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July 07, 2006, 7:46 a.m.
Failure of Intelligence
If stupid hurt, we’d all be in a world of pain. Well, ow.
By Denis Boyles
Surely, after Christmas, the July 4th weekend must be the Internet equivalent of August in Paris. Nobody’s around but us tourists. So you may have missed the results of a poll published in the Daily Telegraph last weekend showing “Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.” Such is the fury of an ex-, I suppose, but it’s good to see all those stiff-upper-lip types getting in touch with their feelings between bouts of binge drinking. To provide balance to the piece, the Telegraph sent a reporter to New Britain to get reax from the kind of Americans the British media love most — a sewage plant worker, a woman drinking beer out of a paper bag, and a guy working in a tattoo parlor.
Well, okay. We like to think the British are smarter than we are; that plum accent after all has formed the basis for many otherwise unexplained careers on the west side of the Atlantic. Yet only 12 percent of the British people think we’re up to any good in the world? Reading that poll (the enchilada completo is here in its full .pdfness) stung — until a few hours later I came across Theodore Dalrymple’s account in City Journal of a trip back home to Britain. The piece is called “It’s That Bad.” How bad? Real bad: “No one who knows Britain could doubt that it has very serious problems — economic, social, and cultural. Its public services — which already consume a vast proportion of the national wealth — are not only inefficient but completely beyond amelioration by the expenditure of yet more money. Its population is abysmally educated, to the extent that in a few more years Britain will not even have a well-educated elite.” Psst. Dr. Ted. The future’s now.
Dalrymple’s complaint reminded me of that poll that appeared in the Telegraph a while ago revealing that a “large proportion of British youth think Gandalf, Horatio Hornblower or Christopher Columbus” were responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Armada. According to the Campaign for Real Education, the Gandalf-worshippers were just as clueless about D-Day, about which most British kids knew nothing, except maybe how to spell the “D” part. History is no longer part of British identity. During recent anniversary commemorations, some hopeful Brits were claiming that the Battle of the Somme, in which 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day alone, was an indelible part of the British national memory. I think you can safely forget that: This week, as the Telegraph points out, there are “Fears over Afghan mission as more troops die.” In this case, “more troops” is two, at the hands of the Taliban.
What’s true in Britain, is certainly true in France, where, in February 2005 the ministry of education’s Patrick Gérard told the IHT that French education was a “failure.” About 15 percent of French students leave school every year, perhaps to follow a calling to burn automobiles; of those who stay to graduate, three-quarters lack basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic — which, Gérard said, was “average” compared to the rest of Europe.
A friend of mine, the late George Leinwall, a Joycean and a remarkable bibliophile, used to say that there were two huge problems confronting us, one that nobody wanted to see, which was the declining birthrate in the developed world, and one that pretty soon nobody would be able to see — the catastrophic collapse of the biggest government boondoggle of all time: public education. They wouldn’t see it, he said, because they’d be too stupid to know what they were looking at — and wouldn’t be educated sufficiently to do anything about it anyway.
Sadly, we’re not doing any better than the British or the French. Last January, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a round-up (subscribers only, but here’s a bootleg) of very bad news on the American education front by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein. The essay, noted by many at the time it was published, is called “A Very Long Disengagement.” A sample: In 2002 the National Geographic Society issued the results of the Global Geographic Literacy Survey. Thirty-nine percent of American 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed failed the test, and in international comparisons Americans came in second to last out of nine nations tested. Only 13 percent of our country's participants could pinpoint Iraq, only 12 percent could identify Afghanistan. The rate rose to just 51 percent for those who could locate New York State. Moreover, the young American adults surveyed could identify an average of only 2.5 countries in Europe. Around 30 percent believed that this nation has one billion to two billion residents…and only 19 percent could name four nations that acknowledge having nuclear weapons. Remarkably, 29 percent could not identify the Pacific Ocean. Dudes! It’s the one with the big waves! Once, a high-school graduate who worked for me asked me what language they spoke in England. The answer, I guess, is “stupid” — it’s the universal language of the West.
Unfortunately, we’re at war with people who go to school and take what they learn seriously — like Shehzad Tanweer, a Briton from Leeds who I’m sure shared his countrymen’s feelings about “cruel, vulgar, arrogant” Americans. Shehzad, who studied sports medicine, successfully identified Pakistan on a map and traveled there to attend a jihadi school for some post-grad work. A year ago today, as the Times reports, he joined with three other suicide bombers to kill more than 50 innocent people and maim hundreds of others in a massive terror attack in London. The BBC, of course, broadcast his commemorative message, courtesy of al Qaeda. That’s not smart, of course — but then at the BBC, they’re all educated in Britain. ITEMS Up Moon River. Pity poor Marco Mancini, unprotected against political prosecution by the new liberal government of Romano Prodi in order to give some credence to the Euro-left’s obsession with CIA rendition flights, real or imagined. He gallantly protests his innocence in today’s Corriere della Sera. We’ll have to wait to see what Ideazione has to report as this unfolds — and don’t forget Daisy the blogger at the doughty I Love America site.
Speaking of vulgarity. Because my daughters enjoy reading it, I’ve maintained my (rather expensive) subscription to The Times Literary Supplement for many years despite the mindnumbingly predictable pairing of reviewers and books — whatever could a Bush-bashing reviewer have to say about a Bush-bashing book? — and the apparently razor-thin Rolodex of writers used by the paper: Mary Beard, Clive James, Mick Imlah, the same names for decades. I remember one review of a Gertrude Himmelfarb book so crammed full of vitriol that it nearly neglected to mention the subject matter of the book itself. Still, they carry Hugo Williams’s “Freelance” every two or three weeks, and it’s by far the best column in a magazine or newspaper in any language. Besides, I’ve been reading the TLS since the ‘60s; I always thought it was much better than the NYTBR. Or at least I did until the May 26 issue (it takes a while to reach me), in which “JC” — one of the rota of semi-arch writers responsible for the TLS’s comment column — used the f-word or a variant 21 times in three paragraphs to discuss the ubiquity of the obscenity “in the pages of an otherwise well-written family newspaper” (The Guardian, as it happens). It was no doubt meant to be ironic in a juvenile sort of way. My children failed to find it so — and unfortunately they found it before I did. Now, I’ve written for both the NYTBR and Playboy, so by now I know the difference: One reviews books no one reads. The other discusses sex in interesting articles that everyone reads. So FU, TLS. Maybe it should be The Claremont Review of Books for me from now on. If only it were a weekly!
Hyping hyperbole. I noticed that one of Time’s bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, has been troubled “for quite a while” by a nagging question: “Is George Bush a War Criminal?” I feel the pain — but it’s a good pain, because sorrowfully criminalizing those with whom one disagrees is so pleasant. Besides, hyperbole like this is unavoidable when there are a zillion bloggers all of whom are troubled by one question or another. I regret that I was guilty of it myself last week when I compared former German foreign minister Jo Fischer to Goebbels because he had articulated a propaganda-driven foreign policy reflecting the virulent anti-Americanism of the Schroeder government. Remember when a minister in the Schroeder government compared Bush to Hitler? Calling conservatives “fascists” is a time-honored habit of the left. Even though I received a note from one German reader saying the comparison with Goebbels was “spot on,” I’m going along with other correspondents who had a contrary view and swearing off that kind of demonizing. Instead, I’m going to follow the practices of the German press, as reported in English by Bloomberg, and stick to tuber references whenever possible. Is George Soros a yam? The question has been troubling me for quite a while.
— Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.
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