Is that your impression? I find it's quite the opposite - people in the United States have become more and more distrusting of complicated machinery/software (think the Prius acceleration thing), science (think Creationism or Global Warming) and generally anything that is beyond their ability to fully comprehend without relying on what experts tell them.

I would think dogs would be right up everyone's alley. Simple, well understood, and in this case possibly even effective.

What was it an acronym for? Where did you get this information? The Perl lore that was handed down to me is that Larry just tried out words until he found something he liked. Almost called the language "Gloria", but that's his wife's name too, so he figured it would cause too much confusion.