blossoming American ignorance

Andrew Sullivan links to a tragic comment, left somewhere on the Web by a teacher:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

I blame the writers’ strike: with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert not around to tell everyone what’s going on, people don’t get their news.

Better infotainment, please—and more of it!