Well that settles it: I'm going to Europe.

Believing that you know at least something about the world is much more comforting than having to believe that there is a great wide world out there with which you are mostly unfamiliar.

I think I'm a pretty well traveled guy, but the fact is, most of the world is a great mystery to me.

To go along with that, my own related take on it is that we have to remember what the region seemed like to most Americans during the '90s: the Arab/Middle East bad guy/Public Enemy #1 for America was Saddam. Not that most people were particularly afraid of him--he was sort of a joke, like in one of the dream sequences in The Big Lebowski, where Saddam is the guy behind the counter at the bowling alley who gives you back your shoes. But then 9/11 happened, and uh oh, Middle East scary/crazy Arabs out to kill us all...OK, so this bin Laden guy is now our sworn enemy. But hey, Saddam is the top asshole in that region, so surely HE must have had something to do with it...

In one form or another, I think that's pretty much how a lot of Americans saw things in the year or so after 9/11. Confusion between Saddam and al Qaeda wasn't really put there by the Bush administration, but they certainly exploited it. And as Daniel Davies said in that classic post that people often link to, supporting the invasion in spite of the bogus Saddam/al Qaeda links being peddled was contrary to what business people are always taught: that the distinction between "deliberately lying" and "allowing a false impression to exist without dispelling it" is not something they should ever count on to keep them out of jail.

Most people get their information about the world from the evening news and the daily paper, even "reasonably sophisticated, educated people".

Jason C's catagories largely track with the way those two media outlets portray the world. If it ain't on TV, it ain't real to most folks. TV coverage provides the frame for almost every debate of any consequence in America.

Scary, huh?

jeez, how about filtering for the fact that you and your friend are overeducated elite-bubble dwellers and that at least you (don't know about your friend) are very young?

It's bad out there, but not as bad as your friend says.

When I spoke to my father a couple of years ago, after it had become clear and even he had acknowledged that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and asked him "why Iraq?", his quite serious answer was, "because we had to attack somebody." This man is a retired attorney, a normally intelligent and discerning man, but the 9/11 attacks left part of him unhinged. For him, as for so many people like him, it was important that we do something, attack somebody, regardless of whether it was the right somebody, just so wouldn't feel so impotent.

Buford,

I'm twice Ezra's age, spend a lot of time among both suburban and urban folks, and from what I've seen, this shorthand take on attitudes seems to apply pretty well to perhaps 60% of the people I run into (it only seems to apply to about 50% of my closer acquaintances, but that's still depressing enough).

So Indians get lumped into the Industrious Gnome category, or are off most people's mental map altogether?

My European friends vacation in Iran and send me postcards of Persepolis. I think they are not as idiotic as the average American.

Bruce--
I suspect that Jason C. needs to add another category:

"Indians: not to be confused with the real 'Indians', although the PC-police are forcing us to say 'Native Americans' about that other kind. Often encountered on tech support helplines. Speak English, but with amusing inflections. Some--like the kid in "Harold and Kumar"--are smart enough to come here, and maybe become doctors!"

South Asian folks who frequent this blog, you are now free to pelt me with rotten fruit.

Like this?

http://laovoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/americanview.gif

Good one, bg.
I don't think things have changed much in the last 45 years. Back in the mid-'60s, very few Americans knew the difference between China and Indochina, and since the former had stopped us in Korea, we could get back at them by moving into the latter.

Jason C is quite right. And, of course, this sort of ignorance is sanctioned and even glamorized in the name of American exceptionalism.

Perhaps the most worrying thing about the U.S. today is that its citizens are so dimly aware of, but have so much power to impact, what's going on around them. It's a bad combination that plays out much the same way with each passing generation.

I'm not sure it's radically different elsewhere

It is, in my experience. The front page of the paper in every country I've visited typically has at least two things: national news and U.S. news. The fact that people in Buenos Aires, Rome, Prague, Sydney, or Costa Rica all know tidbits of American pop culture and politics feeds the American ego and convinces us we don't need to know that much about everyone else after all--just look how interested they all seem to be in us!

Plus, your average Belgian, German, or Dane speaks 3 or 4 languages, sometimes more. Americans feel threatened when anything but English is spoken ("are they talking about me?").

"because we had to attack somebody"

Of course we did attack somebody when we invaded Afghanistan. Six months later Bush lost interest, and taking its cue from Bush, the media lost interest as well. So in order to get our daily dose of war reporting, we had to attack somebody else.

Remember Ambrose Bierce: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."