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Townhall
Don't
Know Much About Geography
by Victor Davis Hanson
Aug 15, 2013
In
Sam Cooke's classic 1959 hit
"Wonderful World," the lyrics downplayed formal learning with lines
like, "Don't know much about history ... Don't know much about
geography."
Over
a half-century after Cooke
wrote that lighthearted song, such ignorance is now all too real. Even
our best
and brightest -- or rather our elites especially -- are not too
familiar with
history or geography.
Both
disciplines are the building
blocks of learning. Without awareness of natural and human geography,
we are
reduced to a sort of self-contained void without accurate awareness of
the
space around us. An ignorance of history also creates the same sort of
self-imposed exile, leaving us ignorant of both what came before us and
what is
likely to follow.
In
the case of geography, Harvard
Law School graduate Barack Obama recently lectured that, "If we don't
deepen our ports all along the Gulf -- places like Charleston, South
Carolina;
or Savannah, Georgia; or Jacksonville, Florida ..." The problem is that
all the examples he cited are cities on the East Coast, not the Gulf of
Mexico.
If Obama does not know where these ports are, how can he deepen them?
Obama's
geographical confusion has
become habitual. He once claimed that he had been to all "57 states."
He also assumed that Kentucky was closer to Arkansas than it was to his
adjacent home state of Illinois.
In
reference to the Falkland
Islands, President Obama called them the Maldives -- islands southwest
of India
-- apparently in a botched effort to use the Argentine-preferred
Malvinas. The
two island groups may sound somewhat alike, but they are continents
apart.
Again, without basic geographical knowledge, the president's commentary
on the
Falklands is rendered superficial...
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall
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