I don't stay up to watch late night television very often. I get up at 3:30am, so even if the TV is on, I'm usually dozing by about nine o'clock. Ten at the latest. But I have at least seen most of the nighttime talk shows more than once. My favorite of the hosts is probably Craig Ferguson, simply because he strikes me as the wittiest of the bunch.
I am going to miss Jay Leno, even though I didn't watch the Tonight Show much. His monologues weren't my favorite, but I loved the segment called "Jaywalking". That's where Jay would interview random people on the street and ask them general knowledge questions. The comedy came from the fact that people who apparently have important jobs and money don't seem to know the simplest things. For instance, Jay once asked, "What country did we fight in the Revolutionary War?" Answers he got included Spain, Mexico, France and Germany. The segments edit out anyone who gets the answer right, but it's still amazing how many people he was able to find who apparently slept all the way through elementary school. The correct answer, by the way, is the Kingdom of Great Britain. I would also accept England.
I was reminded of Jaywalking by an article I read on the Internet this weekend titled "How Dumb Are We?" It discussed the results of a recent poll designed to find out how many Americans would be able to pass their own citizenship test. Here are some of the results:
29 percent of Americans could not name the current vice-president, Joe Biden.
75 percent could not correctly say why America was in the Cold War. The most acceptable answer is that the Soviet Union wanted to consolidate its power by controlling a large number of other countries, and the United States wanted to contain this practice, and both countries had nuclear weapons.
Six percent did not know the date of Independence Day, the fourth of July.
Only one-fourth of one percent, or one person in a thousand, could name all of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, which are freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom to petition the government. Only 25 percent could name even one of the freedoms, which is the same number who could correctly name all the family members on the Simpsons.
Six percent could not find the United States on a map of the world. 67 percent couldn't find England.
Only 33 percent guessed that the population of the United States is around 300 million. More than 60 percent estimated the number to be somewhere between 750 million and two billion.
75 percent said English was the most commonly spoken native language in the world. It's actually third behind Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
And 63 percent were unable to pinpoint the entire Middle East on a globe.
With the invention of the Internet, Americans now have more information at their fingertips than at any point in history. However, it would seem that our attitude is that we don't have to memorize anything anymore because we can always just look it up if we have to.
Ambrose Bierce once said, "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." You can look that quote up on the Internet, but be forewarned: two out of three websites attribute it to Mark Twain.
