U.S. military acknowledges Iraq anti-gay killings

This is bad.

Source: Juan Cole

Geographical Illiteracy 101

I had an email exchange with my former Middle East Geography teacher, who is an Iranian expatriate, about the problem of geographical illiteracy in the United States. He wanted to know my take on why so many people over here can't point out places like Iraq or Afghanistan on the map.

Yes, geographical illiteracy is indeed a problem in the United States. This could be due to any number of reasons, but there are a couple that come to mind, which may or may not be any news to anyone.

Primarily I would say that our relative lack of awareness of other places in the world is clearly a function of the geographical isolation of the United States. One can get in his car and drive a couple thousand miles across the continent and never encounter a (significantly) different culture or language. Aside from Canada and some of the Caribbean island-states, no other country in our hemisphere claims English as a native tongue.

It would be interesting to compare global geographical knowledge in a similarly isolated country such as Australia. My bet is that the percentages who know where Afghanistan is would be pretty similar (although because of Australia's historical ties to the United Kingdom and its colonial domains perhaps more people would know where it was).

But sameness of language and culture in the U.S. isn't the only culprit, it is also the fact that the U.S. is one relatively homogeneous country. Getting from point A to point B in the continent does not require going through a number of countries to do so as compared to, say, the various Spanish-speaking countries of South and Central America. I would argue that because those countries share culture, people, ideas and economies through a common, Latin heritage, more people there would be more geographically literate.

It goes without saying that, right or wrong, as the sole superpower in the world the U.S. is able to project its power and influence into the lives of the people in the far-off places of the world on an unprecedented level. People in those places feel more acutely the impact of American influence; until Afghanistan develops a navy capable of anchoring off U.S. soil, weapons at the ready, it will remain an abstract, ambiguous place to most Americans.

Finally, American innovation, culture, economic opportunity and democracy appeal to many (though, obviously, not to everyone). This may seem overly ethnocentric, but just think of the vast numbers of Arabs who wear blue jeans, for starters.

Understanding is a two-way street, though. While people in other countries are better-informed about the U.S., both geographically and culturally, I have run into a LOT of stereotypes and misunderstandings of America and Americans in my travels overseas.