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

by Charles P. Pierce

  There is an edge to the evening breeze. A vague chill settles in your bones before you know it’s there. It is in the hours like this that you can begin to feel how winter could come pressing in on all sides, like the ice that traps a whaling fleet. But it’s a shadowy and insubstantial feeling, more an intuition than an instinct. The children walk down the street with their coats open.

  A couple of nights a week, the people of Shishmaref gather in the community center to play bingo. The hall buzzes constantly as teenagers wander between the tables, selling extra cards to the players. A sign on the doors warns that nobody even smelling of alcohol will be allowed inside to play. This is high-stakes, competitive bingo. The numbers fly swiftly around the room as the players work four and five cards at once, marking off the numbers in the complicated patterns—“Picture frame!” “Lasso!”—of the game’s variations.

  John and Emily Weyiounna, Tony’s cousins, hunch over a long table near the back of the hall. In addition to their own cards, they are helping a clumsy stranger try to keep up with the play. Emily sees first that the stranger has completed his “picture frame,” filling in all the spots around the perimeter of the card. He calls out “Bingo!” too soon, though, and has to split a $300 pot with another player whose timing was better. They laugh as the stranger offers to share his winnings with them.

  “What?” John Weyiounna says to him. “Do you think we are poor people?”

  They have taken upon themselves the aspect of refugees. They have made provisions within themselves to maintain the community they have built here wherever they eventually go, the way the European immigrants came to the great cities in the Lower Forty-eight and re-created in their neighborhoods the old places they’d left behind. They have no illusions about what is happening to them. There are some local conspiracy theorists who believe that someone, somewhere, wants this land for some nefarious purpose, but most of the people have seen the ice come later and later in the year, and they’ve felt the permafrost soften beneath their feet, and they know there is no argument they can make against what is happening to them.

  The bingo game runs late. When it finally breaks up, the people scatter down the clotted, muddy streets. It is dark and the sky is alive with stars. Moonlight ripples across the waves. Come to the seawall in the Arctic, where now nobody knows when winter will come again. Come and dispute cleverly those things that the people of Shishmaref have known for thousands of years. The sea feeds, but the sea also devours. And that is how they look at the sea.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Principles of Automatic Pilot

  In 1912, the Sperry Corporation developed the first automatic pilot system for airplanes. Two years later, Lawrence Sperry, the son of Elmer Sperry, a famous inventor and founder of the company that bore his name, took an airplane up and flew it around for a while with his hands spread wide and away from the controls. Spectators on the ground gasped in not inconsiderable alarm. Modern autopilots do occasionally fail. Some crashes occur when the human pilot fails to disengage the automatic pilot before attempting to fly the plane manually. All delicate mechanisms fail most catastrophically through human error or, especially, through human neglect.

  The country was founded by people who considered self-government no less a science than botany. It required an informed and educated and enlightened populace, or else all the delicate mechanisms of the system would come apart. The founders provided no mechanism for a government to run on automatic pilot.

  “Public opinion sets bounds to every government,” Mr. Madison wrote in an essay that the National Gazette published in December 1791, “and is the real sovereign in every free one.” Later in the same essay, though, he warned: “The larger the country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited; when ascertained or presumed, the more respectable it is in the eyes of individuals. This is favorable to the authority of government. For the same reason, the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty.”

  Mr. Madison, whose scientific curiosity was piqued more by agriculture than by mechanics—John Quincy Adams once referred to him as “the best farmer in the world”—was most acutely conscious of how easily any government, even a republic, could slip into war and find itself wrecked before anyone knew it had been damaged in the first place. “In war,” he wrote in 1795, “the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied, and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of seducing the force, of the people…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

  He ended up, of course, with a war of his own, a picked fight with Great Britain in 1812 out of which the United States gained Andrew Jackson, Old Ironsides, and its national anthem, but which was ruinously expensive and was highlighted by Madison’s fleeing the White House a few steps ahead of the Royal Marines, who burned the place. Not even he could resist wholly the temptations he saw as inherent in any executive. However, he did try, as hard as he could, to maintain control over the delicate mechanisms he’d designed. The war was properly declared by Congress and when, late in the hostilities, delegates from New England convened in Hartford to discuss seceding from the Union, Madison did not march on the hall.

  “Because he was worried [about the use of his war powers] is the reason, I think, that the French ambassador [Louis Serurier] said it was a triumph because the country got through the war and accomplished at least a standstill, without compromising or destroying its republican institutions,” Ralph Ketchum says. “Madison really stuck to it. He repeatedly refused to whip up a kind of hysterical intolerance around the war. And when it looked darkest, and some New England leaders were gathering for the Hartford Convention—it looked like they might try to make an alliance with the British and with Canada—he did nothing more than warn a good loyal militia unit in New York, ‘Stand by on the border. If these characters in Hartford do anything that’s treason, you go.’”

  In fact, the Hartford Convention’s resolves didn’t get to Madison until after the Treaty of Ghent had ended the war. Madison received them with a silence that Jefferson said, “showed the placid character of our Constitution. Under any other their treasons would have been punished by the halter. We let them live as the laughing stocks of the world and punish them by the torment of eternal contempt.” Idiot America has no gift for that.

  IN August 2001, an official of the U.S. government dropped by Louise Richardson’s office at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born and raised in rural Ireland, Richardson had been steeped in the revolutionary history of that country. “The extremism I imbibed came from school, books, popular history, and songs,” she once wrote. “It came from the air around me.” She had friends from home—and, later, friends from Trinity College—who took the oath and joined the Irish Republican Army. Having watched as their politics gravitated toward the gun and the bomb, Richardson was struck by how poorly understood the subject of terrorism was.

  She made it her field of expertise. She sought out terrorists and listened to them. Gradually, there developed a network of experts on the subject. They even once held a conference, at an undisclosed location, where “activists,” as she put it, critiqued the academic papers presented by Richardson and her colleagues. Working with a cell of Chechen rebels in a kind of war game, Richardson discovered that, when the decision came about targeting women and children, it was the academics who embraced the option first. “I mention this not to make light of a serious issue,” she writes, “only to make the point that terrorists are human beings who think like we do.”

  Richardson had taken it upon herself to develop and to teach courses at Harvard on the subject of terrorism. She’d achieved some renown in what was still an orphan specialty among political scientists. When the government man showed up at her office, he wanted to know why no terrorist group had ever used
an airplane like a guided missile, flying it into a target on the ground. Richardson told him that it had occurred to people, and that somebody was likely to do it sooner rather than later.

  A month later, after terrorists of the Al Qaeda network had flown planes into the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and after a third hijacked plane had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania where today people are arguing about the shape of the memorial, Richardson and her colleagues around the country e-mailed each other furiously, trying to bring their expertise to bear on what had happened. Not long afterward, Richardson went to another undisclosed location, this time at the invitation of the Pentagon.

  “They wanted me to go somewhere in Virginia and talk with some people,” she recalls. “And I walked into the room and my heart soared. Because if you had asked me who were the twenty people in America who knew the most about terrorism, I’d have named the twenty people in that room. And nobody has ever heard of them. You never see them on TV. We are talking about people who have been working in this field for years, and we spent several days there, and they were asking us questions constantly. We sat around a table and debated points.

  “Afterwards, the people who’d invited us were extraordinarily complimentary and grateful and asked if we’d come back again, and we, of course, said yes. None of us ever heard a word again.”

  Over the next seven years, when the response to the September attacks morphed inexorably into a “war on terror” that produced the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Richardson was on the outside looking in at problems she’d spent twenty years analyzing. “The people [who had been] in that room, they sat back and watched these newly minted experts pontificate,” she says, “and those experts were dismissive of us for failing to predict that this would happen. It was apparent to me at the time that we were doing this wrong, that there was a lot we could derive from the experience of other countries, but the people who were saying that were obscure academics like me.

  “From my prism of being a terrorism expert, it was apparent to me that there were absolutely no links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden. They hated one another. People like me knew that. This information was readily available to the decision makers in Washington. They must have known it. So that legitimization of the war, I felt, was preposterous. For someone as notoriously paranoid as Saddam Hussein to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists is preposterous.

  “I think most Americans are not terribly interested in foreign policy. They are interested in paying the bills and the rest of it. And then, you have your leadership telling them the simple story of good and evil. We’re good. The other guys are bad. And the media, I think, have really let us down insofar as they haven’t sought out—not necessarily me, but contrary voices. They’ve gone for the easy spokespeople.”

  The “global war on terror”—and the war in Iraq that it spawned—is a real war with real casualties. It began, as all our wars now do, without the constitutional nicety of a formal declaration of hostilities. However, after the initial shock of the September 11 atrocities wore off, and the United States slid almost dreamlike toward the catastrophe in Iraq, it was clear that war nonetheless had been declared. Through millions of individual decisions, through the abandonment of self-government, through the conscious and unconscious abandonment of the obligations of citizenship, it had been declared by Idiot America.

  The war was Idiot America’s purest product. It was the apotheosis of the Three Great Premises. People believed what they were sold, not what they saw. Before the invasion of Iraq, the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, admitted that the administration would push for war in the autumn of 2003 because everybody knew that the fall was when you rolled out your new product line. Later, after so much had gone to ruin, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the war’s architects, explained that the administration had settled on pitching the war on the basis of Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program because that was the easiest case to sell. Those weapons, of course, were as faith-based a fiction as saddles on a dinosaur.

  Americans chose not to believe those people who really knew what they were talking about. They chose to believe those people who seemed most sure of everything about which they had no clue. Expertise became a liability, a form of softness in the face of an existential threat. Expertise was not of the Gut. In the months and years after September 11, the worst possible thing was to know what you were talking about. People who knew too much were dangerous; on this the country largely agreed.

  It was a huge and expensive demonstration of Hofstadter’s argument:

  The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion.

  It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.

  Inside the government, things were little better. On September 11, 2001, nobody in that government knew more about Al Qaeda than did Richard Clarke. He’d watched it grow. He’d watched it strike—in New York, in Africa, and in the harbor in Yemen. He’d spent the summer trying to get people to hear his warnings that an attack might be imminent. That morning, in the Situation Room at the White House, Clarke watched the Twin Towers burn and fall, and he recognized the organization’s signature as well as he’d recognize his own. Instead, in the ensuing days, a lot of people around him—people who didn’t know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat—wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew. He left the government.

  “In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the traditional diplomats couldn’t do the negotiating because that negotiating involved science and engineering,” Clarke explains. “Interagency decision papers were models of analysis, where assumptions would be laid out and tested.

  “That’s the world I grew up in. The approach still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, that isn’t analysis. It’s the important issues where we really need analysis.’

  “In the area of terrorism, there’s a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11]—they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions—was that we didn’t have time for emotion that day.”

  It ought not to have shocked anyone that a government that deliberately put itself at odds with empirical science would go to war in the way that it did and expect to succeed. The Bush administration could sell anything. Remember the beginning, when it was purely about the Gut, a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not sufficient response. (Donald Rumsfeld lamented that there wasn’t enough in the country to blow up.) In Iraq, though, there would be towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic poisons. Nukes on the gun rack of every pickup in Baghdad. Our troops would be greeted with candy and flowers. The war would take six months—a year, tops. Mission Accomplished. “Major combat operations are over.”

  “Part of the problem was that people didn’t want the analytic process because they’d be shown up,” Clarke says. “Their assumptions would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it all out.

  “They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts who said [Iraq] was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go in anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the p
ost-conflict.”

  The worst thing you could be was right. Today, there are a lot of shiny Washington offices housing people who got it right and got left behind. They form a kind of underground. Some of them failed to press their case as hard as they could have. Some of them did press their case, and were punished for doing so. They were ignored, many of them, because they knew too much. They were punished, many of them, because they knew too much and spoke out about what they knew. They see where the country went on automatic pilot. They’re a government in exile representing the reality-based community.

  Four thousand lives later, they remember the beginning. A career neoconservative ideologue named Michael Ledeen made himself famous by espousing a doctrine by which, every few years or so, the United States should “throw a small nation up against the wall” to prove that it meant business in the world. And Idiot America, which was all of us, was largely content to put the country on automatic pilot and, cheering, forgot to disengage the mechanism.

  Goddamn right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the backroom will have.

  THE office is neat, which is to say that the books are arranged in an orderly fashion as they overwhelm the shelves, and the great stacks of paper are evenly stacked, one next to another, on the desk and on the various tables. Tucked into a brick rowhouse in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., the office is every bit as full as the usual academic’s landfill, but it is nowhere near as chaotic. It is a busy place, but there’s nothing random about it. Every pile has its purpose.