With the election of our nation's first Teabagger Senator, I think a new page has been turned in our grand experiment in representative democracy. We're now testing a new phase of the experiment, namely: can a society barely able to write its name in the ground with a stick maintain a functioning representative democracy?
Congratulations to Senator-elect Scott Brown, shown here either viewing the election results or trying to concentrate on a particularly compelling episode of "Beavis and Butthead."
You ask for evidence? Well, I go by the gut, like so many of my fellow citizens, not by the "brain" like many egghead liberals and such. My theory that America is too stupid to govern itself feels like a nice theory to have a beer with, and that's enough for me.
But, OK, if you insist:
http://www.nrscience.org/...
45% of Americans don't know that the sun is a star
The existence of the Creation Museum
The Birther movement
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them. A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map. The political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying a wide variety of polls measuring knowledge of history, report that fewer than half of all Americans know who Karl Marx was or which war the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in. Worse, they found that just 49 percent of Americans know that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in a war is their own.
http://www.boston.com/... (by Rick Shenkman again)
Like Americans in the 1940s, Americans today barely understand basic facts about our government. Only two in 10 know we have 100 US senators. Only four in 10 know we have three branches of government and can name them. Only a third know that Congress has the power to declare war.
I could go on, but like many of my fellow Americans reading stuff gives me a headache, and in all seriousness this topic is a little depressing even though I set out to write something funny. Please use this thread to offer your own anecdotal or evidential proof of America's newly minted idiocracy, or to take issue with me if you like.