Photo by ep_jhu.

Newsweek decided to see precisely how many people in America take their citizenship for granted, and the results are predictably depressing: 38 percent of people outright failed the official citizenship test, while 29 percent of people couldn’t name the Vice President and 6 percent couldn’t even identify when Independence Day was on the calendar. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

On the surface, it’s easy to damn the results as some kind of sign of Ameri-pocalypse — and Newsweek certainly had no qualms about painting them as some kind of sign that we’re all going to die a fiery, ignorant death, and soon. But American ignorance is hardly anything new. (Even Newsweek had to admit that “yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to ‘slightly under 1 percent.'”) So a large majority of people in America don’t care, and probably never will. Sad? Perhaps. But isn’t this the best argument for representative democracy anyone could possibly come up with?

If you want to give it a go, here’s a list of the 100 questions currently asked of individuals applying for U.S. citizenship — pick ten at random, as proctors do during the test, and see if you would qualify. (Then, if you really need a cheap ego boost, see how many people didn’t know the answers to the questions you got right.)