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

by Charles P. Pierce

  “In my view, the punditry—and to some extent, the mainstream press is responsible, too—has been responsible for dumbing down people about how our political system works and, in particular, in my case, how the judicial branch works.

  “These are purely political creatures who don’t understand what Article Three of the Constitution says. If you poll the United States today, you find that over forty percent, sometimes over fifty percent, of the people in the United States believe in creationism and not evolution. And they think that creationism should be taught alongside, or even supplant, evolution in the public schools. So they don’t understand why this federal judge in Pennsylvania, in my case, won’t get with the program and bend to the popular will.

  “Well, that’s not the way the Framers designed the judiciary. We are supposed to be a bulwark against the popular will at a given time and responsible to the Constitution and to the law. But, boy, that’s lost. People should get that.”

  Six months later, browsing in a bookstore, Jones came upon Godless, the most recent work by the right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter, whose gifts as an evolutionary biologist had been fairly well disguised heretofore. Coulter parroted much of the ID evidence that had been left in tatters during the trial; compared Jones to Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador whose criticism of the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War drew the ire of the Bush administration; and concluded that all you needed to know about Jones’s intellect was that Tom Ridge had been his mentor. All of which made even less sense than the case for ID. “An ‘activist judge.’ That term is so misused,” Jones says. “It’s misused to the extent it’s become useless. You know what it means? It means a judge that you disagree with. It doesn’t mean anything else besides that. If I don’t agree with a judge’s decision, then he’s an activist judge. It’s ludicrous.”

  Like so much of the blasted landscape of Idiot America, the Dover trial was a war on expertise, and Judge Jones was the last expert standing. Pastor Mummert had laid out the shape of the battlefield early on, when he described Dover as besieged by its intelligent and educated elements. The people to be most distrusted were those who actually knew what they were talking about. This is how people get elected while claiming not to be politicians. This is how, through the new mass media technologies best exemplified by the successful know-nothingism of talk radio, everyone is an expert, if they can move units or budge the needle. Everyone is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a political sage. Why should anyone pay Sean Hannity, an NYU dropout, a dime to talk about stem-cell research?

  Why not ask the guy who fixes your car?

  Why not the guy on the next bar stool?

  Why not you?

  Of course, if everyone is an expert, then nobody is. The worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

  It used to be that parents wanted their kids to be smarter than they were. It used to be that, when we had outbursts of primitive enthusiasms, as in the Scopes trial, we treated them as understandable interruptions in the relentless march of the American mind. It used to be that people scrapped and clawed their way up so that they could send their kids to Ivy League schools. Now so many of those children have emerged from the Ivy League as newly minted conservative friends of the soil, brimming with ersatz proletarian outrage and railing on behalf of the rubes in places like Dover against the kind of expertise produced in—wait for it—the Ivy League.

  The founders wanted a nation of educated people: this, they believed, was essential to self-government. Some of the most heated arguments among them involved who would make up the educated elite. High Federalists like John Adams thought the elite should be exclusive and uncomfortably Anglophiliac in its attachment to the upper classes. The old democrats—most notably, Jefferson and Madison—suspected that the educated elite might just be everyone, although neither of these two plantation masters was completely convinced. What none of the founders believed was that the elite should be everyone and no one at the same time.

  Three intermingled schools of idiocy are produced by this kind of society. All have proud histories as American phenomena, but all have been cheapened by their insistence on material success in their most unalloyed forms. (For example, intelligent design would have been perfectly unremarkable as a fringe religious theory. It became intolerable when it insisted on its commercial validity as actual science.) Political idiocy is best represented on the AM radio dial and on those evening cable television news programs, the booking philosophies of which seem to differ little from those once employed by soup kitchens on the Bowery. How much more interesting would Ann Coulter be if, instead of sprawling on the cover of Time, she was fighting to be heard in front of small, fervent audiences in rural Missouri? Coulter fumed for weeks after she was dismissed as a columnist by USA Today. If your biggest public gripe is that you got canned from that blob of mayonnaise, you have no right to stand in the company of Ignatius Donnelly. The Prince of Cranks was an American, dammit, and not an idiot. He never would’ve taken the job with USA Today in the first place. The man had his pride.

  Commercial idiocy is the mechanism through which political idiocy (among other things) thrives, the mechanism through which the authentic revolution fostered by WLAC was diluted and homogenized into profitable syndicated outrage. Religious idiocy, formidable on its own, also functions as a baptismal font for political and commercial idiocy. Gussy up your extremist politics, or your bunco museum in which dinosaurs wear saddles, with the Gospels, and you can paint anyone who suggests that your goods are ridiculous a member of the intelligent, educated segment of the population, come to discomfit the faith-based folks.

  Thus, it is considered impolite to point out, as Judge Jones did, that millions of Americans are paying millions of dollars to be willingly taken in by obvious hooey, such as books in which the loving Savior comes back to earth for his glorious premillennial encore as someone sprung full-blown from the mind of Stan Lee; or that the fringe interpretation of Scripture on which the books are based dates back only as far as the Taft administration.

  American secular eccentrics once stood as proudly outside the world as any insular religious community did, rendering to God what is his, and rendering to Caesar not at all. Which made it all the more disappointing that the fight over intelligent design in Dover ever made it to the courthouse at all. And even more disappointing that it didn’t end there. In the spring of 2008, a movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was released. Yet another defense of ID, this was a vanity project by Ben Stein, an economist who’d also been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, a freelance pundit, a movie extra, a game-show host, and the spokesman for a popular brand of eye drops. Now that he had come to pitch intelligent design, Stein’s career arc could safely be said to have gone from hogwash to eyewash and all the way back again.

  The movie had two themes. It contended that scientists who believed in ID were being crushed by the academic establishment. (Stein’s examples were fairly threadbare. It’s easier to believe in ID than it is to believe that godless secularists have taken things over at places like Baylor and Iowa State.) However, the movie’s second basic theme is startling and disturbing. Stein argues, seriously, that Darwinism led to the depredations of the Nazis. In a moment that seemed drawn from early Monty Python, Stein visits the place where the Nazis perfected their methods of genocide and then visits Darwin’s house. The sequence ends with Stein staring balefully at a statue of Darwin. In an interview with a Christian radio network, Stein said: “When I saw that man … talking about how great science was, I was thinking to myself that the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do, they were telling them to go to the showers and get gassed…. That was horrifying beyond words…. That’s where science leads you.

  “Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a truly glorious place and science leads you to killing people.”

  Science leads you to killing people.

  Crazy his
tory had been mustered to the defense of lunatic science. In the years since the end of World War II, none of Stein’s relatives apparently ever rode a subway, or took a flu shot, or watched men walk on the moon. However, in an increasingly vicarious public discourse, if Jonah Goldberg can make money calling Woodrow Wilson a fascist, it was relatively simple for Ben Stein to drop the gangplank of H.M.S. Beagle at the gates of Auschwitz. This line—that science leads somewhat inevitably to inhumanity—was adopted sub rosa by conservative politicians who wanted to keep ID alive as a political weapon regardless of its transparent worthlessness as actual science. Stein did nothing less than confirm every word in Judge Jones’s decision. He brought ID back to its creationist roots. He demonstrated that it is always and primarily a moral and religious concept.

  After all, creationism and its spawn are hardly the only profitable alternative notions of how life on earth came to be. Ignatius Donnelly had his own ideas on the subject. The writer and historian Peter Bowler points out that both Immanuel Velikovsky and, later, Erich von Däniken proposed outré notions about life’s origins so popular that they persist to this day. (The History Channel regularly runs programs based on von Däniken’s ideas about the prehistoric influence of extraterrestrials on the development of human life. It should be noted here that, yes, sooner or later, these theories do bring you around to the Masons again.) Velikovsky and von Däniken shared as deep a distrust of conventional scientific expertise as exists among the creationists. However, their distrust was based on their eccentric interpretation of prehistory, and it was always purely secular.

  But there is no ongoing fight in local school boards to “teach the controversy” about how space aliens built the pyramids. “Something more is at work here,” writes Bowler, “and that something must be explained in terms of religious fundamentalism’s offer of an alternative, not just to science, but to the whole direction of modern life…. Creationism works because so many people see their commitment to the Bible as both a source of salvation and a way of preserving traditional American values. This is why the biblical literalism of … creationism has become a dominant force in American society without undermining support for science as a practical activity linked to technology and medicine.” That’s how Ben Stein can make a buck or two selling eye care products without inevitably becoming Dr. Mengele. It’s how he can rely on the scientific breakthrough of radio to make his case that all science leads to the gas chamber.

  Not long after the Dover trial, Pastor Mummert spoke about what he’d said at its outset. He spoke softly and gently, but he did not back down an inch. “It seems to me,” he said, “that it’s the educated segment of society that reads the books and gets the new ideas, and that’s the basis of the culture wars that we have going on now.

  “I’m not anti-science, you know. I have one son who’s a civil engineer.”

  Pastor Mummert came to preach in the southern part of Pennsylvania, where the Mennonites and the Amish came and settled, and where the people of the Ephrata Community slept on planks with blocks of wood for pillows. There, among the swelling hillsides and deep swales shivering with corn, these people came to escape in their own ways the perils of a sinful world. And they found a country that would welcome them, that had written its tolerance for their eccentricity into its founding documents, that was the best country ever devised to be a little off the beam. It might look askance at them, or turn them rather tastelessly into tourist attractions, but it would allow them the blessed freedom of their insularity. The Amish were not faith-based people. They were far too serious for that. They rendered to God and to Caesar in the proper measure. They kept things in the right places.

  IN Derby Line in Vermont, they put their public library on the ground floor of the old opera house, cleanly melding public information and public entertainment. Curiously, though, down the middle of the library runs the border between the United States and Canada, indicated by a black line running across the library floor. (The line was drawn in the 1970s, after a fire, in order to demarcate the respective responsibilities of American and Canadian insurance companies.) If you want to borrow a book, you go to the stacks in Stanstead, Quebec, to find it, and then back to Derby Line, Vermont, to check it out.

  For decades, it was a point of civic pride for the people in both towns that they lived right atop one of the friendliest stretches of one of the friendliest borders in the world. People wandered down the tiny, shady backstreets of the place, passing back and forth between the two countries without ever really noticing. By 2007, though, the Gut had come to rule in the United States. Borders were now dangerous places, shadowy and perilously permeable at any moment by international terrorists or illegal immigrant gardeners, or both. “They’re proud of their history,” an official of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the New York Times. “But because of what happened on September 11, 2001, we cannot do nothing. We have to react when there’s a threat.” The border authorities in both countries moved quickly to restrict access along the side streets in Stanstead and Derby Line. As part of the plan, it was proposed that anyone parking a car outside the library on the Canadian side might well have to pass through a port of entry before walking up the front steps, which are on the American side.

  Of course, all of this brought the media, which fit Derby Line and Stanstead into the ongoing market-tested, focus-group national narrative of terror, adorned with ominous logos, laden with dark brooding music, and pitched for six years by relentless anchorpeople wearing their looks of geopolitical concern and their flag pins. “It was okay,” says Mary Roy, a librarian in Derby Line, of the town’s sudden celebrity. “But it was sort of like, ‘Can’t you guys get together and get it once, because you’re all asking the same questions?’

  “That one night we were on the seven o’clock news, NBC there, Brian Williams and, probably at seven fifteen, we got a telephone call from a gentleman calling from Pennsylvania, totally irate that the government was going to not be strong on [border security in the library], and what could he do. Wasn’t there a blog, or a citizen’s advocacy group he could join. This was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.”

  It has not been an easy decade for libraries. A national network of libraries had been operated for decades by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the Bush administration closed it, destroying a number of documents in the process. The USA Patriot Act, passed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks by a terrified and docile Congress, allowed the FBI virtually untrammeled power to rummage through the records of library patrons. Some librarians resisted by destroying their records before the Feds could get to them. One librarian in Massachusetts threw two FBI agents out of the library and told them to come back with a warrant. John Ashcroft, who was then the U.S. attorney general, pooh-poohed the privacy concerns of the librarians, claiming that the Feds never used their new powers, but neglecting to mention that the same law that allowed the FBI to come snooping in the libraries also forbade the librarians from disclosing their visits. Libraries are well-ordered places, and there were too many people profiting too greatly from a disordered age for libraries to go unscathed.

  Libraries are still good places to visit while you consider what’s gone wrong in the country. They’re one of the few places left that are free and open and, at the same time, reliably well-ordered. Fiction is on one set of shelves. Nonfiction is on another. Books on theology lean on one another. Nobody puts them on the shelf with the scientific volumes. Aquinas and Mendel are in different places. Ignatius Donnelly’s work does not abut that of Percival Lowell or Edwin Hubble. And, if libraries sometimes seem to be evolving into Internet cafes, still, once you step away from the computers, a library is a good and steady place, where the knowledge you’re looking for is in the same place it’s always been.

  Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are defined by those people’s ferv
ency. Fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell. The best sellers are on one shelf, cheek by jowl, whether what’s contained in them is true or not. People wander blindly, following the Gut into dark corners and aisles that lead nowhere, confusing possibilities with threats, jumping at shadows, stumbling around. They trip over piles of fiction left strewn around the floor of the nonfiction aisles. They fall down. They land on other people, and those other people can get hurt.

  Part III

  *

  CONSEQUENCES

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Woman Dies on Beech Street

  In The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times, Earl Shorris argues that fundamentalist Protestantism—and, indeed, American religion in general—has been changed, well, fundamentally by embroiling itself in the pursuit of secular political power. “It has changed from a congregation or a conference into a faction,” Shorris writes.

  Defenders of republican government all the way back to Aristotle have mistrusted factions. Mr. Madison went out of his way to wave red flags, most vigorously in Federalist 10, in which he cautions that “the latent causes of faction are [thus] sown in every man, and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points … have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for the common good.”