For all its whiz-bang action and pinballing plotlines, 24 is as resolutely and deliberately free of actual expertise in interrogative techniques as F Troop was of actual conditions on the American frontier. There are actual experts in interrogation, and most of them agree that the “ticking bomb” scenario is largely fantastical and, anyway, even in that situation, torture probably won’t yield the information you need to foil the plot. Significantly, Mayer reported, when a team of experienced Army and FBI interrogators flew to California to meet with the people behind 24, and to explain their concern that the show was mainstreaming torture in a dangerous way, Surnow blew off the meeting to take a call from Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News Channel.
According to Mayer, an Army general named Patrick Finnegan told the people behind 24 that the show was complicating his job teaching the laws of war to his students at West Point. “The kids see it,” Finnegan later told Mayer, “and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about 24?’ “
Finnegan’s students are not alone in this. The show’s reach has extended into some extraordinary places. Surnow was the guest of honor at a dinner party thrown at Rush Limbaugh’s house by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The Heritage Foundation, the de facto headquarters of respectable conservative opinion in Washington, threw a laudatory panel discussion on the show that included, among other people, Michael Chertoff, then the secretary of Homeland Security. On that same trip, Surnow and some other people from the show got to have lunch at the White House with Karl Rove and with the wife and daughter of Dick Cheney.
The show was cited in a book by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer whose memos justified much of the actual torture that was being carried out by the United States. The talk show crowd inferred support for torture from the show’s ratings. In 2007, attending a panel on the subject in Canada, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that torture can be justified: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles…. He saved thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that the criminal law is against him, is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.”
And perhaps the apotheosis of the show came when it was revealed by an international lawyer named Philippe Sands that, during high-level administration meetings regarding the treatment of detainees, “People had already seen the first [season]…. Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantanamo. He gave people lots of ideas.”
“I am quite pleased to report,” says Colonel Steve Kleinman, an Air Force intelligence officer, “that I have never seen that show.”
Kleinman has spent his career in what is called human intelligence, and specifically, in the interrogative techniques best suited for getting actionable information out of people reluctant to give it up. “I was reading Jane Mayer’s piece this morning and she’s got Chertoff, who’s described as a big fan, and all these other people, and I’m thinking, ‘Wait a second. That’s the way we’re conducting ourselves? Our senior people are being informed by Hollywood, by a guy who was a former carpet salesman? They’re just making it up as they go.’
“I guess we are informed by the mass media and this very silly show, where interrogation is a very visible means of revenge. So we have this person and, if we have to shake him up to get information, well, that’s just part of the process, and I say, ‘Wait a second. Interrogation is not punishment. Interrogation is not supposed to be some form of retribution. Interrogation is a very sophisticated and very critical intelligence platform, and it’s a methodology that needs to be employed with some foresight, with care, and with diligence. It’s not to wreak revenge. What your gut tells you to do, what your gut says the other person is thinking, is almost always wrong.’”
IN February 2008, Forbes.com noted that reality programming might have topped out. The genre’s initial shock value had worn off, and attempts by the networks to push the boundaries of the form further were greeted with at best apathy and, at worst, public revulsion, as was the case with CBS’s Kid Nation, an extraordinarily bad idea that went even more wrong in the execution. Children left on their own to go feral on camera in New Mexico turned out to be nothing anyone wanted to see, and there weren’t enough William Golding fans left in America to save the project. At the end, the network reality shows that maintained their large audiences were mainly those most clearly descended not only from Queen for a Day, but also from the old Hollywood Palace—most notably, American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. Thus did reality shows bring the variety show back to prime time.
Around the same time, the producers of 24 gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which they explained that their show was in trouble because torture didn’t seem to be as popular as it had been a few years earlier. News reports about the Bush administration’s predilection for Jack Bauer solutions to real-world problems had soured the audience on Jack Bauer solutions to Jack Bauer’s problems. (The WSJ piece tracked the slide in 24’s ratings as almost perfectly paralleling the decline in George W. Bush’s approval ratings.) Actors declined to appear. Jane Mayer’s piece in The New Yorker made the show’s producers sound like braying jackasses and thumbscrew salesmen. “The fear and wish-fulfillment the show represented after 9/11 ended up boomeranging against us,” lamented the show’s head writer. The problem with torture, it seemed, was not that it had proven to be ineffective and immoral and illegal under any conceivable circumstance, but that it couldn’t hold an audience anymore. The producers took the show off the air for some extended retooling.
But torture remained, a shadowy issue on the edges of the presidential campaign, which was just hitting its stride as the reality shows came back and 24 went into the shop. Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, a book about how, slowly but quite willfully, the United States had established forms of torture as a national policy, sold well, but the issue was strangely absent from the political news of the moment; most of that concerned the election of the next president, for whom torture was going to be a fait accompli whether he wanted it to be or not.
Writing in Salon.com, Rosa Brooks noticed that torture was becoming the new abortion, a litmus test among conservative Republicans to measure a candidate’s fealty to a unilateral and aggressive approach to a war on terror, and among Democrats a measure of a candidate’s commitment to constitutional guarantees. In her acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin got a big hand when she said, “Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and [Barack Obama’s] worried that someone hasn’t read them their rights.” So, of course, torture is an issue like all the other issues, a way of measuring one’s commitment to the team in which people vicariously invest themselves.
Torture turned out to be no more or less important, as the campaign went on, than John Edwards’s hair, Hillary Clinton’s laugh, or John McCain’s age, and far less important than the crazy things that emanated from the pulpit of Barack Obama’s church. In April 2008, the blogger Glenn Greenwald put “torture” through a Nexis search along with the name of John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who drafted the memos that gave the administration cover for what it was doing. Greenwald came up with 102 entries over one two-week period as the story of Yoo’s opinions was first breaking. In that same period of time, Greenwald’s search rang up more than three thousand entries containing both Obama’s name and that of his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright. There were more than a thousand stories about Obama’s public ineptitude as a bowler.
“Torture” was now just another political product, a brand name, a trademark issue among dozens of others involved in an extended national transaction that was not going the way it was supposed to go but, rather, the way it always did—according to the Great Premises of Idiot America, where anything can be true if enough people believe in it.
THE problem is not that America has dumbed itself down, as many people believe. (Reality shows are often cited as Exhibit A for the prosecution here.) It’s that America’s gotten all of itself out of order, selling off what ought ne
ver to be rendered a product, exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself. Real people get ground up in these transactions. Sell religious fervor as science, and Annie Santa-Maria’s checking the rearview mirror as she drives home in the dark. Sell corporate spin as science, and the people of Shishmaref watch their homes get eaten by the sea. Sell propaganda as fact, and hundreds of thousands of people die. For real. None of these people lived in Idiot America. They were shanghaied there.
In 2007, a man named Scott Weise was in a bar in Decatur, Illinois, watching his beloved Chicago Bears play the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. Perhaps well lubricated, perhaps not, Weise made a bet with the assembled fans in the bar that, if the Bears lost, he would change his name to Peyton Manning, the name of Indianapolis’s star quarterback. Weise even signed a pledge to that effect, which his fellow patrons duly witnessed.
The Bears were pretty awful that day, and Indianapolis won from here to there. Manning was voted the game’s Most Outstanding Player. Weise stood by his pledge. However, a judge subsequently ruled that Weise couldn’t legally change his name to “Peyton Manning” because to do so would be to violate the quarterback’s privacy.
“I had told the judge that I was not doing this because I wanted to change my name, but I was doing it because I was honoring a bet,” Weise told the local newspaper. “I think she understood that.”
There are people who will believe that a man named Scott Weise represents Idiot America. But they would be wrong. He was merely a crank, making a crank’s wager and accepting the consequence when he lost. And when the court ruled against him, he accepted the ruling because he didn’t really want to be “Peyton Manning” anyway. It was an honorable transaction all the way around. There was nothing out of order about it. By comparison, though, consider Antonin Scalia, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, citing a fictional terror fighter as a justification for reversing literal centuries of American policy and jurisprudence, and citing that fictional character, furthermore, on a panel that had gathered to discuss international law. Consider the highest level of the U.S. government, gathering in the White House in order to set American law back to a point ten minutes before Magna Carta was signed, and tossing around ideas they’d heard on the same television show. And people are worried that this country pays too much attention to American Idol? That’s just a reality show, which is more show than reality, because somebody has to write it. That meeting in the White House is what happens when you’ve already made reality a show.
Idiot America is always a matter of context, because it is within the wrong context that things get out of order. Idiot America is a creation of the mind in which things are bought and sold under the wrong names and, because some of those things sell well, every transaction is treated as though it had a basis in reality. Put things back in order and it becomes plain. Scott Weise is an American crank who did something any American crank would be proud of. Antonin Scalia, and the people at that White House meeting, are representatives of Idiot America. The sad irony is that they think everyone else lives there.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mr. Madison’s Library
The flat heat of early summer floats, shimmering, just above the asphalt of the parking lots. The Creation Museum has been open for just over a year now, and the parking lots are respectably crowded for a Monday in June. The cars are from Mississippi, and from Wisconsin, and from Minnesota. There’s a minivan from West Virginia with a vanity license plate: “JESUSROX.”
They really have done it well. The hilltop in Hebron contains not only the museum itself, but a petting zoo, a picnic area, and a nature walk around the perimeter of a small lagoon alive with perch and echoing with the low sound of croaking bullfrogs. Like any other museum, the kids are entertained for a while by all the bells and whistles, but by the time everyone gets to the picnic area, everyone’s pretty hot and sweaty and praying, not for guidance, but for Coca-Cola.
Inside, of course, the museum is cool and shady, dark in many places and in many different ways. It shrewdly mimics other museums with its exhibits and interactive diversions for the younger crowd. The walls are filled with small signs explaining what the visitor is looking at. Of the respectable collection of fossils, none, the visitor is told, can be older than four thousand years. The museum has animatronic people and animatronic dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are almost everywhere you look; walk in the front door, and the neck of a huge herbivore looms over you, chewing away on plastic grass. In fact, dinosaurs are a lot more visibly present in the place than anything else. There’s more Jurassic than Jesus here.
The Creation Museum is also a richly appointed monument to complete barking idiocy, from start almost all the way to the finish.
Anyone who’d visited while it was under construction came away thinking to themselves, “Well, a lot of what they say is basically to flush the rubes to raise money.” But, no, they actually believe it. The planetarium show is fairly conventional, although the narrator occasionally reminds people who might be overly awed by Alpha Centauri that “all these worlds are marred by the Curse,” which is to say that Adam’s sin dropped the hammer on some Venusians who never did anything to anyone.
The museum is organized as a scientific walk through Genesis. Poor Adam likely is still dickless, but in his two appearances he’s lounging in the Garden with shrubbery in front of his naughty bits, and standing hip-deep in a pond with water lilies around his waist, so a firsthand examination is impractical. Eve still has the long hair, arranged conveniently so as not to scandalize the faithful.
“Hey, come on down here,” yells a young boy who has gotten ahead of the story. “Eve’s pregnant!”
Walking through the exhibits is an airless, joyless exercise. Among other things, you learn that there were no poisonous creatures, nor any carnivores of any kind, until Adam and Eve committed their sin. Then, it seems, velociraptors developed a taste for hadrosaur tartare, and we were off. Things get a little dicey when an exhibit tries to explain why it was all right for Cain to have married his sister. (The answers seem to be, in order: (1) there weren’t many women around; (2) everybody was doing it; and (3) who are you to be asking these questions, you infidel bastard?) Out of that room, past a grumpy robot Methuselah, and you come to a huge exhibit depicting the construction of the Ark.
Noah and his sons are milling about, moving their arms and heads like mechanical Santas and talking about the upcoming disaster. Now, it would be unkind to point out that there probably weren’t many Jewish people involved in the construction of the Creation Museum. So let’s just say that the people who built it can possibly be excused for believing that every Jew since Abraham has sounded like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Noah himself seems to favor Topol from the movie, rather than Zero Mostel’s broader performance in the original stage musical.
The flood is central to the museum’s “science.” The exhibit contends, quite seriously, that Noah took two of everything, including two of every species of dinosaur, and that he was able to load up the latter because he took baby dinosaurs rather than the full-grown kind. The flood is vital not only to the museum’s paleontology, but to its geology and topography as well. As the tour goes drearily on, you wander half-awake through the Hell in a Handbasket sections depicting the modern world. (Poor Darwin comes in for a real hiding here.) But what’s startling you is their theory that, if dinosaurs got on the Ark, then they must have gotten off it as well. Which means that they survived into human memory.
That compelling notion—catnip for kids, no matter what age they are—illuminates the museum’s collection of fossils. As wretchedly Stalinist as the explanatory cards are—one refers to “the false idea” that birds are descended from dinosaurs, reflexively couching scientific disagreement in the clumsy language of doctrinal dispute—the fossils are quite good, and the room is bright and alive with the sounds of children released from those parts of the museum t
hat warn them that evolution is the gateway to sin, death, graffiti, and eternal damnation. The place almost seems like fun.
At the end, over by the snack bar and just short of the gift shop, there is the Dragon’s Theater, where a film explains that, not only did dinosaurs survive the flood, they may well have lasted long enough to account for the multiplicity of dragon legends that exist in all the cultures of the world. Absent its obvious religious filigree, this notion is a blessed piece of pure American crankhood amid the religious eccentricity of the museum. The impulse behind it is the same that compels secular cryptozoologists to go haring off to the Congo to look for Mokele-mbembe, or all those film crews haunting the Himalayas trying to capture the Yeti for the History Channel. People seeing dinosaurs in dragons are no different from people going off their heads looking for the Templar gold.
This little film places into stark relief what is truly depressing about the place—its conventionality, its unseemly lust for credibility in the wider world. In Dealey Plaza, for example, there are dozens of independent crackpots who will gladly take a couple of bucks to explain to you who shot John Kennedy, and from where, and who was behind them. They work their territories by themselves and for themselves, and none of them is demanding that the country’s historians take their theories seriously. (The Sixth Floor Museum inside the Texas School Book Depository is resolutely agnostic on the big questions.) Counternarratives are designed to subvert conventional ideas, but there is nothing at all subversive about the Creation Museum. The ideas in it are not interesting. They’re just wrong. It’s a place without imagination, a place where we break our dragons like plow horses and ride them.
The dinosaur with the saddle (still English) is tucked into the end of the tour now; but you can almost miss it as you come around the corner. The kids spot it, though. They climb up and smile and wave for the camera. Something is there that’s trying to break out, but it never really does, God knows.
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