ACCORDING TO A new poll, 60 percent of Americans are unable to name the president who ordered the nuclear attack on Japan, and 35 percent do not know that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
One out of every four people surveyed for the America's Talking/Gallup Poll did not even know that Japan was the target of the first atomic bomb.Four percent of the 1,020 adult respondents thought the first bomb had been dropped on some other country. Twenty-two percent knew virtually nothing about an atomic bomb attack. They didn't know where - or, in some cases, even if - such an attack had occurred.
Two percent of those surveyed thought John Kennedy launched the first nuclear strike, and 1 percent thought it was Richard Nixon.
This is scary.
In an era in which the ability to acquire and properly process information has become profoundly important, America insists on being, to a large extent, a nation of nitwits.
Consider, for example, some of our recent top-grossing movies: "The Brady Bunch Movie," a ditzy reprise of a ditzy 1970s situation comedy about a terminally ditzy family; "Dumb and Dumber," which is even dumber than the title indicates; and "Billy Madison," a full-length made-for-morons motion picture about - what else? - a moron.
I turned on "Beavis and Butt-head" the other night, and it was so much worse - so much more stupid - than anything I had imagined that I just sat staring in astonishment.
None of this would be important if we were talking only about fads, goofy things that make a momentary appearance, spark a chuckle and pass from sight. But that is not what is going on. We are surrounded by a deep and abiding stupidity.
Each day tens of millions tune in faithfully to the television talk shows, which have come to resemble an imbecile's version of "Can You Top This?"
Some black students, unable to extricate themselves from the quicksand of self-defeat, have adopted the incredibly stupid tactic of harassing fellow blacks who have the temerity to take their studies seriously, thereby "acting white."
If only there were alarms clanging to alert us to our folly. An ignorant populace is a populace in danger.
Consider that many of the people who are screaming the loudest about the so-called Republican revolution were too ignorant about the issue of civic responsibility to drag themselves to the polls last November to vote.
I spoke to a woman last week who had made the astonishing discovery that Gerald R. Ford was once president. "I'm so embarrassed," she said. "I didn't know until I saw the three of them (Ford, President Clinton and former President Bush) golfing on the news."
Americans who willingly swim in a sea of ignorance can blame themselves when the quality of their lives deteriorates.