk shows on Japanese TV, and if you know enough to understand overheard conversations, you will hear conversations that are so stupid it hurts your brain.

The difference is this: most politicians don't CATER TO stupidity. Voters don't elect politicians on the basis of "Cool, he's as dumb as I am!" There doesn't seem to be a deliberate attempt in the media to dumb people down.

Or take the UK. There are some really dumb people there, too, and really, only the best of their TV gets exported to this country. Even so, as a mystery fan, I'll take a British author over most American authors any day, because their mysteries show more complexity, social commentary, and depth of characterization, while the most popular Americans seem to be cranking out book-length scripts for CSI (yes, there are exceptions, but I'm thinking of the real popular authors). British TV dramas are more likely to feature actors who look like real people (compare the original "Prime Suspect" and the American knock-off), to explore moral and ethical dilemmas, and feel free to have sad or inconclusive endings. They get the best of our TV (The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men--and all except Mad Men comes from the subscription-only channels) unaltered, but in the U.S., the networks feel compelled to remake (and dumb down) foreign programming. Furthermore, a country with 1/5 the population of the U.S. supports not one, but three monthly classical music magazines. Look at their newspapers: Yes, the appallingly dumb and sensationalist tabloids that make the National Enquirer look like a Ph. D. thesis, but also really, really smart mainstream newspapers like The Guardian, The Independent, and The Times (conservative, but not stupid).

Or take Scandinavia. When I went as a teenager, I had to use the phrase "Snakker du engelsk" ("Do you speak English&quot a lot. The answer was "no" about half the time. On my trip last year, I stopped asking, because younger people in particular seemed almost offended that I had to ask. Most of them also speak a second language as well. Yet in this country, if you speak another language (even more so if you speak more than one), you're regarded as either some kind of a genius or a stupid immigrant who doesn't want to become a proper American. Even back in the 1960s, Maj Sjövall and Per Wahloo wrote a book called "The Man Who Went Up in Smoke," in which a Swedish police detective is sent to Hungary to trace the disappearance of a Swede. When he protests that he doesn't speak Hungarian, his supervisor assures him, "You'll get along fine with just English and German." Yes, the assumption that an ordinary police detective should speak two foreign languages.

Of course, not everyone in Scandinavia is smart, either, but I think the attitude is different in many other countries. Our pop culture says that being smart is a BAD thing and that smart people need to relax and become TV zombies and sports nuts.