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

by Charles P. Pierce

  The station is the state of the art. It is a quiet place. Nobody bustles from room to room. Phones ring softly in small cubicles. There is a low buzz of quiet conversation, but there’s no sense that anyone is really working here. Even the sales department is placid. You can no more imagine a whiskey-soaked poker game breaking out than you can imagine an elephant stampede in the hallway. The inside of the building is of a piece with the sign on the wall outside. It is a place made of niches, each one carefully cut and shaped to fit a specific audience, each making its quotas, the space between them dull and impermeable.

  The national shows all come in by satellite. “Every commercial break, every news break, has a tone that we receive, so we know they’re coming,” says Patrick Blankenship, a young man who’s engineering the programming at WLAC the afternoon of my visit. He’s heard the history of the station, and he thinks it might have been fun to work here “when they were doing R&B, and there was that kind of frenzy.”

  Every day from three P.M. to six P.M., Sean Hannity’s show goes sailing out over the 50,000 watts of WLAC, saying exactly the same thing that he’s saying to thirteen million people on five hundred other stations, talking to this particular part of a country full of people grown bored with talking to themselves. Once, WLAC did something remarkable—it developed and sustained a subversive unity that would help undermine the divisions that held America together. Now, though, far away, one computer talks to a satellite, and the satellite talks to another computer down in Nashville in an office filled with the low and melancholy hum of remorseless corporate efficiency. Nobody sells baby chicks here anymore.

  “I’ve heard the stories,” said Steve Gill, whose show precedes Sean Hannity’s on WLAC. Gill’s a big, friendly bear of a guy with a down-home accent that stands out at the New Media Conference. “One time, Jesse Jackson was in Nashville,” Gill recalled, “and he came on the station and talked about how he used to listen to WLAC when he was coming up in North Carolina.

  “When I started there, Hoss Allen [another legendary WLAC DJ, whose show followed John R.’s back in the old days] used to still be around, and he used to talk about how surprised people always used to be back in his day to find out he was white. I mean, everybody thought he was black.”

  Gill stood talking outside the movie theater in which the conference was about to give its coveted Freedom of Speech Award to a nationally syndicated talk host named Michael Savage. It is not a major exaggeration to say that Savage makes Gordon Liddy sound like Bertrand Russell. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Michael Savage, whose work this conference is preparing to drape in ermine, is a raving public nutcase.

  Born Michael Weiner, he studied anthropology and ethnobiology, picking up two master’s degrees at the University of Hawaii and a Ph.D. from the University of California. In the latter field, he briefly came into the public eye in the 1980s, when he took an obscure research paper concerning the high incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in Canadian bauxite miners and turned it into something of an international brouhaha in which aluminum came to be blamed for the disease. People threw out aluminum cookware. Glass bottlers ran TV commercials meant to scare the people who still drank their beer out of cans. The frenzy didn’t truly abate until the genetic markers for AD began to be discovered.

  But Weiner didn’t go off the rails until he’d changed his name and become a talk show host. Based in San Francisco—on KGO, the station run by the same Jack Swanson who would have fired Don Imus and then himself—Savage quickly went national. An estimated six million listeners on three hundred stations were treated to rambling, barely coherent babble about “Turd World” immigrants, gay people, treasonous liberals (“They’ll kill you because they’re deranged!”), castrating feminists (“human wreckage in high heels”), self-hating Jews, and other denizens of the menagerie that Savage apparently has running around between his ears. The Million Mom March was “the Million Dyke March.” Speaking of high school students who were spending time feeding the homeless, Savage suggested that, “There’s always the thrill and possibility that they’ll be raped in a Dumpster while giving out a turkey sandwich.”

  And he’d said all of this before MSNBC decided to put him on television.

  Savage, said Erik Sorensen, the alleged adult who hired him, was “brash, passionate, and smart.” Thus Sorensen pretended, in vain, that he wasn’t just trying to bring in those six million listeners attracted by someone who celebrates Yom Kippur by running tapes of Adolf Hitler’s speeches.

  Mercifully, the TV show proved short-lived, Savage celebrated the Fourth of July by stuffing sausages into his mouth while telling a gay caller to “get AIDS and die, you pig,” thus burying himself beneath a half ton of Freudian irony. This might have been enough to sink most careers but, once carved, a niche is forever. Now a victim of the dreaded censorious liberal media—and not, as reality would have it, of a rare spasm of common decency in the world of pundit television—Savage found his talk radio career flourishing even more, until we all gathered in New York to honor him. Less than a year later, Savage would pass along the shocking news that childhood autism was “a fraud and a racket…. I’ll tell you what autism is. In ninety-nine percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent. They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Stop acting like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there screaming and crying, idiot.’”

  The autism community exploded in rage. Savage lost some sponsors, and some stations even canceled his show. Mark Masters, whose Talk Radio Network brings Michael Savage to the nation, summoned up all the spine of a ficus to complain: “Unfortunately, by condensing his multifaceted concerns into 84 seconds of commentary, the … context for his remarks was not apparent.”

  Savage’s remarks could not have come as any shock to anyone who’d been in the theater on the afternoon of the Free Speech presentation. Michael Savage got this award because people were willing to pay him to say exactly the kind of thing he said.

  The award was preceded by a speech by Alan Colmes, a tall, passive-looking man who once played the role of Sean Hannity’s heavy-bag every night on Fox television. Colmes took the pseudo-Lockean high road previously trod by Michael Harrison: “As much as I find much of what Michael Savage says despicable,” he intoned, “I am reminded that there are many people who find what I say despicable. I don’t want to live in a country where Michael Savage can’t say the things he says, because I’m next, or any one of us could be next.”

  Colmes declined to mention how many times he’s speculated on his show how lucky it would be for, say, comely freshmen at Bob Jones University to experience the “thrill” of being raped behind an athletic dorm. He also failed to explain exactly how Michael Savage has been imperiled by anyone save the voices in his own head. But, good liberal that he was, he did mention that Savage had been “the first conservative to speak out against this so-called conservative administration.”

  Of course, Savage did so because the administration had declined to fulfill his fondest wish, which was to clap in irons everyone who looked like an illegal immigrant and drop them into San Francisco Bay. Savage was operating well within his niche, selling the product he was paid to sell. To do anything else would be to throw on the table a new intellectual commodity, for which his market might not pay. What Colmes praised as an act of intellectual courage really was little more than Savage’s reluctance to try to sell New Coke to his established audience. “Who gets to decide?” Colmes meeped. The answer, apparently, was nobody. We are all ennobled by the blessings of a country in which someone can make a fortune talking about “dog-grilling” Koreans on the radio.

  One tires of this easily. Colmes’s attempt to graft an intellectual conscience onto an industry based on profitable ignorance was exhausting. It was like watching someone try to explain that his hippo could conjugate verbs. Fortun
ately, Mark Masters came along with precisely the right corrective. “When I heard Michael Savage,” he said, “I thought this was the spark that might give life to independent syndication. Everyone thought I was crazy, and we didn’t get paid for two years. But, eventually, Savage proved we could do it, and I’m grateful for that. If it hadn’t been for Michael Savage, I couldn’t have relaunched Talk Radio Network.”

  Savage didn’t come to New York to pick up his award. Unexplained “personal reasons” kept him home in the city he calls “San Fran Sicko.” Instead, he sent a DVD of his acceptance speech. The house lights dimmed. Savage appeared on screen, mysteriously walking down a dock by the ocean. He looked like someone who’d gotten drunk at the yacht club cotillion and spent the next four days sleeping in the boat basin. The video mysteriously kept jump-cutting between Savage on the dock and Savage standing in front of what appeared to be a clam shack. It was an altogether remarkable film. It looked like a hostage tape.

  Savage veered wildly between truckling gratitude for the recognition, and paranoid ramblings about the people who have set about to destroy him, and thus, presumably, all of us. These included adherents of the “environmental faith” who “want to make it a crime to deny global warming.” The identity of these Tofu Torquemadas remains a mystery.

  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. He waves his arms. He shouts at the sky. If there were a moon out, he’d be howling at it.

  “Freedom of speech has never been in such a perilous state as it is today,” Savage bellowed, as a few people in the distant rows begin to filter toward the back doors of the theater. “That is because in Venezuela, the dictator Hugo Chavez just shut down a TV network. That can’t happen here, you say? Oh, it can’t?

  “As I speak, Congressman [Maurice] Hinchey of New York … and others are circulating a bill in Congress to return the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Which means that people like Michael Savage will not be able to speak freely. Is that any different than Chavez shutting down a TV network? Is that not dictatorship?”

  Well, no, of course it’s not dictatorship, even if it were going to happen, which it isn’t. Nobody’s going to put Michael Savage in jail. Nobody’s even going to take him off the radio, even though he’s plainly tetched. By this standard, the United States was a dictatorship in its public discourse from 1939 until 1987, and at least some of the people in the hall are old enough to remember some robust debates over things like civil rights and Vietnam that occurred while the airwaves were bound by the iron shackles of the Fairness Doctrine—which, even if it came back, which it won’t, would require only that, if a station wanted to broadcast Michael Savage, it also would have to find a mushy nonentity like Alan Colmes to achieve “balance.”

  The lights come up and there’s some low murmuring as the crowd files out. The First Amendment, God love it, lives to fight another day in a country that’s grown bored with talking to itself. America’s always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.

  CHAPTER SIX

  God and Judge Jones

  In November 1784, the Virginia legislature was in an uproar. A proposal had come before it to support “teachers of the Christian religion” through a new general tax. No less a figure than Patrick Henry lent his voice to the proposal. His arguments will sound somewhat familiar: Henry maintained that this tax was needed because of the “moral decay” that had set in since Virginia disestablished the Anglican church in 1777 by adopting its own Bill of Rights. “Many influential men,” writes Ralph Ketchum, “… retained the hallowed ideas that religion was essential to the well-being of society and that the well-being of religion required state support.”

  Nevertheless, since Virginia had relieved itself of an established church, the spiritual life of the Commonwealth had exploded. There were Baptists and Methodists flourishing, especially in the western parts of the state. The Presbyterians had gained in strength and numbers. All of these denominations howled in outrage at the notion that tax monies should be sluiced off into the Episcopal Church. The issue so roiled the politics of the state that many of the people who’d supported the law lost their seats in a subsequent election. In June 1785, Mr. Madison took up his pen in opposition to the proposal.

  His “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” is the most closely reasoned argument for a separation of church and state ever written. As Ketchum puts it, it is “a defense of freedom for the human mind worthy of Milton, Jefferson or Mill. The Remonstrance argued that government suffered when religion was established, and that religion suffered the closer it got to government, and that human liberty suffered in either case. Its phrases were clear and unequivocal.”

  “It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties,” Madison wrote. “… Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of only one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?”

  Citizens had a right to follow any religion they wanted, Madison wrote. They had a right to follow no religion at all. The primacy of the individual conscience was paramount. His language was unsparing. Religion established by the state is of necessity corrupted. Madison “argues that religion will best support morality if it is free and pure, working up from its independent and spontaneous roots,” observes the historian Garry Wills. Moreover, Madison contends, the commingling of religion and government is inevitably a recipe for civic discord.

  “Torrents of blood,” Madison wrote, “have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion.” He notes that simply proposing the bill has led to great disharmony. “What mischiefs may not be dreaded, should this enemy of public quiet be armed with the force of a law?”

  As in all things, Madison had done his homework. He rooted his arguments in one of the oldest precedents in Christendom: the adoption by the Emperor Constantine of Christianity as the official religion of what had become a fractious Roman empire. Constantine had brought in Christianity not as a moral code, but as a tool to enforce political unity.

  “He attempted to use Christianity as a means of bringing order to society,” writes the historian Charles Freeman. “… In many of his other laws, he maintained a traditional Roman brutality…. If a free woman had a sexual relationship with a male slave, both were to die, the slave by being burnt alive. Slaves who were found to be an accessory to the seduction of a young girl were to have molten metal poured down their throats. Christians played very little part in Constantine’s administration and the army remained pagan.”

  This, Madison believed, was not a promising start for the notion of an established religion. “Madison agreed with [Joseph] Priestley and other Enlightenment figures that the purity of Christian belief and practice was corrupted when Constantine made it a state religion,” writes Garry Wills. “All the abuses of power through the Middle Ages reflected the entanglement of the spiritual with the worldly.” What nobody anticipated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they would meet inevitably in the heart of Idiot America.

  Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking spaces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to fill the
niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.

  “MY contention,” writes George Barna, a “church consultant,” in 1988, “is that the major problem plaguing the church is its failure to embrace a marketing orientation in what has become a market-driven environment.” This situation did not last long.

  Today, suppliers of “Christian” products, up to and including the various churches themselves, have created a self-contained and profitable universe in which almost everything that was worthwhile about Christianity’s contact with the secular world has been cheapened and fashioned into tawdry souvenirs for the suckers. Sacred music has traded Gregorian chant, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Thomas Dorsey, and Mahalia Jackson for “worship anthems” sung by stubby white guys who look like they flunked the audition for Counting Crows. A literature that once produced C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton now sells millions of copies of the “Left Behind” series, written by Jerry Jenkins and the noisome political preacher Tim LaHaye, in which the end times occur and the Antichrist arrives in the person of one Nicolae Carpathia, so named, perhaps, because the authors didn’t think of calling him “Evil J. Transylvania.” Carpathia comes to power preaching a one-world government based in the United Nations, which, at least, proves that Jenkins and LaHaye have rooted their profitable Apocalypse in the American conspiratorial tradition. As far as can be determined, however, Mr. Carpathia is not a Mason.