Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

by Charles P. Pierce

  This is the country where the Cardiff Giant, the Ponzi scheme, and the Monkees were concocted. Aimee Semple McPherson worked this room, and so did P. T. Barnum. Inhofe’s hoaxes don’t deserve to stand in the proud tradition of American bunkum—not least because they’re, well, true. Unfortunately for Inhofe, his sad misreading of the history of American suckerdom was surpassed almost immediately by his junior colleague Tom Coburn, a doctor elected in 2006.

  Coburn showed promise during the campaign, when he happened to mention that he’d been talking to a campaign worker from the tiny town of Coalgate in central Oklahoma. This person, Coburn said, told him that, down around Coalgate, lesbianism was “so rampant in some of the schools … that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”

  Presumably, Coburn meant one girl at a time. Otherwise, some young lady had been accorded a rather dubious honor on behalf of her classmates. She’d probably have preferred to be elected prom queen. Speaking of which, one can only imagine what dark conspiracies must have occurred to young Tom Coburn at his prom, when all five girls at his table excused themselves at once.

  On the other hand, Coburn likely could teach Inhofe a little something about great American hoaxes. According to the most recent figures, there are only 234 students at Coalgate High School, and fewer than half of them are girls. It’s doubtful that much of anything can be said to be “rampant” in that small a sample, except, perhaps, gossip about something being “rampant.” (Yeah, right. Whatever. As if.) Coburn probably should check to see if there’s a cannibal murderer listening on his upstairs phone.

  Encouraged by the infrastructure of movement conservatism, and insulated by its success from any carping that might arise from outside a mainstream political establishment that respects success and power more than it does logic, these two paid no political price for saying things in their official capacity that would have cleared out their end of the bar in any respectable saloon. It wasn’t always this way. Once, aggressively promulgating crazy ideas could cost you dearly. Global warming a hoax? Rampant lesbianism on the Oklahoma prairie? You might as well believe in Atlantis or something.

  IT is October 13, 2007. Exactly seven hundred years ago, King Philip IV of France undertook to round up all the members of the crusading order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar. The Templars had amassed great wealth; supposedly, they found their seed money while excavating the site of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. They also accrued considerable influence as a protected prefecture of the Vatican, so much so that they scared Pope Clement V as well, and he signed off on the dragnet personally. (This is a dreadfully ungrateful way to treat people who invented, among other things, the traveler’s check.) Philip picked up many of the French Templars, including most of the leadership. He tortured them horribly and killed them even more horribly. But most of the order got away—probably on a fleet of ships that the Templars kept, as the Wizard of Oz says about his balloon, “against the advent of a quick getaway”—and reportedly the majority wound up in Scotland where, legend has it, they came riding out of the mists at Bannockburn to help Robert the Bruce kick the English king back across the border where he belonged. And that was pretty much it for the Templars—unless, of course, they’ve been controlling the world ever since.

  Perhaps they’re doing so from deep in a place like this one, on Walnut Street, in Newtonville, Massachusetts, a tall, handsome brick building across the street from a massive old Congregational church that most recently has done service as an office complex and a Chinese restaurant. The brick building has one round corner, a series of spires on its roof, and carefully wrought carvings on its façade. At street level, it houses a bookstore and a defunct Christian Science reading room. The people who may be controlling the world are upstairs, on the second and third floors. They’re having an open house today.

  The Dalhousie Lodge of the Freemasons was founded in Newton in 1861, in the upper story of a Methodist church. An earlier anti-Masonic fever in Massachusetts had largely subsided, and Masonry was beginning to revive again. Not only the Dalhousie Lodge, but various Masonic subgroups, such as the Royal Arch Masons and the Gethsemane Commandery of Knights Templar, were flourishing in town, and they all needed a larger place for their meetings. In 1895, they bought the property on Walnut Street, laying the cornerstone of their temple in September 1896 in a ceremony that shared the front pages of all three Newton newspapers with news of local men involved in that fall’s heated presidential campaign. “The craze for political secret societies, advertising, and slangy buttons is particularly widespread now,” one of the papers noted. The combined membership of the three lodges helped put up the building. It was dedicated on December 6, 1907. The Masons expected to rent the ground and second floors out to local businesses and to use the third and fourth floors for their functions.

  The upper floors of the old building are awash in dusty autumn sunlight, the corridors sweet with the smell of old wood and varnish. In the past, the building has hosted reunion meetings of the Grand Army of the Republic; one wall displays the autographs of Generals Grant, Sherman, and McClellan. The club room features the mounted heads of big game killed by Masons past. On one wall is an impressive old print of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where the Templars supposedly found the treasure—or the Holy Grail, or some valuable, if theologically inconvenient, evidence regarding the early Christian church—that supplied the basis for their wealth and power and influence. The connection between the Templars and the Masons seems to have been made first by those Templars who escaped to Scotland, most notably in the construction of the famously symbol-laden Rosslyn Chapel.

  In truth, nobody knows exactly what the Templars found in Jerusalem, if they found anything at all. But the order’s secretive nature and the elaborate plot under which they suddenly were hunted down have made them central to almost every conspiracy theory that arose in Europe after their fall from grace. Meanwhile, the Masons prospered in Europe, particularly through their role in building the great cathedrals. They were particularly careful to keep the secrets of their trade away from ambitious competitors. They became adept at codes and various other forms of sub-rosa communication. Many of their vaunted symbols were little more than rudimentary copyright emblems carved into the stone by individual craftsmen—what Philip Ball calls “medieval bar-codes.”

  “There seems to be no indication of any ‘esoteric’ content in Freemasonry until the lodges began to admit ‘non-operative’ members in the seventeenth century,” writes Ball in Universe of Stone, his history of the building of the great cathedral at Chartres. “Gradually, these non-operatives, who did not work in stone but instead had antiquarian interests in the masonic tradition, came to dominate the organization, transforming it from a trade guild into the ‘speculative’ fraternity that still exists today.” The Masons’ role in American history centers largely on the actions—alleged and real—of these “non-operatives.” George Washington was famously a Mason, but nobody would ever have hired him to build a wall.

  The Masons, then, right here on Walnut Street, renting space to the Christian Scientists and having their open house on a fine fall day in an American suburb, have long been assumed by the fertile American conspiratorial mind to be either the heirs to the Templars, or their ideological stepchildren. And, the unfortunate historical resonance of the day aside, it’s a good time to be a Mason. Or a Templar.

  The Masons are having an open house because the national organization is in the middle of a thoroughly modern membership drive. There are television commercials featuring an actor portraying Benjamin Franklin, a Mason himself, talking about the benefits of membership. Their official recruitment pitch has been helped immeasurably by the explosion of interest in the Templars prompted by Dan Brown’s speculative literary supernova, The Da Vinci Code, which postulates that the Templars discovered the bones of Mary Magdalene, who was actually the wife of Jesus Christ. In Brown’s book, Mary
flees Jerusalem after the crucifixion and takes up residence in France, where she gives birth to little Sarah Magdalene-Christ, their daughter.

  For the benefit of the eleven human beings who have neither read the book nor seen the movie: The Templars dedicate themselves to guarding Mary Magdalene’s bones, blackmailing the Vatican with what they know until Clement V gets fed up and sets Philip on them. Some of them escape with the bones, set up an absurdly complex system of perpetual guardianship that inevitably breaks down, and protect their secret down through the years against a network of shadowy clerical operatives, including a self-flagellating albino monk. The book ends with the discovery that the gamine French detective who has been helping the hero is actually the long-lost Magdalene-Christ heir. To his credit, Brown wrote an intriguing thriller. It’s hardly his fault that people read it and integrated it into their personal views of the hidden world. The Masons, for example, play a tangential role in the book, but by all accounts, the novel’s success spurred a great burst of interest in Masonry worldwide.

  In fact, The Da Vinci Code touched off a Templar frenzy in the popular culture. The hit movie National Treasure has Nicolas Cage running down the Templars’ treasure—which, in this case, actually is a treasure, and not a desiccated figure from the Gospels—by following a map that the various Masons who signed the Declaration of Independence secretly drew on the back of the original parchment. This map can only be read by someone wearing complex multifocal glasses invented by that future Masonic television pitchman Ben Franklin. (The movie posits that the treasure was whisked off to the New World on that famous Templar fleet.) The History Channel ran so many programs about the Masons, the Templars, and the Holy Grail that the subject actually threatened the long-standing primacy of World War II on that outlet.

  Soon, everybody had climbed aboard. On the very day when the Masons were holding open houses all over the country, and on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the Templars’ last roundup, the Vatican announced that it would release copies of the minutes of the Templars’ trials.

  The document—“Processus Contra Templarios”—had been unearthed in 2001 from deep in the Vatican archives. Now, the Vatican planned to publish a handsome, limited-edition, leather-bound collector’s edition of the documents, including expert commentary and reproductions of the seals used by the various inquisitors. And at only $8,333 a copy, too. The Vatican always was a little more open about its treasure-hunting than the Templars were.

  “We were talking in the other room about the Vatican releasing this today,” says Larry Bethune, the Grand Master of the Dalhousie Lodge. “Is it a coincidence that they release these documents on the seven-hundredth anniversary? This is how conspiracy, or conspiracy theories, get started.”

  Bethune is the vice president for student affairs and dean of students of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and he got into Masonry through the De Molay Society, which he joined as a teenager in New Jersey. He cheerfully admits that his organization has benefited from the renewed interest in the various conspiracy theories involving the Masons. It’s not that dissimilar to the Da Vinci Code tours offered in Europe, which take devotees of the book around to the spots where the big moments in the novel take place, so that they can pester elderly museum guards with questions about exactly what secrets the elderly museum guards are being paid to conceal.

  “It’s made a big difference,” Bethune explains. “We have to be careful now because there are a lot of people who come to us now because they’re taken by the mystery of it, and that’s not the point of the organization. The people who come thinking that, it’s very hard to argue with them because a lot of it is just hypothesis, even within the organization.

  “They’ll come in here thinking it’s Indiana Jones and all that Knights Templar stuff and they’ll be sort of disappointed.”

  Bethune himself is interested in the connection between the flight of the Templars and the rise of Masonry. In his ancestral home on the islands west of Scotland, he’s seen Templar graves, the monuments flat on the ground and depicting the knight interred there. “I happen to believe it’s true,” he says, “but it’s still just hypothesis. When Philip rounded them up, he hardly got any of them. A whole bunch of them were gone. They did disappear and the story is that they went to Scotland. And that part of Scotland where my family comes from had a lot of Masonic lodges. A connection between the Templars and the Masonic lodges, so far as I know, has never been proved.

  “There are probably four or five million Masons, so there’s probably some group that’s doing something. I always say to potential candidates that they should come to one of our annual dinners first. Watch us plan that dinner and see if you think we’re capable of pulling off some major conspiracy. We can barely get that dinner done.”

  Of course, that’s what they would say.

  Hmmmmm.

  EVEN though the action in his novel takes place in Europe—the bones of the late Ms. Magdalene-Christ eventually are discovered to be resting beneath the Louvre—Dan Brown could not have tossed his novel more directly into the American wheel-house. For good or ill, there’s nothing more fundamentally American than conspiracies or, more precisely, conspiracy theories. There is always secret knowledge, somewhere, being kept from us somehow, by someone. It’s just not the secret knowledge everybody presumes is there.

  For example, Brown published his novel concerning a secret cabal within the Roman Catholic church in 2003. At the time, the church in the United States was reeling from almost daily revelations about how its institutional structure had been used for decades as, at best, a conspiracy to obstruct justice. The newspapers that published the exposes ran into storms of criticism and disbelief. It seemed that people were more willing to suspend disbelief in the case of fictional murderous monks than they were concerning the elaborate lengths to which the church had actually gone to cover up its complicity in the sexual abuse of children.

  Secret knowledge—at least, temporarily secret knowledge—was essential to the founding of the nation. In 1787, when the delegates to the Federal Convention in Philadelphia agreed to debate and write the new Constitution in complete secrecy, they had a number of reasons to do so—most notably, the desire of some to maintain their political viability if the whole enterprise crashed and burned later.

  Not everyone approved. (Lobbing his objections from Paris, Thomas Jefferson made it clear that he hated the idea of a secret convention.) When the Constitution finally did emerge, it was greeted by some people as though it were a collection of magic spells, written in mystic runes and decipherable only to a handful of initiates. According to political polemicist Mercy Otis Warren of Massachusetts, the convention was nothing less than a cluster of “dark, secret, and profound intrigues” aimed at creating, at best, an American oligarchy. In reply, the people defending the convention, and the Constitution that it produced, argued that they were afflicted on all sides by dark cabals. Some time passed before the Constitution was debated primarily on its merits. At first, everyone chose up sides to defend themselves and their position against the black designs of the conspirators arrayed against them.

  Not much has changed. In November 2007, a Scripps Howard poll revealed that nearly 65 percent of Americans surveyed believed that the federal government ignored specific warnings prior to the September 11 attacks, and that fully a third believed in a whole host of other conspiracies, including a plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy and a government effort to conceal the truth about UFOs.

  Conspiracy theories are basic to most American popular culture as well. The rise of black American music—blues, jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop—to a position of dominance within the culture is richly attended in history by a dynamic of Us versus Them. Aficionados enjoyed an undeniable frisson of underground excitement that was sharpened and hardened by a demonstrable organized reaction from the predominant culture of the times. The endless, nearly incomprehensible “culture wars” are a manifestation of one side’s oppositional identity to
the cabal meeting across the faculty lounge. There is a misapprehension about conspiracy theories that ought not to make us lose sight of their true value. In fact, it can be argued that a conspiracy theory—airy and vague and not entirely moored to empirical fact—can be more important than is the revelation of an actual conspiracy itself.

  Conspiracy theories do engage the imagination. In their own way, they are fragments of lost American innocence in that they presume that the “government” is essentially good, but populated at some deep level by evil people. At the heart of some of them, at least, is a glimmering of the notion of self-government. They tumble into Idiot America when they are locked solely into the Three Great Premises, when they’re used merely to move units, and when they’re limited to those people who believe them fervently enough to say them loudly on television. To look at how that can work, you have to spend some time in Dealey Plaza.

  I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961

  My God, they are going to kill us all.

  —JOHN CONNALLY, Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963

  There is an X in the middle of Elm Street, just down the little hill that runs away from the Book Depository and toward the grassy hill with the fence behind it. The sun in Dealey Plaza is merciless on a summer’s day. People squint and shade their eyes. They toss a couple of bucks to the freelance experts who work the plaza every day, with their diagrams and their newsletters. They wander up the knoll, through the blessed shade, and behind the fence—not the original fence, long ago lost to souvenir hunters, but a newer one, rebuilt there because the fence is important to people who wander into the plaza and never find their way out. Even this fence is weatherbeaten now. On one board, almost in a line with the X in the roadway, there once was a line of graffiti.