He wasn't a king and he didn't live in Scotland

The Last King of Scotland
Not that I'll go see this in the movie theater but checking out the website for this movie and then clicking on the link for the interactive time-line is quite an education. I had heard the name Idi Amin when I was a kid but I never knew what he was all about. Now I know! This reminds me that I want to see that movie with Don Cheadle did about Rawanda, I guess I'll try to rent that soon.
These are just some of those things that you heard on the news or read in the paper when you were a kid (those of us over the age of 40) but it never really sunk in: the reality of what was going on in another part of the world at that very moment. It's kind of like how I felt about 10 years ago when I realized that the Vietnam War didn't end until 1975. We common people in America are so isolated from events in the rest of the world, we have so little sense of the Big Wide World picture. We only know what other people tell us - what we see on TV and what we read in print (newspapers, magazines, Internet).
I have no answer on this and don't know if I should be ashamed for not knowing or be happy that I don't know.
Even worse - when getting the link for Hotel Rwanda I saw that it just happened in 1994. What's my excuse for not knowing about this before the movie was made?