November Read (II): Lost in Idiot America

Ohio: WPA Art Program
Library of Congress

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free,
Charles P. Pierce; 2009

Pierce's tour of this terrain is expanded from magazine pieces, for which he traveled to some varied places—historic and intellectual, as well as geographic.

The historic context has two intellectual touchstones.

One is the notion of "the American crank," as

... one of the great by-products of the American experiment. The country was founded on untested, radical ideas...

The American crank stood alone, a pioneer gazing at the frontier of his own mind the way the actual pioneers looked out over the prairie. American cranks fled conventional thinking...

... Very often, it was the cranks who provided the conflict by which the consensus changed. They did so by working diligently on the margins until, subtly, without most of the country noticing, those margins moved...

Pierce's premise is that the freedom to test ideas made America a great place for cranks, even though the public tended not to accept their ideas readily. If some cranks were self-deluded or mere snake oil salesmen, others dreamed up innovations with merits that might eventually be recognized. In our time, TV can make any charlatan an instant success.

The life and work of James Madison serves as the other point of historic reference. Of the Constitution's authors, "Madison was always the guy under the hood, tinkering with the invention he'd helped devise."

Madison believed in self-government in all things, not merely in our politics. He did not believe in drift. "A popular government," he famously wrote, "without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a tragedy or a Farce, or perhaps both." The great flaw, of course, is that, even given the means to acquire information, the people of the country may decline. Drift is willed into being.

Pierce surveys that "drift" in our current intellectual landscape.

First stop: Kentucky's Creation Museum. Where, to make the point about humans having co-existed with them, the museum entrance features a dinosaur—

Which was wearing a saddle.

It was an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur that performed in dressage competitions and stakes races. Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would have worn a sturdy western saddle. This, obviously, was very much a show dinosaur.

From there, Pierce goes on to examine the war on expertise, waged via "Three Great Premises of Idiot America"

... Any theory is valid if it moves units...
... Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough...
... Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

We are surrounded by illustrations, and Pierce writes terrific stuff about the ones he's selected.

He looks at 2008's Republican presidential candidates in "debate," rushing to establish their fundamentalist Christian credentials and to outdo each other in promises to "double Guantanamo," and to claim the mantle of fictional torturer Jack Bauer.

This was not a serious discussion of the reality of torture, any more than the discussion about evolution had anything to do with actual science. It was an exercise in niche marketing. Evolution and torture were ... being discussed... in the context of what they meant as a sales pitch to a carefully defined group of consumers. They were a demonstration of a product...

After all, these candidates were competing to succeed a president with whom 57% of the electorate once wanted to have a beer—

Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? How many of them can you envision in the Oval Office? Running a cabinet meeting? Greeting the president of Ghana? Not only was this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it wasn't even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.

A chapter on AM radio tells the story of how, during World War II, visionary white DJs broadcast black music from Nashville's WLAC. Their late-night shows transmitted over a signal that reached much of North America; in the process, "integrating the country, even if the country pretended not to notice."

It's a sad commentary on cultural decline that AM was remade in the 80s, and that WLAC now follows the formula of airing nationally syndicated hate-talk shows.

Pierce visits a talk radio industry conference, where attendees puff with pride at the sponsor's praise of G. Gordon Liddy, the First Amendment, and America as "process," mashed together into a speech that "sounds like de Tocqueville filtered through Tony Robbins."

Since right-wing populism has at its heart an "anti-elitist" distrust of expertise, talk radio offers the purest example of the Three Great Premises at work. A host is not judged a success by his command of the issues, but purely by whether what he says moves the rating needle... If the needle moves enough, then the host is adjudged an expert... Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.

This time around, Michael Savage is given the annual "Freedom of Speech" award.

He does not attend, but sends a DVD performance that plays "like a hostage tape"—

There is some stirring in the theater. This display is not what many of those present had in mind. This is the acknowledged leader of their profession, and he's acting like a guy you'd run away from on the sidewalk.

Pierce visits with some people particularly affected by the dumbing down. He writes the moving story of Alaskan natives watching their land sink into the sea; all while well-funded climate change denial efforts, including Bush administration suppression of NASA evidence, are being positioned to overcome science.

And there is a powerful chapter about the Florida hospice workers whose years of dedication led to their working in the face of death threats, as Terry Schaivo was made into the focus of fundamentalist political rage.

Pierce, as always, is a great read. Along with righteous anger at deserving targets, he supplies laughter at the darkness.