Spin Dry

From the inimicable Michael Ventura, with whom I once had the good fortune to regularly attend a writers workship -- if you think America is number one, some statistics could change your mind.

Go read the whole thing, but here's a taste:

• The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York • The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
• Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).
• "The International Adult Literacy Survey...found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).

Scary stuff, but if you've ever watched Jay Leno's "Jay Walking," you know that the stupid bit isn't exagerrated. Unfortunately, stupid is the least of the problems. When it comes to just about everything -- health care, infant mortality, agricultural production, wage increases -- the US is far, far, far from number one.