Like most Americans, I was raised, by family and teachers in school, to believe that Americans were the smartest people on Earth.
As I approached adulthood, and read more and more writers from other countries, I started to realize that Americans were not actually smarter than people in other developed nations.
The first time it occurred to me that Americans might, in fact, be dumber than residents of other “first world” or developed nations, was in the late 1990s, when a national poll showed that 59% of Americans doubted that the theory of evolution was true. I remember that bewildering moment, reading the poll results in a newspaper in a coffee shop, as though it were yesterday.
But the moment I realized, for certain, that Americans were the dumbest “first world” people on Earth, was George Jr’s reelection in 2004. By that point, we knew that he had lied to get us into a major war. And why did people vote for him? Because he, whose administration incompetently let 9-11 happen, despite having the intelligence that it was going to happen, was the best candidate to keep them “safe.”
My family left the country then, and what we found in Europe was that this was also the moment the entire world realized that Americans were dumb. We heard it all the time. America was a joke.
And nothing has changed since then. Indeed, all we see is more and more proof of it.
Sarah Palin was beloved and defended by so many four years later. The idiotic “tea party” rose up and placed a bunch of Michele Bachmanns in office. And now we have the lowest of the low, Donald Trump. It is a nightmare that never ends.
And even if Donald Trump loses in a “landslide,” the very fact that 40% of Americans support such a clearly incompetent con man at all is beyond depressing. And it is further proof of what the rest of the world just takes for granted now.
America is dumb as hell.