The idea, as expressed in the thread title, is most ill thought out on a number of levels.

Considering that we're talking about over 300 million individual people here, a blanket statement like that demonstrates more of an emotional state on the part of the original poster than any use of intellect. It demonstrates a form of lazy, collectivist thinking on a par with "All Indians walk in a single file. At least the one I saw did."

I recall an acquaintance of mine some time back bemoaning the idea that "There are no more Renaissance men around, people with really wide knowledge. You know, people who had read just about every book there was, and who thought deeply about things." I pondered this for awhile and it occurred to me that in this modern age, it would be pretty difficult to be a Renaissance man in the same manner as someone in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.

For one thing, there weren't that many books back then. And how many tens of thousands of books printed per year these days? Impossible to read all the books there are. For another, not all that many people, including many aristocrats who could afford books, were literate. So Renaissance men were really few and far between.

And these days, it's pretty difficult, even for a very well educated person (who continues to read constantly after graduating summa cum laude from a good university), to know something about everything.

So, with all due respect to Wynton Marsalis, for a person who is up on early music, classical music, opera, contemporary musicals, and, yes, even folk music, not to be familiar with Charlie Parker hardly means that "Americans are truly stupid."

To say so would be truly stu—

Oh, well!

Don Firth