The Onion headline “Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens,” popped up a few days after the Boston Marathon bombings and the same day the suspects had been identified as Chechen. I saw the article reposted and retweeted for days, and I noticed there was a seriousness behind the comments: Certainly, the headline was a joke, but it was also probably true.
Fetishizing stupidity
The Onion headline “Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens,” popped up a few days after the Boston Marathon bombings and the same day the suspects had been identified as Chechen. I saw the article reposted and retweeted for days, and I noticed there was a seriousness behind the comments: Certainly, the headline was a joke, but it was also probably true.
While news of the suspects’ Chechen origins spread, media outlets didn’t hesitate to show all the examples of the idiocy of those who confused or could not distinguish between Chechnya and the Czech Republic, to the point that the Czech Embassy issued a statement stating that they are, in fact, different.
How widespread this “confusion” actually was is unknown, because so many instances were smeared across our computer screens, making it seem as if most Americans were incapable of understanding the difference.
My guess would be that a lot of Americans had heard of Chechnya because it was in the news all the time in 1990s and into the 2000s, but not many logged on to Twitter to declare their hatred for the Czech Republic. What this and so many other incidents like it show is that we are building and propagating a new Other: the quintessential stupid American.
For years, former President George W. Bush provided the country with an endless stream of bloopers, but we seem now to have become transfixed on spotting and replaying mistakes regardless of who makes them. Between TLC and MTV, there’s an endless stream of shows that are adamantly anti-intellectual to the point of fetishizing the stupidity of their participants.
It goes beyond reality TV, though, extending to politics and making the news. From Sarah Palin’s Alaska and Teen Mom to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Doomsday Preppers, we await with baited breath the slip-ups, blank stares and nonsensical answers.
In turn, through this obsession with continually ogling what’s become the “stupid American,” we reinforce class divisions. If it is assumed, through watching the news and reality television, that a large portion of the population knows nothing about foreign policy and wants only to protect their gun rights, then what use is there in including them in the national conversation?
Why should the American population even be included in discussions about education and health care if they cannot even figure out what (let alone where) Chechnya is? This is plain wrong. The fetishization of stupidity in this country allows politicians and academics to simply not include vast swaths of the country in conversation.
We’ve become complacent in our receipt of information: We read headlines and tweets but not the articles themselves. This lack of analysis of our current events makes it possible for The Onion to mock our lack of knowledge regarding history and geography. It also reinforces the idea that there is a (perhaps imaginary) majority of Americans that don’t know as much about the world as “we” do.
I have no way of knowing if half of the U.S. knows less than I do about current events, but I hear it so often that I’ve come to accept it. This is just as bad as only reading the headline and not the article.
Most Americans probably don’t have the time to read the newspaper everyday, or spend an hour perusing the news online or listening to NPR. But I don’t believe that those individuals who didn’t have the same educational opportunities as I did, or who must work significantly more than I do, should automatically become the target of bullying.
Instead of assuming that half of Americans are stupid, wouldn’t it be more productive to assume that they aren’t?
