Dumb Americana
If America wants to be a good imperialist, perhaps it might turn its attention to the lives and careers of the Great Gamers of the British empire, who, exploitative colonialists as they were, still brought detailed knowledge and human engagement to the imperialist project. ?The Great Game? is the name given to the period of intense competition between Britain and Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, for control of the interiors of Asia.

...In fact, the wealth of American intellectual life in its universities stands in sharp contrast to the provincial insularity of its leadership. Morris Berman, professor at MIT, writes in Twilight of American Culture that America has fallen into an irretrievable ?dark age?. The ?dumbest? president in the history of the US presides over a society where the number of people reading a daily newspaper has halved since 1965. In Berman’s survey, 40 per cent Americans couldn’t name the US’s World War II enemies and 120 million Americans had the cognition of an 11-year old. [IE]

As Danny says so rightly in The Believer - If you hate somebody know why do you hate them.