Multimillion-selling author, award-winning filmmaker, performer, activist and scourge of political hypocrites everywhere, Michael Moore is nothing less than a global phenomenon. Stupid White Men - the book they tried to ban in the US - was published by Penguin in the UK in 2002 and has since sold well over 1.5 million copies. These hilarious and scorching extracts show exactly why Moore is the man that everyone has an opinion on.

Do you feel like you live in a nation of idiots?

I used to console myself about the state of stupidity in this country by repeating this to myself: Even if there are two hundred million stone-cold idiots in this country, that leaves at least eighty million who'll get what I'm saying - and that's still more than the populations of the United Kingdom and Iceland combined!

Then came the day I found myself sharing an office with the ESPN game show Two-Minute Drill. This is the show that tests your knowledge of not only who plays what position for which team, but who hit what where in a 1925 game between Boston and New York, who was rookie of the year in 1965 in the old American Basketball Association, and what Jake Wood had for breakfast the morning of May 12, 1967.

I don't know the answer to any of those questions - but for some reason I do remember Jake Wood's uniform number: 2. Why on earth am I retaining that useless fact?

I don't know, but after watching scores of guys waiting to audition for the ESPN show, I think I do know something about intelligence and the American mind. Hordes of these jocks and lunkheads hang out in our hallway awaiting their big moment, going over hundreds of facts and statistics in their heads and challenging each other with questions I can't see why anyone would be able to answer other than God Almighty Himself. To look at these testosterone-loaded bruisers you would guess that they were a bunch of illiterates who would be lucky if they could read the label on a Bud.

In fact, they are geniuses. They can answer all thirty obscure trivia questions in less than 120 seconds. That's four seconds a question - including the time used by slow-reading celebrity athletes who ask the questions.

I once heard the linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky say that if you want proof the American people aren't stupid, just turn on any sports talk show and listen to the incredible retention of facts. It is amazing - and it's proof that the American mind is alive and well. It just isn't challenged with anything interesting or exciting. Our challenge, Chomsky said, was to find a way to make politics as gripping and engaging as sports. When we do that, watch how the Americans will do nothing but talk about who did what to whom at the WTO.

But first, they have to be able to read the letters WTO.

There are forty-four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level - in other words, who are functional illiterates.

How did I learn this statistic? Well, I read it. And now you've read it. So we've already eaten into the mere 99 hours a year an average American adult spends reading a book - compared with 1,460 hours watching television.

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