Does Justin Bieber Know What German Means?

The Celebrity Curtain

You have to love America and its mysterious ability to elevate ignorance to an art form. Evidently this poor boy (whose name and fame has somehow escaped my brain's celebrity spam filter) was home-schooled. What is classic is how he refuses to say, "I'm sorry I don't know what that word means." Instead he resorts to the idea that "We don't do that in America"!!!!!

To be fair, it's probably true that though we now have so much access to digitalized information, young people in all industrialized countries are becoming less adept at choosing what information is worth retaining and less able to analyze and interpret information. Yeah, let's throw another Bake Sale so we can pay our teachers...but seriously, there is a deeper issue which is how culturally ISOLATED the USA has become, and how intelligent discourse is being completely displaced by celebrity chatter.

Here in Germany, people talk about and follow the lives of "Promies" as they are called, but they also are regularly exposed to the films, music and television series from other countries. Also, in this part of the world you find people working in a pizza place who can speak four languages fluently. DVDs are always subtitled in several languages and synchronization--where German actors redo the dialogue--is very common, so that television and movies from other lands and cultures have a better chance of penetrating the market.

Okay, on one hand, Whoopi Goldberg in German is not a pretty sight, but on the other hand, what would the world be without any exposure to her at all..if all her comedy had been locked down, only available to English speakers?

The reverse situation is reality for Americans; despite internet and satellite media, so little is getting through. Americans self-censor. They don't look outside of themselves very much at all, dismissing the greater world as irrelevant. The cultural and therefore intellectual scope of the average American is continually contracting, which leaves the nation increasingly vulnerable in a global economy where the balance of power is shifting.

A friend of mine who grew up in East Germany suggested that this cultural isolation is comparable to what was once life behind the Iron Curtain.