Here are some facts for you to masticate, unless you’re one of probably 65 to 70% of those Americans who don’t know what that word means.
Almost half of Americans believe that Christianity is older than Judaism. As Bill Maher once observed, they were confronted with the Bible containing the Old Testament and the New Testament and couldn’t figure out which one came first.
24% of Americans can’t name the country the US fought against during the Revolutionary War.
A full 2/3rds of Yanks don’t know what Rove v. Wade refers to.
Another 2/3rds haven’t a clue what the Food and Drug Administration does.
Almost half of Americans polled don’t know that each state has two Senators and most couldn’t name any of their own Congressmen.
Many Americans think that foreign aid consumes almost a quarter of the Federal budget. (Hint: it is around 1%)
A staggering 18% think that the sun revolves around the earth.
2/3rds of Americans can’t tell you when the Civil War took place.
42% can’t name a single country in Asia.
A third of the nation thinks that Franklin Roosevelt was president during the Viet Nam war.
And let’s not forget the number of people who don’t want a public option for health care because that would be “socialism” while simultaneously using the services of Medicare and the Veteran’s Administration, both of which are run by the government, or that 49% of those who bothered to vote, actually voted for George W. Bush twice.
A Creation Museum in Ohio which opened in 2007 actually has animatronic dinosaurs and children playing together. According to the museum, dinosaurs survived the Great Flood and were around until relatively recently. Although the word ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1841, prior to that these creatures were referred to as ‘dragons.’ How, asked Alec Russel, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, were such enormous creatures able to be crammed into Noah’s Ark? Says museum guide Ken Ham, “They only took young dinosaurs on board.”

So here’s my question. Why are some Americans so staggeringly stupid?

And before you accuse me of whipping unseemly on Americans, let me be the first to point out that you’re not alone. Pervev
Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azem University in Islamabad, wrote the following in the Washington Post in 2002:

“A former chairman of my physics department in Islamabad has calculated the speed of heaven. He maintains it is receding from earth at one centimetre per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Islamic holy book which says that worship on the night on which the book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time-dialation factor of 1000, which he puts into a formula of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
One of the two Pakistani nuclear engineers who was recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan’s energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire, so this high-placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy.”

The French feminist critic, Luce Irigaray, has proclaimed Einstein’s E=Mc2 equation to be a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.” She has suggested that pure mathematics is biased due to its inherent “sexist” concern with closed spaces rather than the “partially open” structures apparently only visible to the subtler female mind.

First, let’s define the genre. Ignorance is not stupidity, but simply a lack of knowledge. I myself am quite well informed on a number of subjects and almost frighteningly ignorant of others. However, I can ameliorate my ignorance by study. Stupidity is a different story. It is, in my opinion anyway, the willful ignorance of a subject, combined with the public espousal of opinions on that subject that are based on misinformation or outright bullshit. When a person rants at the public option in health care being socialism and in the next breath warns the president to keep his hands of his Medicare, that is outright stupidity. When someone shouts down a Congressman at a town meeting with outright falsehoods, proudly proclaiming that he got his information from that hemorrhoid of a man, Glenn Beck, that is blatant stupidity.
Stupidity requires that the facts be readily available but that the person in question is either too lazy to seek them out or doesn’t wish to have the facts confound his preconceived notions or prejudices of a subject. To have to reconcile the facts with misinformation or personal bigotries would require one to examine one’s own stance on a subject which would lead to the horror of abstract thought or the terrifying possibility that the Becks, Limbaughs and Hannities of the world have been lying to you which, to the average right-wing person of the Republican pursuation, would be anathema. Stupidity is the acceptance of an opinion as fact not because it is verifiable, but because of who said it. Most stupid people get their opinions off the rack rather than tailor them themselves. Now speaking personally, I would be disinclined to take the words out of anyone elses’ mouth. It’s very unsanitary and in the case of Limbaugh or Coulter, you can never know where they’ve been.
Unfortunately, America was saddled for eight years with a president who popularized stupidity, a man who was willfully ignorant and seemingly inordinately proud to be so. Dubya himself was not a mental defect - his SAT scores were quite high - in the upper ten percent. His ignorance was a choice because it was easier than becoming educated. This lead to such statements as the jury still “being out” on the subject of evolution.
What jury, where. The Scopes trial ended many decades ago…
Here we may make an excursus on the subject of religion. Religion is the faith in things unprovable and unseen, for which I have no particular axe to grind. However, Creationism is stupidity. This is because it claims to be a science without applying the scientific method to its assertions. In order to believe that the earth is between 6000 and 17,000 years of age, (as Sarah Palin claims) one must essentially discard the evidence to the contrary from biology, zoology, archeology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, physics, etc. One of the prime attributes of stupidity is that it cannot stand to be contradicted and insists, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it is right.

“The earth was created in six days. God did it, end of story.”
“Where’s your proof, your empirical evidence of that claim?”
“God said so.”
“And where’s your proof that God even exists?”
“What are you? Some kind of Satanistic Liberal commie?”

Another feature of stupidity is that it seeks to prove its points by not simply ignoring but re-writing facts. The so-called “death panel” provision in HR 3200 is a case in point. Read the relevant section and you will find that it refers to living wills and the right of a person to leave instructions to not resuscitate or use extraordinary measures to prolong life if the person in question is in an irreversible coma or a vegetative state together with the physician’s responsibility to discuss such things with the families involved. Somehow this got translated into pulling the plug on granny. A recent Gallup poll showed that the largest number of opponents of health care reform come from the southern States which have the highest number of people uninsured. So we can see another function of stupidity - the ability to act against your own self-interests. But one might recall that these are also the same people that were bribed by the Bush administration into voting Republican by a $250 dollar tax rebate and ended up with two wars and the highest National Debt and deficit in history. It’s never amazing to realize that most people can be bribed, but just how low some people’s prices appear to be.

Everyone knows the term “functional illiteracy” and to what it refers. There’s another classification, “functional incompetency,” which is defined as the lack of knowledge of the forces, political, economic and otherwise, that directly impinge on a person’s day-to-day existence. When you get your news from Fox, you economic knowledge from Jim Cramer and your political opinions from Glenn Beck, then I would argue that you are functionally incompetent.

It is often said that stupidity is its own punishment and that people get the government they deserve. Well, nowadays, the US has finally gotten the government it not only deserves but desperately needs. And yet, there are many who are trying to return it to the days when America got the government the stupid deserved. The question now remains: are you going to let them?