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

by Charles P. Pierce

  “I was talking awhile back to a citizens group in Richmond and almost everybody in the audience was a conservative. There were a couple of Democrats there and, at the end of my spiel, a young man got up and he was really angry and he said, ‘I’m a Republican and I’m very conservative and I support this war.” Then he pointed at one of the Democrats, and he said, ‘But, you, as the opposition party, you had the obligation to create the debate on this war and you failed.’ I mean, we had the failure on one side to stand up and be counted and we had the failure on the other side of bullying and using patriotism to stamp out any debate and now both sides regret that more and more.”

  The rain falls more steadily on the trees outside. A low, wet fog rolls in along the parkway. The men in uniform shake hands outside the Marriott with the men who don’t wear uniforms anymore. It is a loose summer’s day in a nation at war, a country full of easy marks, blinking in the ruins and soggy now with futile buyer’s remorse.

  IF everything, even scientific discussion and even questions of an individual life and death, is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. The founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today, we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates exemplified by cable television, creating its own events to argue about. Every discussion, even discussion of who should be president, ends up in a bar fight.

  (And even that standard is imprecise. If his two terms as president prove nothing else, it proves that George Bush was the kind of guy who comes with you to the bar, disappears into the gents’ when it’s his turn to buy, and ducks out the back door, after starting a fight with the defensive tackle of the football team that you have to finish.)

  A year after that famous Zogby poll was released concerning the nation’s preference to toss back a brew with George W. Bush—August 19, 2005, to be precise—it was a beautiful day in Idiot America. In Washington, William Frist, the Harvard-educated physician and majority leader of the U.S. Senate who from the well of that chamber had recently diagnosed Terri Schiavo as fit to dance the merengue, endorsed the teaching of intelligent design in the nation’s public schools. “I think today a pluralistic society,” Frist explained, “should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith.”

  That faith is not fact, nor should it be, and that faith is not science, nor should it be, did not elude Dr. Frist. He simply wanted to be president, and he was talking to the people who believe that faith is both those things, and he believed that those people would vote for him simply because he talked this rot, and that everyone else would understand him as an actor reciting his lines. In Idiot America, nonsense can be a no-lose proposition.

  On that same day, across town, Larry Wilkerson, a top aide to former secretary of state Colin Powell, told CNN that Powell’s pivotal presentation to the United Nations, in which the general described Iraq’s vast array of deadly weapons, was little more than ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag. “It was,” said Wilkerson, “the lowest point in my life.” By August 19, 2005, it had proven to be an even worse moment for thousands of American families and God alone knew how many Iraqis. This apparently was trumped by Wilkerson’s tender conscience.

  Powell’s speech was the final draft of the novelized Iraq saga. The war’s proponents needed a narrator with gravitas, and they had found him. “You can afford to lose some points,” Dick Cheney reportedly told Powell, sending him off to befuddle the UN and concluding with breathtaking cynicism that the sparkle of Powell’s public image would be enough to dazzle the rubes out in the country. And on August 19, 2005, long after it could have made a difference, Larry Wilkerson looked into his hemorrhaging conscience and said that that was precisely what happened. The successful sale of the Iraq war was a pure product of Idiot America.

  But Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the results of millions of decisions made and not made, to reduce everything to salesmanship. Debate becomes corrupted argument, in which every point of view is just another product, no better or worse than all the others, and informed citizenship is abandoned to the marketplace. Idiot America is the development of the collective Gut at the expense of the collective mind. It’s what results when we abandon our duty to treat the ridiculous with ridicule. It’s what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and we not only surrender our right to punish them at the polls but also become too timid to punish their ideas with daily scorn—because the polls say those ideas are popular, and therefore they must hold some sort of truth, which we should respect.

  Idiot America is what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people, and that’s why, after Frist and Wilkerson had their moment in the spotlight, August 2005 went on to become a seminal month in Idiot America. With complete impunity, George W. Bush, the president of the United States, wandered the landscape and talked like a blithering nitwit.

  First, he compared the violence surrounding the writing of an impromptu theocratic constitution in Baghdad to the events surrounding the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Undaunted, he later compared the war he’d launched in Iraq to World War II. And then he compared himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt. One more public appearance, and we might have learned that Custer was killed by the Hezbollah.

  Then, we saw the apotheosis of the end of expertise, when New Orleans drowned and then turned into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in real time and on television. As the city was virtually obliterated as a functional habitat for human beings, the country discovered that the primary responsibility for dealing with the calamity lay with a man who’d been dismissed as an incompetent from his previous job as the director of a luxury show-horse organization. And the president went on television and said that nobody could have anticipated the collapse of the city’s levees.

  In God’s sweet name, engineers anticipated it. Politicians anticipated it. The poor bastards in the Ninth Ward anticipated it. Hell, four generations of folksingers anticipated it. And the people who hated the president went crazy and the people who liked him defended him. But where were the people who heard this incredible, staggeringly stupid bafflegab, uttered with conscious forethought, the people who realized that, whatever they thought of the man, the president had gotten behind a series of podiums and done everything but drop his drawers and dance the hootchie-koo? They were out there, lost in Idiot America, where it was still a beautiful day.

  Oh, he paid for it. His poll ratings cratered and his party lost its congressional majority in 2006. He became the subject of tinny mockery. But the dynamic that created Idiot America remained in place. In 2007, on the question of habeas corpus for prisoners the U.S. military had detained, the Congress could muster only six Republicans to vote essentially in favor of the Great Writ, but twenty-two Democrats were willing to vote to condemn an antiwar newspaper advertisement. Habeas corpus had less of a constituency in 2007, in the Congress of the United States, than it had in the field at Runnymede in 1215. The disorder remains.

  None of these episodes was inevitable. Terri Schiavo’s death did not have to become a media circus. The country could have rejected, now and forever, the media culture that made it into one, and the people who even now are shining up the green room in anticipation of the next. The facts and the science surrounding the global climate change that is slowly eating away at the lives of the people of Shishmaref could have been kept out of the cheap and tawdry disputation that passes for political debate; it shouldn’t matter that “liberals” are on one side of the issue while “conservatives” are on the other. The land is still being pulled away into the Chukchi Sea. There were opposing voices speaking out in the aftermath of September 11 and in the run-up to the war in Iraq that was devised from the shock of it, but those voices were marginalized and ignored, and the media that did so acted with the tacit approval
of its audience. We leave ourselves on automatic pilot and realize, too late, what happens when we do.

  “There was no plan except ‘Defer to us,’” explained Andrew Bacevich, Sr., a retired Army colonel who teaches history and international relations at Boston University. He is a blade of a man with unsparing eyes. His is the last of the cluttered offices to visit, the ones where the people who knew work now. A CNN crew has just packed up and left. People are listening to Bacevich, seven years into the war, because the war has gone bad, and some important people are pretending that, glorioski, they can’t imagine how it all happened.

  “They said, ‘We will cut your taxes and we will not have a draft. Don’t worry. The U.S. military is unbeatable, so go to Disney World,’” Bacevich said. “And I think that’s the inclination of the American people anyway, and we were all encouraged to do that. Had the president said at the time, ‘This requires an all-out national effort. I’m going to increase your taxes. We’re going to pay for this. Expand the Army’—in that moment, I think the Congress would have said, ‘You got it, Mr. President.’ As Americans, we would have said, ‘Okay, if that’s what it takes.’ He said, ‘Go to Disney World,’ and the moment passed.

  “The guys who were so smart that thought they knew how to exploit the window of opportunity were, actually, stupid. I think that’s where the historians will puzzle.”

  Real people get used up in the transactions of Idiot America. None of these people live in Idiot America. Their lives are hijacked there. Annie Santa-Maria finds doing God’s work made infinitely harder by people who think they’ve divined God’s thoughts. Faith is sold as science, and a town is torn apart. Spin is treated as fact, and Shishmaref comes apart. Propaganda is indistinguishable from truth, and thousands die. On June 4, 2008, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that stated, flatly, that the president and vice president had sold the Iraq war to the country on the basis of claims that they knew were false.

  By then, more than four thousand Americans, and God alone knows how many Iraqis, had died. One of those people was First Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., of the U.S. Army, who had been killed in Iraq on May 13, 2002. Six years after his death, his father wrote a book in which he quoted Reinhold Niebuhr: “Those who think there is little difference between a cold and hot war are either knaves or fools.”

  “Between 2002 and 2003,” his father wrote, “the knaves and fools got their war.”

  The book you are reading was almost called Blinking from the Ruins. But that would have been dishonest and wrong, because there’s an innocence between the lines there that none of us deserve. Nothing happens in Idiot America by accident. It is a place that we will into being.

  “I got to go meet a guy for lunch,” Andrew Bacevich said.

  He has not followed us all into the bar, where all opinions are of equal worth, where everyone’s an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. No voice is more authoritative than any other one; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that, sooner or later, some noisy bastard always picks a fight. The next day, in the cold light of the morning, everybody’s too embarrassed to remember how it all began.

  Part IV

  *

  MR. MADISON’S LIBRARY

  CHAPTER TEN

  Torture in New Hampshire

  They weren’t made of marble. Years after the Constitutional Convention, William L. Pierce, a delegate from Georgia, published his impressions in a Savannah newspaper. Many of them detailed the work of the convention, but Pierce also took the time to write down his personal impressions of his colleagues which, owing to the enforced secrecy of the convention’s deliberations, made the sketches something of a sensation. Reading them today is a blessed, gossipy relief from what has become the Founder of the Month Club on various best-seller lists.

  Pierce found that William S. Johnson of Connecticut had “nothing in him that warrants the high reputation he has for public speaking.” Johnson’s colleague Roger Sherman was “the oddest shaped character I ever remember to have met with.” Alexander Hamilton sometimes showed “a degree of vanity that is highly disagreeable” and Benjamin Franklin “is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary man and he tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard.”

  Pierce sized up “Mr. Maddison” as “always … the best informed man of any point in debate…. Mr. Maddison is about 37 years of age, a Gentleman of great modesty—with a remarkable sweet temper. He is easy and unreserved among his acquaintance and has a most agreeable style of conversation.”

  This is shrewd, intelligent gossip, but gossip nonetheless, and it serves as a deft counterpoint to what Mr. Madison was about, sitting in his chair closest to the front of the room, taking down with almost preposterous precision the specifics of the great debates going on around him. But the works are not interchangeable, and they ought not to be. Neither Madison’s notes nor Pierce’s sketches ought to define fully any of the people in them. But there seems little question that, had there been cable television news shows in 1787, Pierce would have been booked solid for a week, while you’d have had to scan CSPAN during whiskey hours of the poker game to catch a glimpse of James Madison.

  For example, Roger Sherman, of Connecticut, was a ferocious defender of the rights of the smaller states. He threatened to pull all of them out of Philadelphia if his concerns were not addressed. He was not bluffing. (Thomas Jefferson said of him that Sherman had never said a foolish thing in his life.) Luckily for all concerned, Sherman’s great gift was compromise. Without him, the Constitution might not have passed at all. That he also was odd-looking is both beyond question and beside the point. Define him by the latter, and everything is out of place, an eighteenth-century equivalent of John Edwards’s hair, or of the many voices screaming lines from old movies that seem to echo in the head of Maureen Dowd.

  Why not apply the most precisely loony of modern standards and ask with which of the founders you’d most like to have had a beer? Franklin’s the obvious answer, although the ferocious dipsomaniac Luther Martin, from Maryland—“he never speaks without tiring the patience of all who hear him,” according to Pierce—might have been entertaining for an hour or so. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson would have been no fun at all. He was pedantic, and he was always talking about how much he knew. (Pierce admired how Wilson could run down all the stages of “the Greecian commonwealth down to the present time.”) Sure, we might not have had a Bill of Rights without him, but how much fun would he have been?

  It’s good that there was gossip. There is a place in our understanding for Madison’s meticulous note-taking on the great questions being decided, and for Pierce’s loose-limbed assessment of the men who came to decide them. It’s good that they were not made of marble. Reality demands that they not be cast as figures from Olympus. But reality also demands the acknowledgment that they were not the cast of My Man Godfrey, either.

  FOR a brief moment in 2008, reality disappeared from American television because there was nobody around to write it.

  A trend as deeply rooted in Idiot America as anything else is, reality television shakes out as little more than the creation of a context in which one set of connivers is set against another. The ur-program Survivor was meant to set a number of contestants against one another in an every-person-for-themselves free-for-all. Within a week, one set of contenders was conspiring against another. The “tribal council” became a venting of boundless suspicion, some justified and some not, but all with the essential integrity and suspense of a professional wrestling match. We had, after all, already seen the actual plotting as the series went along.

  Televised sports and the media attendant on them had already broken a lot of ground, and the creation of a television reality as an arena went back even further than that, all the way to the rigged quiz shows of the 1950s and to forgotten classics like Queen for a Day and You Asked for It. In the former, a woman with a
terrible tale of sorrow and woe would share it with an adoring public and be rewarded with a new stove. In the latter, people wrote in asking to see a man break a board with his head, or to watch a Tahitian fertility rite, and the host would obligingly share it with a grateful, if baffled, nation. Sooner or later, a country that could so invest itself in Charles Van Doren, or in a housewife from Kansas with ulcers, or in dancing South Sea islanders was bound to start arguing about reality.

  The essential dynamic of reality programming is the creation of teams through which Americans can vicariously compete against one another, whether in rooting for the personal trainer in the loincloth on Survivor, the Shania Twain wannabe on American Idol, or the harried mom and dad trying to win the daily battle of getting the sextuplets off to school in the morning. It is the creation of profitable vessels in which to invest whatever we find unsatisfactory in our own lives. In every real sense, we buy the people and their problems. The essential truth of reality shows lies in how fervently we involve ourselves in them.

  “All reality shows,” Craig Plestis, an NBC executive, told Forbes.com, “should have a visceral reaction for the viewer. You need to feel something.”

  Even American Idol, Fox television’s star-making phenomenon, is shot through with the notion that the panel of demi-celebrities doing the judging is conspiring against one contender and in favor of another. (The charges gained a little credibility early on, when a judge, Paula Abdul, was discovered to be dating one of the contestants.) Now, the cable dial is dotted with reality shows involving huge families, dangerous jobs, messy garages, and really big tumors. There are even reality shows about unreality, people going off in search of Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil. Ignatius Donnelly, alas, died much too soon.