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Notes from the dumberground >> Bill Bryson gets serious about American stupidity by JULIET WATERS
True enough, Bryson in person isn't the laugh-a-minute curmudgeon he is in print. He still seems a bit stunned by the culture shock of returning to his native U.S. after living in Britain for 20 years. The dumbing down of America is just one of the many topics he covers in Notes From a Big Country, two years worth of weekly columns he wrote for London's the Mail on Sunday's Night and Day magazine, but it seemed to be the one we kept returning to. Mirror: The dumbing down of America problem you write about really hit me when I was watching the Barbara Walters interview with Monica Lewinsky. ABC made this strong link between Monica's self-esteem and her weight problem, but why wouldn't Walters go anywhere near the link between her self-esteem and her intelligence problem? BB: True, she doesn't come across as a heavyweight thinker. Then again, not one person connected with that--including dear Bill Clinton himself--seems real bright. I know everyone thinks of him as a very smart man, and he's no fool. But there's no depth to him either. That's a kind of stupidity, and he's got plenty of that kind of stupidity. You watch this whole business and it does seem that everyone involved in this, all these peripheral senators, the Kenneth Starrs, the Bill Clintons, the Monica Lewinskys, the Orin Hatch's--anybody who commented on it at all--are staggeringly unperceptive and inarticulate. And you think, "Is this the best we can come up with. Is this why my dad fought in the Second World War?" It's a really discouraging age to be around. When I left for Britain it was the Richard Nixon era. And sure, he wasn't a good person, but you had to respect his intelligence and his cunning. M: Still, there's a certain standard of incompetence that seems to have started with Nixon. BB: Well, Nixon was quite possibly the first president to actually spend his whole life just campaigning to be president. And that's the way it is now: in order to become president it seems that what it takes is just campaigning non-stop for years. Anyone with half an ounce of character, who wants to have a real life, probably couldn't endure that experience. It means having to go to like 10,000 roast-chicken lunches for four years. Maybe that's why these people are all so shallow and hopeless. M: What do you think has changed the most about American culture since you left? BB: I think the real change is the complacency. When I left there was a lot of turmoil. There was Vietnam, and civil rights was still going on, and it was still that era when they took to the streets and protested and you had lively debates... And then you see something like Littleton last week, and you watch the discussions afterwards and nobody's talking about gun control, not real gun control. I saw Clinton interviewed in a press conference and he said he was going to empower a group of experts to look into violence on television. I mean, c'mon. I can see this is a contentious issue and you're not going to sort it out overnight, but it's time to start talking about this and to agitate for real control of firearms. But the first person I saw interviewed on Larry King started talking about the need for school uniforms. School uniforms?! I don't think that's going to turn the corner.
Notes From a Big Country by Bill Bryson, Doubleday, hc, 318pp, $32.95 |
I tried, but I couldn't get travel writer Bill Bryson to say anything mean and hilarious about Canada. The worst I could get out of him was that our pedestrian symbols "look like they were drawn by four year olds" (but he concurred that this may be because we also design them for American tourists). His reticence to slag us might be an effect of the media training course his American publisher sent him to after Bryson balked at doing his first book tour because, "I have no personality."