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Courtesy of a good friend comes a YouTube video.
A nine-minute and 5 second clip from the brilliant Aussie satirical ‘current affairs’ show CNNNN, it is a real live interview with some Americans.
Watch for the ‘on the street’ vox pop with our Prime Minister John Howard, and watch out Kyrgyzstan!
UPDATE: Anyone got any videos of dumb Australians I can post for balance?
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Ben Hamilton 01.17.07 at 7:56 pm
Ohh… this is so so funny.
I wonder tho what the results would be if we did something similar to Australians…. ?
Martyn Davies 01.19.07 at 9:37 am
Oh God, I’m really depressed now, and we can’t even blame Sacha Baron Cohen.
Warren Allan Johnson 01.19.07 at 11:44 am
This really is funny! Perhaps this should be required viewing in high school social studies classes — as an inspiration to American youth to not be so stupid when it comes to the world around them.
Warren Allan Johnson (in Michigan, in the States)
Lee Hopkins 01.19.07 at 1:11 pm
I thought I would have received a landslide of abuse from North Americans over this — what amazes me is that so many people have picked this up; see John Wagner’s post on it for more informed and eloquent commentary.
Amazing!
(http://wagnercomm.blogspot.com/2007/01/america-land-of-free-home-of-well-not.html)
Lee Hopkins 01.20.07 at 3:32 am
Lee,
There’s no “landslide of abuse” because from here in the USA because: a) we’re used to these type of videos; and b) most of us reading your blog *know* that this level of lack of knowledge exists.
As John Wagner pointed out, the Canadians have been doing these type of videos for years (proximity helps) and our own comedians and talk show hosts have been doing them as well. (and Borat, of course) As one of the commenters to John’s post mentioned, it has a lot to do with quantity… ask enough people and you’ll get the segments you want.
There is, though, a much larger reason for much of the ignorance of the rest of the world that I’ve found in the past is hard for people outside the US to fully appreciate. The reality is that with the huge economy of the USA and also the huge landmass of the USA, the average person in the USA does not *need* to think about the Rest Of the World. There is very little *direct* impact on their daily lives. Many US residents do all their shopping, their travel, their correspondence *within* the USA. They will never *need* to visit or even call another country in their entire lives. (Another trick… ask average Americans how to call a country outside of country code 1 (which is all of North America)… the *vast* majority (who are not recent immigrants) will never have made such a call and have no clue how to do so.)
There don’t seem to be exact stats, but the reality is that the vast majority of Americans don’t own passports. They don’t need them! They can live their entire life living, exploring and vacationing in the USA. Why go through the headache of getting one when you’ll never need it?
Now, yes, in this increasingly global world, there are certainly impacts hitting closer and closer to home, but still, on a daily existence level of working, paying the bills, getting the kids to school, cleaning the house… what goes on in the rest of the world seems incredibly remote.
It’s not an excuse in my opinion, but it is an explanation. I’m a passport-bearing, news-junkie, frequent-travelling American who did actually know where Kyrgyzstan was (I recall a Nat’l Geographic article on it some months back
and who is quite saddened by the lack of knowledge within our nation about the wider world (and don’t even get me going on the state of our education system). But I’m not an example of the majority.
We live in a large country with a large population and (for now) a very large economy.
So no, we’re not sending abuse… we know the lack of information is out there.
Dan
David Murray 01.20.07 at 8:46 am
The reason you don’t get guff from Americans on this is that the real morons don’t read blogs and the rest of us are so deeply grateful for how easy it is to distinguish ourselves from the morons–H.L. Mencken said an American could set himself up as a prince by reading 50 good books–that we’re reassured, not outraged, by videos like this.
Of course, that was 80 years ago. If Mencken were writing now, his standard would be, “by watching CNN 10 minutes a week.”
Jay Leno has made most of his living on this grim instinct of the masses of half-educated Americans to chortle at the masses of uneducated Americans.
Lee Hopkins 01.20.07 at 9:12 am
David — you say exactly what was in my head. I would have no fear of any of us appearing in one of Jay’s videos (or their ilk) precisely BECAUSE my North American colleagues are so learned.
Mind you, John Wagner didn’t realise that Kyrgyzstan was a REAL country, but I can totally forgive him because countries with a distinct lack of the vowels (making it easy for us westerners to pronounce them) *do* sometimes look like made-up names.