What's Andy Cooking?

Worldwide stupidity

Being back in town now has prompted some thought (on my part) about the 'worldliness' of Americans in relation to the rest of the world. Now, to some people that have done some travelling overseas, they come back to find that people here in general are somewhat ignorant of goings-on abroad. In my own experiences, I've found this to be true, but I'm not convinced that this is a sign of America's ignorance.

An example of American knowledge of international politics from my own experience abroad took place just recently, while my brother and I were touring Ireland. On the bus, we played a game that involved famous peoples names. Each side of the bus was a team, and each person had to write down five names that they thought everyone should know or at least heard of. Then the names that one team had collected were passed to the other team, jumbled together in a hat. The object of the game was for people on each team to take turns pulling names out of the hat and give clues to get the rest of the team to guess who the person was. Everyone had thirty seconds to get their team to guess as many names as possible.

If a person came across a name that they didn't recognize, they could pass, and if the name was judged to obscure at the end of the half-minute round, they got extra points. Vice-versa, if the name was judged to be 'general knowledge,' then the team would lose points for not knowing it.

It came time for Alec to pull names, and he was moving slowly along when he came to a name that he immediately scowled at and passed on. At the end of the round, the name was announced as John Howard, at which point all the North American kids gave puzzled looks, while the Australians threw their hands up in frustration. Being Irish, and therefore more worldly I suppose, the judge (our driver) decided that we should know who the Prime Minister of Australia is, seeming that we got him to fight in our war recently.

This example proves that Americans (and a Canadian too) are quite possibly focused too much on our own political doings that we neglect to consider what's happening in the rest of the world. But isn't this true of almost anywhere you go?

In all my exposure to the youth of Britain and their ideas on global politics, I found very few that could relate their opinions (or even knew the details) of the ongoing 'Tibetan' debate. I had a few very enlightening conversations with a Chinese guy I befriended about the current political state of China, but no one I encountered from outside Asia could discuss the same topic.

At the same time, I had numerous debates with locals about George W's crusade, at one point almost getting in a bar fight with Barry from Dublin for simply being American. It seemed that while no one knew the latest news from Russia or Chile, they could all easily discuss Western Europe and North America.

In the end, it is my humble opinion that Europeans aren't 'worldly' just because they know a thing or two about American politics. The expectation that Americans should be fully knowledgable of the world we live in seems a bit excessive. An analagous situation would be like Trent expecting Cheryl Crow to know what's going on in his life based on the fact that he knows what's happening in hers.

What we need to realize as Americans is that the only reason we get this reputation is because we put ourselves out in the world so much. No matter where I went in the last six months, the majority of poeple that I encountered as fellow travellers were Americans. Send a buch of Germans to Thailand and they'll look just as stupid as we normally do.

That's what I've concluded so far anyway. Maybe that's just as big-headed as the next motor-home sporting, deer hunter, but what the heck: it's out there now, I can't take it back . .