US 'intelligence' fails again... it was KARACHI and not CARACAS

http://vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=3741

Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 20:03:01 EST

From: W. E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com

To: Editor@VHeadline.com

Subject: Re: US 'intelligence' fails again... it was KARACHI and not CARACAS

Dear Editor: Most Americans are geographically challenged ... if not retarded. To wit the following anecdotes:

1. A man told me he had spent a couple of days in Athens and said ... Turkey is a very interesting country.

2. Overheard on line at a foreign currency exchange booth at JFK airport in New York: "I'm going to Puerto Rico. I need some Puerto Rican dollars..."

3. I told someone I was born in Paris. "Texas?" he asked. "No, Paris, France." "Oh, where's that?"

4. Most high school seniors believe that the Peloponesian Wars were fought on horseback by two opposing Polo teams...

5. Four out five people in Los Angeles have never heard of Connecticut.

6. I argued with a local school administrator that the elusive "smoking gun" can be found north of the 38th parallel, in Pyongyang, not Baghdad. "Pyong what?" he said.

7. The clincher: American babbitry can best be exemplified by a nice pink-haired old lady from Akron, Ohio, who observed that Italy must be a very poor country. "After all, they've had 2,000 years to repair the Coliseum and, look at it, it's still in ruins...'"

It should come as no surprise that in a nation where one out of ten people don't know who was the first president of the US, can't tell for sure whether Canada is north or south of the US, can't tell the difference between Austria and Australia, and couldn't find Madagascar on a world map if their lives depended on it -- that Caracas and Karachi would be confused.

After all, the first two syllables sound the same...

W. E. Gutman