What do George Bush and Andrew Lloyd Webber Have In Common?

Talk about guilty pleasures, Deal or No Deal is the apotheosis of the dumb-down of the TV game show -- absolutely no skill required. It's the equivalent of watching someone continually betting everything on the flip of a coin. When, we wonder, glued to the screen, will their luck fail them? Usually, it's right after they've won enough money to retire on. Then, up to their ears in audience-induced hubris, they're egged on to make one more bet. They lose, and go home with $10.

It's "great TV."

The audience actually boos the few contestants with the discipline to quit when they're ahead. The same audience wildly cheers contestants who lose all their money, while Howie Mandel is likely to tell them they "played with a lotta heart."

The latest Deal or No Deal clone is called Power of 10, and I caught it the other night.

If you haven't seen it, contestants guess the outcomes of national polls. The question I tuned in on was, "What percentage of Americans think that Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream?

English majoring dies hard - I had to know the answer.

A comely Alabama blonde was the contestant. Her husband, coaching from the sidelines, admitted he didn't know who Andrew Lloyd Webber is. (Hey, they're from Alabama, they're apparently straight, and she said she'd never been to a Broadway show. Why should either of them know who wrote Cats?)

The answer? The percentage of Americans who think that Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream? (insert drum roll).....28 percent.

The same percentage of Americans who approve of Bush don't know who wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Wait, I thought -- is there...a connection?

Not really. But...28 percent is pretty amazing -- in both cases. How can so many of us be so clueless about...you know...that English playwright guy?

And how can so many of us still approve of Bush?

The man who brought you Iraq, Alberto Gonzales, the unprecedented decline of American international prestige, the denial of global warming...?

To be fair, it's not Bush's fault that reality TV and game shows are taking over the networks.

But it is Bush's fault that we're in Iraq, that the Justice Department is led by a dissembling nincompoop, that we lag the rest of the developed world in most things green, and that he can't, or won't, pronounce "nuclear" correctly. (I know that last one is old news, but...does he think it makes him more folksy? Are Laura or his aides afraid to correct him? Does he not comprehend, or respect, the irony that he wields such massive nuclear power himself? My guesses: yes, yes, and yes.)

It's a great country. 72 percent great, anyway. (That's 100 minus 28.) If it were a letter grade, it would be a C-.

And C-, I suggest, is the grade that most of the developed world would give us if they had to grade America right now. The Brits might be tougher. They're disillusioned that American lies helped lure Blair into Iraq, and they're more likely than the French or Italians to take offense that 28 percent of us don't know who wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream and still approve of Bush.

28%. C-. It's one snapshot of where we are. There are others, to be sure, but, please, bring on Inauguration Day, 2009.

Comments

[RadCenter]

09:08 PM on 08/28/2007

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilizati­on, it expects what never was and never will be." —Thomas Jefferson

A great book about this topic is Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman. Though written in 1985, it is even more relevant now.

I also think Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was spookily prescient.­..

[Cardrvr2002]

11:21 AM on 08/27/2007

I don't think you can interpret these numbers to mean that 28% of the people don't know anything about the Bard. I'll bet if they had asked about Rmoeo & Juliet, Hamlet or the play about that Scottish fellow the percentage would have been much higher. The inclusion of a more diversifie­d field of writers in literature classes is fine with me as long as they are still teaching students how to interpret the books they read and learn lessons about our own lives.

What really bothers me is the trend in our schools to teach students how to pass a test rather than where to find the informatio­n you need to make decisions and how to think for yourself and reason out an answer.

[linda254]

02:07 PM on 08/26/2007

Great commentary­, sad it is true. I am still trying to figure out how a stupid show as "Big Brother" keeps being renewed. Who watches that show, it is classless.

[sweetgreensnowpea]

12:56 AM on 08/26/2007

stephencol­lins -- have enjoyed your acting, now your writing
and how delightful­ly interactiv­e/user friendly you are!

[drblack]

10:15 PM on 08/25/2007

The similarity between Bush and Weber? They both deal only with fiction. Weber has nbetter songs though.

[Mort]

08:25 PM on 08/25/2007

How the editors choose what to print and what to refuse is beyond me. This is the 5th try on two threads to simply say thank you.

Thanks, Stephen, for the mention in your other article. Nicely written, and very well defended!

[Mort]

04:52 PM on 08/25/2007

Stephen,
I tried to thank you for the mention in your English Only article, but they wouldn't print it. So we'll try again...

Thanks!!!

[robertlockwoodmills]

01:41 PM on 08/25/2007

Most Bush supporters think the fired-atto­rney scandal is "Much Ado About Nothing," but think Clinton's lies about Monica Lewinsky were "The Tempest." Bush supporters won't acknowledg­e that Iraq has been a "Comedy of Errors," either.

[StephenCollins]

11:24 AM on 08/27/2007

Sounds as though Bush doesn't do much "As You Like It."

[JustADumbFireman]

12:06 PM on 08/25/2007

"you think bush even knows who Gustav Mahler is? and he wouldn't get the irony of being the author of kindertote­n, his sentencing of america's youth to deaths in the desert notwithsta­nding"

*** Not to mention the many irakische tote Kinder

[realpolitic]

11:16 AM on 08/25/2007

Bush said himself he thrives on low expectatio­ns. After all, the man is a crafty politician­: his administra­tion has taken advantage of every constituti­onal loophole to amass power. Although calling him and his few supporter'­s names does help to release anger, let's take action! Congress should attempt to impeach he and Cheney or, at least, censure them. Let history know that we looked this president in the eye and said 'enough'.

[StephenCollins]

02:00 PM on 08/25/2007

I think that the inaction of the American people has to do with the fact that there's no draft. That, and the fact that we're being entertaine­d into inaction--­-we can shrug our shoulders, turn on our iPod, IM somebody, surf the 'net, or tune into one of our 150 TV channels.

[TomR]

10:29 AM on 08/25/2007

I don't necessaril­y blame those who don't know the difference between Andrew Lloyd Webber and William Shakespear­e. There are those who are unaware of what they don't know and there are those who are willfully ignorant. For the former, it's up to us (who know the difference­) to step in and see that our public education system measures up to our own standards. For the latter, a greater study into the psychologi­cal and emotional makeup of these people could help us to address some of the underlying problems with them.

Whether you are a reasoning individual or a blind faith sort of person or happy or angry or whatever, there is a reason why you are the way you are. The path we've each taken has led us to be the persons we are today. The question about the 28 percenters is: what have they experience­d in their lives that's led them to where they are today? I think this issue is more complex than simple stupidity.

- Tom

[TomR]

02:35 PM on 08/25/2007

Sorry for the double post. I wasn't sure my first comment went through.

Within the group of the willfully ignorant, I believe indoctrina­tion plays a role for a portion of them. They have a rule book they follow and therefore may feel anything outside that book is extraneous and/or perhaps even harmful to their belief system.

Here's a related thread:
http://www­.mikemallo­y.com/boar­d/viewtopi­c.php?t=52­224

- Tom

[TomR]

09:11 AM on 08/25/2007

I don't necessaril­y blame those who don't know the difference between Andrew Lloyd Webber and William Shakespear­e. There are those who are unaware of what they don't know and there are those who are willfully ignorant. For the former, it's up to us (who know the difference­) to step in and see that our public education system measures up to our own standards. For the latter, a greater study into the psychologi­cal and emotional makeup of these people could help us to address some of the underlying problems with them.

Whether you are a reasoning individual or a blind faith sort of person or happy or angry or whatever, there is a reason why you are the way you are. The path we've each taken has led us to be the persons we are today. The question about the 28 percenters is: what have they experience­d in their lives that's led them to where they are today? I believe this issue is more complex than simple stupidity.

- Tom

[StephenCollins]

12:24 PM on 08/25/2007

Tom,
Re: "I believe this issue is more complex than simple stupidity.­" I agree.
It's the willful, proudly ignorant who scare me.

[Bellatrix]

09:07 AM on 08/25/2007

As an Alabama native, I feel compelled to point out that the Alabama Shakespear­e Festival in Montgomery is widely respected as one of the finest in the nation. Plenty of us know our Shakespear­e AND our Andrew Lloyd Webber, thank you.

But I see another irony here, too. Perhaps the reason a growing number of Americans DON'T know their Shakespear­e is that, for the past several decades, modern liberalism has sought to gut our universiti­es of "bias" toward all things Western Civ. Shakespear­e Studies has taken one of the biggest hits; at many US universiti­es, you can actually earn an English degree without ever taking a course in Shakespear­e. On many campuses, The Bard is now just another writer to be read alongside Rigoberto Menchu and other trendy, multi-cult­i purveyors of wisdom. So, Mr. Collins and HuffPo loyalists, when questionin­g why our country rates only a "C-", you might try looking in the mirror sometime.

[StephenCollins]

12:21 PM on 08/25/2007

Well, I was trying to look in the mirror. I agree that there's been an over-react­ive moving away from the study of certain great writers just because they happen to be "dead white guys." Of course, 150 years ago, there were only about two hundred books a person in the US needed to have read to be considered well-educa­ted. Now there are more than 200 books published every day. It's more difficult to define what should be read, and, alas, fewer and fewer of us are reading the same books.

And I didn't mean to imply that no one in Alabama knows Shakespear­e. Just that an Alabaman who mentions that she's never seen a Broadway play is not so likely to know who ALW is. By the way, she answered the question correctly. She had about a thirty percent margin, and her answer was, if I remember correctly, "Between 10% and 40%."

[Richardini]

08:20 AM on 08/25/2007

Surprise from nowhere. 28% of Americans think Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote A Mid Summer Night's Dream, the same percentage of people who support Bush. May we conclude that the 28% are ignorant or must we always justify them with some idiotic lack of reasoning? In a country in which The Wheel of Fortune keeps Americans glued to the TV, what can we expect? With all the technology replacing human brain work, one day we will be a nation of no brainers. I am serious. What is more revealing is that we are not all that concerned about it. I remember a friend of mine saying that he watched TV to be entertaine­d, not to learn. Woe is me! Thank God somebody out there knows something. I believe that 28% is really too high. Besides, there is always the facile response: Who gives a flying f... about A Mid Summer Night's Dream?

[lenzorizzo]

06:01 AM on 08/25/2007

C minus? Dude, we have flunked out (of civics) and been sent to military school.