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

by Charles P. Pierce

At one point, Hannity got caught on camera coaching some of his interviewees to be harsher in their assessment of Michael Schiavo. It was Hannity—along with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC—who brought to the nation the spectacular charlatanism of William Hammesfahr, a doctor who’d been one of many brought in to evaluate Terri Schiavo as part of the seemingly endless litigation over the previous five years. Hannity relentlessly pointed out that Hammesfahr had been “nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine.”

  In fact, a Florida congressman once wrote a letter to the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine on Hammesfahr’s behalf. That’s not how one gets nominated for a Nobel Prize. (If it were, Hannity could “nominate” himself in the category of distinguished letters.) Hammesfahr had told Judge Greer that he could rehabilitate Terri Schiavo. Judge Greer had rejected his findings outright and called him a self-promoter. Previously, he’d been only one of dozens of medical professionals who’d collided with the case, but now he suddenly became useful. He popped up in a number of media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and on CBS. He argued that Terri could be rehabilitated. That she could be speaking within two years. The people working at the hospice gazed in angry fascination. None of them would have been surprised to see Hammesfahr on television claiming that, in no time at all, he could have Terri Schiavo playing linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

  “How is it possible,” Hannity would intone in meat-headed awe, “we’re in this position if you have examined her. You were up for a Nobel Prize. This is mind-boggling to me.” Hammesfahr was a television star, an actor in the drama. He had a role to play: presenter of the Other Side of the Argument, to whom fair-minded people were somehow obligated to pay heed, no matter what nonsense he spouted. No place was more fair-minded at that point than the Congress of the United States, which somehow managed to go out of its way to make everything infinitely worse.

  “What is really frightening,” says Elizabeth Kirkman, that once-beloved Point of Light for the Bush family, “is that we’re so gullible that crazy people scare us, and they scare our politicians into foolish, foolish decisions. And that, to me, is just mind-boggling—that our politicians are such wusses that they are so swayed by this kind of thing.”

  JUDGE Greer’s final order mandated that Terri’s PEG tube be removed for good on March 18, 2005. On that evening, Annie Santa-Maria was in her office. A federal marshal was there with her. That afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives had voted to subpoena Michael Schiavo and several doctors, some hospice personnel, and all the equipment being used to keep Terri Schiavo alive. It also subpoenaed Terri herself to come and give testimony. So the marshal stayed with Annie to make sure that she was there to receive her subpoena, and to take delivery of a subpoena demanding testimony from a woman Annie knew could no longer move or speak or think.

  In anticipation of Terri’s passing, Annie had contacted a local Catholic priest who was on call to deliver the last rites if necessary to the residents of the hospice. She was unaware that Terri’s parents had contacted their own priest. The two men encountered each other in the lobby outside Annie’s office. Voices were raised to an unholy volume. It looked very much as if a full-scale clerical hooley might ensue. Annie moved to break it up. The marshal blocked her way. He was sorry. She had to stay in her office. She couldn’t go break up a fight between two priests because she had to stay there and wait for a subpoena to be served on a woman who was, for all practical purposes, dead. A few minutes later, the Schindlers were outside, telling the world that the hospice wouldn’t let them send a priest to give Terri the last rites.

  (Later, Annie tried to explain to her mother what had happened. “I said, ‘Mother, that’s just not true,’” Annie explains. “‘That woman had last rites many times over.’ And my mother said, ‘Why would a priest lie about that?’”)

  The last-minute intervention by both the Congress and the president reflected the Schindler family’s last throw of the dice. They’d lost, time and again, in the state courts. They wanted an act of Congress that would then be upheld in the federal system. Remarkably, and to the astonishment of everyone at Woodside, they got what they wanted. Senate Bill 686 was filed and debated and, improbably, passed into law on a resoundingly bipartisan basis, although the U.S. Senate bravely did so on a voice vote only.

  The bill was not merely aimed at one woman in Florida. A memo that circulated on the floor of the Senate described the case as a “great political issue” for Republicans going forward. The bill was aimed at voters in Pennsylvania in 2006, where incumbent senator Rick Santorum, who’d shown up at the hospice to pray with the Schindlers, had a tough reelection fight, and at voters in Iowa who would caucus in 2008 to pick the next Republican nominee. For its Democratic supporters, the bill would serve to blunt future attacks on them from the same quarters, even though every poll consistently showed that the public overwhelmingly wanted the federal government to butt out of the case. To vote for the bill was a careful act of preemptive cowardice.

  Senate Majority Leader William Frist of Tennessee was one of the people with serious designs on those Iowa Republicans in 2008. Frist was also a licensed physician and an accomplished cardiac surgeon. After viewing a carefully edited videotape provided by Terri’s parents, Frist proceeded to diagnose her from fifteen hundred miles away. She was not in the persistent vegetative state that her doctors claimed. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay agreed: “Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead. She talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort.”

  March 20, 2005, was Palm Sunday, a fact noted so often on the floor of the House that Tom DeLay should have ridden to work on a donkey. Late that night, flying all the way back from Texas and interrupting a vacation for the first time in his presidency, President Bush signed what was now called, inevitably, the Palm Sunday Compromise. A great roar went up across the street from the hospice. The Schindlers hurried into federal court to apply for a federal order to replace the PEG and to move Terri to another facility.

  Federal judge James Whittemore had gone to bed that Sunday night, but a little after three in the morning, his phone rang. His clerk was on the line and she was in tears. “I am so sorry,” she told him. The Schindlers’ last-chance lawsuit had landed in his court.

  The case shook Whittemore so much that he declines to discuss it to this day—unlike Judge Jones, who will talk about the Kitzmiller intelligent design case to anyone who will listen. However, the two men shared a panel at a meeting of the American Bar Association that discussed the pressures of working high-pressure, high-visibility cases. Whittemore opened up to that panel about the longest three days of his life. The day they got the case, he and his staff worked all night. At about ten o’clock, somebody sent out for pizza. At that exact moment, Nancy Grace, a CNN legal commentator who combines the nuance of a sledgehammer with the social graces of a harpy, was raging at what she said was Whittemore’s delay in ruling on the Schindlers’ motion to have the PEG tube reinserted. What’s keeping this judge? Grace wondered. He’s probably out having a steak with his family.

  On the fly, Whittemore and his staff were enveloped by a complex security system. They unplugged all their phones; Whittemore’s secretary had gotten physically ill from the abuse. They secured the phones to the point that even Whittemore’s mother’s phone was routed to the federal marshal’s office. Whittemore’s sons were placed under protection. (A run-of-the-mill neighborhood arson in St. Petersburg turned into a federal case because it happened behind the house in which one of Whittemore’s sons lived.) The person who cared for Whittemore’s disabled daughter had to pass a full background check. “It does take its toll on you,” Whittemore told the ABA panel.

  These were not idle precautions. As mentioned earlier, a man had already been arrested for offering a bounty on Judge Greer. The media was aflame. Michael Savage called Democrats “an army of soulless ghouls,” and the former White House aide and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan lumped the removal of the feeding tube with activities
of German doctors in the 1930s. He called it a “crime against humanity.”

  The talk in more respectable quarters was little better. On the floor of the Senate, Senator John Cornyn of Texas seemed to threaten federal judges with physical harm, and this in a year in which one federal judge, and the spouse of another, already had been killed. Other members of Congress talked darkly of defunding courts whose rulings they did not like.

  For all the emotions swirling around him, Whittemore’s ruling was simple and direct. The new law did not mandate a stay, so he was not prepared to grant one; and his court lacked jurisdiction in the matter. This ruling was affirmed on appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. At 9:05 A.M. on March 30, 2005, Terri Schiavo died.

  “I can tell you it was a sacred time,” Annie Santa-Maria recalls. “We had a really moving moment where all of the staff just said good-bye and thank you for the privilege of letting us help you.” The head of the housekeeping staff came in and cleaned the room up personally. Hospice workers lit a candle. Outside in the hallway, thirty people lined up silently to watch the body go by.

  An autopsy revealed that Terri Schiavo’s brain had atrophied almost to the point of insignificance. It had been in that condition when the U.S. House of Representatives had subpoenaed her to testify as to how much she wanted to live. The autopsy showed no evidence of abuse by Michael Schiavo, or by anyone else, for example the staff of the Woodside Hospice. She didn’t even have any bedsores.

  The late Terri Schiavo had a brief afterlife as a political tool. The following April, at a conservative political conference entitled “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith,” a reporter for The Nation heard one panelist refer to the removal of the PEG tube as “an act of terror in broad daylight aided and abetted by the police under the authority of the governor.” Another participant cited a saying of Stalin’s that, the speaker opined balefully, suited the situation: “No man, no problem.” The Nation’s correspondent noted that Stalin coined the phrase as rationale for solving political problems with political murder.

  Conservative commentators noisily charged that the memo describing the case as a political godsend to the GOP, which had so engaged the Senate, had been a piece of Democratic disinformation aimed at making the Republican majority look foolish. This conspiracy theory took flight, attaining the giddy heights of briefly being taken seriously in the Washington Post. Alas, an aide to Florida Republican senator Mel Martinez confessed that he’d written the memo. In the case of Terri Schiavo, the congressional majority hadn’t needed the majority’s help to look foolish. Bill Frist declined to run for reelection. His presidential hopes were stillborn. Tom DeLay departed the House under a federal indictment for corruption. In 2006, the voters handed the majority of both houses over to the Democrats.

  The bonds forged in the siege are as strong as ever. Captain Mike Haworth and his officers regularly participate in charity fund-raisers—10K runs and the like—to benefit the hospice. Louise Cleary tries to interest the press in them. She now watches CNN only when she wants to watch it; doing so isn’t part of the job anymore. Mike Bell had a bad moment when he was told that someone had put what they claimed was Terri Schiavo’s PEG tube up for auction on eBay. He checked. The feeding tube was still in the sealed bag it was placed in the moment it came under congressional subpoena. Terri was going to go to Washington and explain how it worked.

  The kids are back at school down the street at Cross Bayou Elementary, and Marcia Stone doesn’t talk to the FBI anymore. The lots are empty and dusty in the high morning sun. No pundits walk the perimeter. There is no perimeter anymore. Back at work as a volunteer, Liz Kirkman doesn’t have to stop at checkpoints anymore. She can walk up the driveway toward the Woodside Hospice and nobody calls her a Nazi. There are no priests slugging it out in the lobby, and there’s a new patient in the room down on Beech Street.

  Annie Santa-Maria walks the stone paths out back in the meditation garden. She has been changed by what happened. Her devotion to her patients and their families remains unflagging. But she finds that her faith in her fellow citizens is not what it was. She has seen private suffering coined into public advantage, and she has seen the public, for all its pronounced disapproval, eat up the story as just another television program.

  Like the rest of the country, Annie was riveted by the coverage of the massacre perpetrated by a young man named Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech University. She sympathized with the families of the victims. She also sympathized with the other students who, confronted by cameras, tried to explain the inexplicable. She believed in their grief, but that was all she believed. She had lost something she’d brought from Cuba, something very much like faith.

  “I knew, okay, that they’re probably getting thirty or forty percent of the truth,” she says. “The rest? We don’t really know what’s happening because we’re only getting that little piece of the pie that somebody wants them to get.

  “And I have to ask you, as a journalist, how do you live with that, in a profession that we’re so blessed to have in this country, but you know the truth isn’t in there. I don’t feel vindicated. I still think the public at large is still very confused about what happened.”

  The heat of midday doesn’t penetrate the trees. Neither does the grinding of the machine shops across the way. The clamor of Idiot America is gone, too, and all that’s left is the murmuring of the water and the fluttering of the prayer ribbons. And the wind chimes ring like the songs of ghosts in the trees.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How We Look at the Sea

  Mr. Madison, it seems, wanted us to be educated, so that we would not be so easily fooled. In 1810, in the annual message to Congress, he proposed what he called a national Seminary of Learning. “Whilst it is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people,” he told them, “… the additional instruction emanating from [the seminary] would contribute not less to strengthen the foundations, than to adorn the structure, of our free and happy system of government.” Later, not long before his death, he wrote to the Kentucky legislator William Barry that “learned institutions … throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty…. They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public agents of every description.”

  An educated people is a self-governing people, Madison believed. That was why he and Thomas Jefferson spent so much time developing the University of Virginia, Madison organizing the project after Jefferson’s death. “They saw it as the nursery of the future leaders themselves, but also as training the teachers who could then teach the rest of the nation,” Ralph Ketchum explains on his porch. “They would never have expected that self-government could work with an ignorant and inattentive citizenry. They would have been disappointed.”

  THE Chukchi Sea is a southern child of the Arctic Ocean. The great Pacific storms that barrel through the tropics and then swing north to devastate China and Japan keep coming, roiling and merciless, until they spend themselves in the Chukchi, battering against the hard barrier islands in the far northwest of Alaska. The storms roar themselves hoarse, having finally found a place as implacable as they are. This is where typhoons come to die.

  Shishmaref is a village on one of those barrier islands, a flat little comma of land between the sea and a broad lagoon that runs eastward, toward the mountains. There are meadows along the banks of the lagoon where musk oxen roam in the summer. The Inupiaq people have lived on this island for longer than human memory can recall, hunting the oxen in the meadows, fishing in the lagoon, and, in winter, taking long, perilous journeys across the ice that formed on the Chukchi Sea in search of the walrus and the seals that the polar bears were also hunting. Once, hunting season began in the middle of October, when the sea froze, and it wouldn’t end until the warm breezes of June broke up the thinning ice and swept it back out to sea.

  “I
remember that the season would be starting in October,” says John Sinnok, a lifelong resident of Shishmaref. “The ship that brought supplies to the village for the winter would come in here in mid-October, leave them off, and then get out before it got frozen in for the winter.”

  The Inupiaq were already here in 1848, when the first whalers came, following the trail into the Arctic blazed by Thomas Welcome Roys, the master of a ship called The Welcome, based in Sag Harbor, New York. Roys had discovered a huge population of bowhead whales living in the Chukchi Sea, and word quickly spread from New York to the whaling centers of New Bedford and Nantucket in Massachusetts. Whalers were fond of the bowhead because it was a slow, docile beast, rich in baleen, far easier to kill and not nearly as deadly as the sperm whale. In addition, the Chukchi Sea formed a smaller hunting ground than the vast South Pacific. The bowheads there were virtually penned for slaughter between the Alaskan barrier islands on one side and the Siberian coast on the other. The whalemen flooded north. Many of the Inupiaq signed aboard the great fleets as what were called “ship’s natives.” The hunting was so good that hardly any bowhead whales are left today.

  However, as safe as it was to stalk the bowhead, it was just as dangerous to sail the Chukchi Sea. The window for a successful hunt was a narrow one. The ships had to hit the killing grounds around the middle of July, because only then would the winter’s ice have broken up enough to allow passage. They had only eight to ten weeks to hunt before the ice began to form again. Linger too long in the Arctic whaling grounds, and the merciless ice would trap your ship and, gradually, grind it to splinters.

  Some whaling ships wintered in the Arctic at a place called Herschel Island, where a thriving, if rowdy, port city grew. (For a thousand-dollar fee paid to his ship’s owners, a captain could have his wife and children join him on the island.) Most of the ships, though, made for San Francisco, where they would lay up for the winter.