Michael Moore: The Dumbest People on the Face of the Earth-Politics

"Fahrenheit 9/11" auteur Michael Moore recently fueled the epidemic of hatred for America by denouncing his own country and his own people to the foreign press. The UK's Mirror printed Mr. Moore's observation of Americans: "They are the dumbest people on the face of the earth...in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks...We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing." (1)

That's right. We are. In fact, we're stupid enough to believe that we have a great country. Why? Let's look at the facts...

In 2002, the US Census Bureau estimated that 32.5 million people, from places Moore claims our children can't find on a map (2), lived in the United States, the largest foreign-born population in America since we started keeping records in 1850. (3) Why are all these people risking drowning, hardships, cultural barriers and possible contamination by our laziness, aggression and arrogance, incompetence, shallowness, and sexually explicit media? Why do people such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger come here, entertain, take advantage of opportunity, and enrich our economy through Business and philanthropy?

Shock time: Americans are not nearly as despised as Al-Jazeera would have you believe. In fact, the PEW Global Attitudes Project reports that in its 2004 survey, roughly half the respondents in Russia, Turkey and Morocco say people who have moved to the U.S. have a better life (natives of Germany, France and Britain who responded to the survey disagreed, but that's hardly a surprise, even though Britain has always been a friend).4

None of the usual pat phrases such as "land of opportunity," "let freedom ring," and "democracy, democracy, democracy," seem to explain why Elian Gonzalez' mother died to bring him to America.

But perhaps we as Americans are stupid enough to believe that those phrases actually mean something. Perhaps we are the dumbest people on the face of the earth. "Dumb" in this case can mean "nave," generally meant as an insult, as in "Don't be so nave about why al-Qa'eda hates us so much."

These days, anyone who doesn't adopt the de rigueur attitude of boredom and yawning in the face of just about everything is called nave. But Americans have always been known for innocence and openness.

Beverly West quoted actress Alicia Silverstone in Culinarytherapy. Ms. Silverstone, perhaps channeling President Abraham Lincoln's optimism, once remarked, "Like when I'm in the bathroom looking at my toilet paper I'm like 'Wow! That's toilet paper!' I don't know if we appreciate how much we have." (p. 184)

The idea of anything-therapy and the overuse of "like" appear to the global audience to be authentically American, impressed with our own coolness in one breath and cheerfully mangling the English language in the next, not to mention taking the words of a nubile young Hollywood actress (who starred, interestingly, in a contemporary remake of Jane Austen's satire on manners Emma) as wisdom. Being excited about toilet paper seems, in this high-tech age, a little backward and disingenuous.

Yet all major religions, particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition on which America as we know it was founded, emphasize gratitude as part of spiritual consciousness. Gratitude for the simplest of things, like toilet paper. The great composer Aaron Copeland based his "Appalachian Spring" symphony on the Shaker song of gratitude, "Simple Gifts."

"Simple" is often a synonym for "dumb." Yet if simplicity means stupidity, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were prize idiots. Both of these quintessential American philosophers emphasized simplicity.

In a land of high-speed Internet, 500 channels, strip malls, and Coffee companies proliferating like WMD, simplicity seems a foreign concept. Yet in America, we're "simple" enough to believe that we live in a land of liberty, that (political correctness aside) we can pray, say, or sing whatever we want. We're simple enough to believe that there still is a personal God, no matter what name we praise; that our kids have the right to attend church, despite the brouhaha over "one nation under God" in the Declaration of Independence; and that (reality shows and a 50 percent divorce

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