Americans Are Stupid

You have heard this cliché a hundred times. It is cheaper than the sugar sold at Carrefour and more frequent than the sour mood exhibited by public servants. I encountered this cliché in a weekly publication a few days ago, and, even worse, it read: “Americans lack class.”

Where the hell did they get this idea? And why is it so rare in Europe, but so common in Romania? What is the mechanism that elevates our own IQ up to the stratosphere, from whence we look down upon the Yankee’s small and withered brain?

I have a few hypotheses. The first deals with wounded pride. A few years ago, I came up with the idea, as unoriginal as it was, of conducting some street interviews in Washington D.C., and I asked people the question, “What do you know about Romania?” Only one person in five knew something, and their answers revolved around Ceauşescu, Nadia Comăneci, Dracula. The rest had no clue. There was one guy who asked about our geographical position, and, when I told him Romania was next to Bulgaria, he was very surprised and asked me: “Are you telling me Bulgaria is real? I thought it was an imaginary country, they mentioned it in a TV show!” It is no wonder then that the Romanians who travel to the U.S. can only find two explanations for this situation. The first is that Romania does not deserve to linger in the Americans’ memory for more than five minutes after geography class, as it is… simply not important. No, this cannot be right! The other explanation is more palatable: Americans do not learn anything in school, because they are stupid. And their schools are stupid too!

There are a few other reasons why we started to believe this. One of them is the movies. Movies portray Americans as straightforward individuals, who shoot their guns when they are angry, who solve all intellectual dilemmas with bulldozers, and who blow up all things that they think might cause problems. I have to admit it: from Rocky to Terminator, from I Am Legend to Armageddon, the main heroes in Hollywood movies are action men with few ideas and simple lines: “If it moves, shoot it!”

But again, we are wrong. The heroes in these movies are not created in the image of the American citizen. In fact, they are created in the image of the global viewer. They do not know much because the viewer does not know much. They do not ask fundamental questions because the global viewer does not. They have not read Sadoveanu… and we could go on forever. The point I am trying to make is that judging America by Hollywood productions is like trying to picture France only by driving a Citroën car. It is impossible. Voltaire did not write the user’s manual.

However, the cliché is formed in yet another place. Namely, in our press. Our journalists perpetuate it, particularly the ones who know just enough English to make sense of CNN headlines, but not enough to read Bill Bryson (he can write better essays, commercially speaking, than any editorialist in Romania, myself included!). We picked America in order to heal our inferiority complexes, which, just like a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, have become an ironic and biting cultural superiority. What have these Americans ever written?

I do not know precisely, they never taught me in school. But I can refer everyone to a cute little text written on a metal plate on the Moon. Have any Europeans signed their names there? Have they?