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

by Charles P. Pierce

  OUT where the broad lawn meets the road, workmen are digging a series of holes in the ground, looking for the place where the carriages once turned around, stopping briefly to disembark the ladies and gentlemen who had come to have dinner with the little old fellow who ran the place. The carriages would come up the twisting, narrow paths from the main road, rattling between the long white rail fences until they came to a spot somewhere right along here, right at the edge of the lawn. A house slave would greet them there, and bring them up to the main house for dinner.

  On a hot day at the end of August, the high whine of power tools cuts through the low hum of the bees and drowns out the birdsong in the shrubbery. On their knees, two workers cut the earth away in a series of precise squares, down just far enough until they find some more of the old brick. They are gradually pulling the history from the earth, one square at a time.

  James Madison was nine when his father built the plantation that would come to be called Montpelier, tucked into a green valley below the Blue Ridge Mountains in Orange County in Virginia, now two hours by car southeast of Washington, D.C. Madison lived there the rest of his life, and he died there, on June 28, 1836. He and Dolley had no children—Dolley’s son from her first marriage, Payne Todd, was a profligate drunk who ran up $20,000 in debts that Madison paid off secretly, in order to spare his wife the heartbreak—so, in 1844, Dolley sold the estate. Eventually, in 1901, it passed into the hands of some members of the DuPont family. In all, the DuPonts added thirty-three rooms. They built a racetrack on the grounds. They also did up the exterior of the main house in flaming pink stucco. The DuPonts built on, added to, and refurbished the place until the original Montpelier disappeared like Troy vanishing beneath a strip mall.

  In 1983, the last remaining DuPont owner bequeathed the place to the National Trust, and the effort then began to free Montpelier from the encrustations of Gilded Age plutocracy. The process is nearing completion on this breathless summer afternoon, as the old turnaround out front is unearthed. The garish pink stucco is surrendering at last to the original red brick. The mortar being used is mixed the same way that it was in the eighteenth century, and a fireplace is being rebuilt of red sandstone from the same quarry as the original. A piece of Madison’s personal correspondence was found as part of a rat’s nest inside one of the walls. In June 2007, a reunion was held on the grounds for the descendants of the plantation’s slaves.

  Madison was never a superstar, not even among his contemporaries. His home never became a shrine, not the way Washington’s Mount Vernon did, or Jefferson’s Monticello. The ride out from Washington takes you through three major battlefields of the Civil War. It seems as though you are driving backward in time through the inevitable bloody consequences of the compromises born in the hallways of Montpelier. Madison is an imperfect guide, as all the founders were.

  But he felt something in his heart in this place. (And he did have a heart, the shy little fellow. He never would have won Dolley without it.) He studied and he thought, and he ground away at his books, but it wasn’t all intellect with him. Not all the time. He knew the Gut, as well. He knew it well enough to keep it where it belonged.

  Madison amassed more than four thousand books in his life, and the people working at Montpelier are not altogether sure where he kept them. Some people believe the library was on the first floor, in the wing of the house where once lived Madison’s aged mother, Nelly. A better candidate is a room on the second floor, at the front of the house. It has broad, wide windows, and it looks out on the sweeping lawns and off toward the Blue Ridge beyond. It is a place to plan, but it’s also a place to dream.

  “You know what’s nice about Madison in contrast to Jefferson,” says Will Harris, who runs the Center for the Study of the Constitution on the grounds of Montpelier. “Jefferson has this debate with himself with his heart and his head. Madison doesn’t split the two up. He can be very angry, and he can be very motivated, in the sense of emotion and sentiment. But what that does, it engages his intellect. So when his emotions are running strong, his intellect is running strong. He wouldn’t say, ‘Well, my heart tells me this but my mind tells me this.’ He puts the two together. And, in some ways, it’s a more progressive understanding of the relationship.”

  In this room, with the mountains going purple in the gathering twilight, you can see all the way to the country where Ignatius Donnelly felt free to look to Atlantis, the country where a thousand cranks could prosper proudly. But also to a country in balance between the mind and the heart, as Madison was when he walked these halls in blissful retirement. A country where the disciplined intellect and the renegade soul could work together to create a freedom not merely from political tyranny, but also from the tyrannies of religion and unreason, the despotism of commercial success and brute popularity. A country where, paradoxically, the more respectable you become, the less credible you ought to be.

  Whatever room the restorers finally decide is the one where the old fellow kept all his books, it turns out we are all Mr. Madison’s library. He and his colleagues, who were not made of marble, gave us the chance to learn as much as we could learn about as much as there was to learn, and to put that knowledge to work in as many directions as the human mind can concoct.

  But we were supposed to keep things where they belonged, so their essential value would be enhanced and not diluted. Religion would remain transcendent, and not alloyed cheaply with politics. The entrepreneurial spirit used to sell goods would be different in kind from the one used to sell ideas. Our cranks, flourishing out there in the dying light, would somehow bring us around to a truth even they couldn’t see.

  We need our cranks more than ever, but we need them in their proper places. We’ve chained our imagination because we’ve decided it should function as truth. We’ve shackled it with the language of political power and the vocabulary of salesmanship. We tame its wilder places by demanding for them conventional respectability, submitting its renegade notions to the banal administrations of school boards and courthouses. We build museums in which we break our dragons to the saddle.

  That’s why that room on the second floor of the mansion has to have been the library, because you can see the mountains from there. It’s a room meant for looking forward, for casting your imagination outward into the outland places of the world. The nation had a government of laws, but it was a country of imagination. From that window, where you can see the mountains in the dying light of the afternoon and feel their presence as a challenge in the night, you can imagine the wild places beyond the mountains, in the vast country into which John Richbourg once had enough faith to beam his music. You can imagine the wild places in yourself. You can imagine the great things crazy notions can accomplish, if we can only keep them out of the hands of the professionals.

  He designed a government, Mr. Madison did, but he dreamed himself a country. It’s time for us to get ourselves in order, to set out and find that place again. Or else we will stay where we are, like that statue of Adam, before they covered his nether parts with water lilies so you wouldn’t notice what was missing, lounging around, brainless and dickless, in an Eden that looks less and less like paradise.

  Acknowledgments

  This book started as a magazine article—in the November 2005 edition of Esquire—and the article started as a three-line pitch that read, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” So the first toast goes rightfully to David Granger and to Mark Warren, who saw everything there was to see in those three words, and who saw the length and breadth of the story even before I did. There is no possible way to explain how much their faith in this idea meant to me, so I won’t really try except to wish upon every writer in the world the chance to work with people like them.

  The best way to thank all of the people who found themselves dragooned into this project is chronologically through the text, so the first ones are Ken Ham and the staff at the Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky. Then comes Ralph Ketchum, who sat on his porch with me as a morning
thunderstorm broke over Lake George and talked about James Madison, the great subject of his life. The conversation was too short in that it ended at all.

  Ed Root shared his experience with the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, and Kit Hodges explained why scientists don’t explain themselves very well. My local Masons—and perhaps, shhh!, Templars—were gracious hosts, most notably Larry Be thune. Sean Wilentz was generous enough to spend an hour on the phone talking about anti-Masons. Thanks also to Jack Horrigan, my local UFO host.

  Michael Harrison and the staff of the New Media Conference in New York gave me the run of the place, and I thank Steve Gill, Tom Peace, and Patrick Blankenship at WLAC in Nashville for doing the same. Thanks also to radio guys Cenk Uygur, John Parikhal, and Holland Cooke, as well as Sgt. Todd Bowers. Andrew Cline took time to explain in detail his laws of modern punditry. Also thanks to Keith Olbermann for chatting over breakfast in the days before he became an authentic TV star, thereby confounding one of the central tenets of this book—and, as a wise man once said, that’s if you’re scoring at home, or even if you’re not.

  Judge John Jones gave me the better part of a day, and was not in any way banal, but especially not breathtakingly so. Thanks also to Liz O’Donnell in Judge Jones’s office. And thanks to Pastor Ray Mummert for his patience and his honesty.

  It’s not possible to measure the admiration I feel for the people at the Woodside Hospice. Their graciousness in talking about the worst few weeks of their lives was nothing short of a gift. This starts, of course, with Annie Santa-Maria, a very formidable and brave soul, but includes no less Mike Bell and Louise Cleary. Thanks also to Captain Mike Haworth and the Pinellas Park Police Department, and to Marcia Stone and the staff of the Cross Bayou Elementary School, as well as to Elizabeth Kirkman, who’s still a Point of Light.

  Thanks to everyone in Shishmaref, especially the folks at the Fire and Rescue-cum-journalists’ hostel, but also to John Stenik, Luci Eningowuk, Tom Lee, Patti Miller, and all the Weyiounnas—Tony, John, and Emily. Special thanks to Emily for noticing that I’d won at bingo, or else there might have been one more ironic twist to Idiot America. Thanks also to James Speth and Elizabeth Blackburn for their insights into politicized science.

  There are a number of people who were willing to talk about their roles in what happened as the United States went to war in Iraq. All of them were painfully honest about it. Thanks, then, to Richard Clarke, Paul Pillar, Carl Ford, David Phillips, Anthony Zinni, and Eric Rosenbach. Louise Richardson—and her book, What Terrorists Want—was essential in understanding the roads not taken. Steve Kleinman’s clear-eyed assessment of torture was just as essential in understanding the roads that were. And finally, my profound gratitude to Andrew Bacevich, who found time to talk during what must have been a period of nearly insupportable sorrow. People like him need a nation worthy of them.

  I advise everyone to visit the ongoing restoration of Mr. Madison’s place, Montpelier, down in the hills of Orange County in Virginia. Thanks especially to my tour guide, Elizabeth Loring, and to Will Harris at the Center for the Study of the Constitution. And, finally, thanks to Gary Hart, for a long conversation that informs almost every part of this book.

  Three libraries were vital to portions of the book. My gratitude to Greg Garrison and the staff of the John Davis Williams Library at the University of Mississippi, the staff of the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, and to the staff of the Oral Histories Project at Columbia University. Special thanks to Matt Kane (Columbia ‘07) for expert emergency aid.

  I bounced the idea of this book off a number of people and I am grateful for the way they bounced it back. Thanks, then, to Bob Bateman and also to the two Doc Erics—Alterman and Rauchway—for their help and support.

  As always, I had a wonderful pit crew for this trip around the track. Mulberry Studios in Cambridge again provided the transcriptions, and I thank again the Benincasa family of Watertown, Massachusetts, for their submarine sandwiches and for the use of the hall. David Black is my agent and my friend and, most of all, a conjurer of the first rank. Almost on the fly, he made a book out of a lot of amorphous notions. Everyone else at the giddily pinwheeling empire that is the David Black Literary Agency knows that I love them madly.

  For about seven months, I was absolutely unable to explain what I wanted this book to be about. This did not faze Bill Thomas at Doubleday, who knew what it was supposed to be about and patiently waited for me to figure the damn thing out. My debt to his patience and deft way with the editing blade is huge and ongoing. (He got promoted while working on this project. I have not yet asked for a kickback.) Thanks also to Melissa Danaczko for her forbearance with my utter ineptitude at the task of sending electronic mail, and for her odd idea of what Pierce Brosnan should look like. Thanks also to the folks at my day job at the Boston Globe Magazine, especially editor Doug Most, for his understanding of why I one morning happened to be calling from arctic Alaska.

  There is no explaining my family, and no measuring the debt I owe to them, especially to my wife, Margaret Doris, who is the strongest and bravest person I know, and who lived this project through a year in which she needed all of her strength and courage. Abraham, Brendan, and Molly know what I’m talking about, because there is so much of her in them. I am so damned blessed.

  Charles P. Pierce

  Autumn 2008

  Notes on Sources

  The author is grateful to the authors and journalists whose work is cited directly herein. Some of these works also served as resources for this book’s spirit as well as its text. The ur-text was probably Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which produced several invaluable offspring. These include: The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, and The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman. The passages about James Madison and his work would not have been possible without Ralph Ketchum’s magisterial biography of the man, the Library of America’s collection of Madison’s writings, and Madison’s Advice to My Country, which was edited by David Mattern. I was able to make Ignatius Donnelly Madison’s curious doppelganger partly through a biographical piece in Minnesota magazine written by my friend and NPR quizmaster, Peter Sagal.

  The chapter on WLAC in Nashville first gestated while I was reading the work of Peter Guralnick, especially Sweet Soul Music and Feel Like Going Home. The account of Michael Savage’s brief career as a host of a television program on MSNBC is drawn largely from James Wolcott’s hilarious Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants. The author also acknowledges a debt in his treatment of talk radio to the proprietors of Media Matters for America, and to Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? and Sound and Fury. The discussion of the treatment of presidential candidate Al Gore would not have been possible without the work of the redoubtable Bob Somerby at www.dailyhowler.com.

  In addition to Gordy Slack’s The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything, my account of the Dover intelligent design case, and of the intelligent design controversy in general, also depended on Before Darwin by Keith Thomson; The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design by Ronald Numbers; Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons by Peter J. Bowler; Margaret Talbot’s contemporaneous reportage in The New Yorker; and P. J. Myers’s work at his blog, www.science blogs.com/pharyngula.

  The account of the death of Terri Schiavo was aided immeasurably by The Case of Terri Schiavo, a collection of essays edited by Arthur Caplan, James McCartney, and Dominic Sisti. The story of Elizabeth Blackburn’s experiences on the President’s Council on Bioethics can be found most completely in Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres by Catherine Brady. Also immensely helpful were Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and Esther Kaplan’s With God on Their Side.

  The brief account of the history of whaling in and around the Chukchi Sea is drawn from the work of NASA’s Jeremy Project (http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/arctic/explore/ship_history.html) and the online resources of
the New Bedford Whaling Museum (http://www.whalingmuseum.org/library/amwhale/am_arctic.html). A. F. Jamieson’s account of the Baychimo comes from www.theoutlaws.com/unexplained8.htm. The author also acknowledges a debt to the previous reporting on Shishmaref done by Margot Roosevelt of Time magazine.

  A number of accounts have been published concerning how the Iraq war came about. The author is especially indebted to Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Fiasco by Thomas Ricks, Losing Iraq by David Phillips, The Limits of Power by Andrew J. Bacevich, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and The Italian Letter by Knut Royce and Peter Eisner. The Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Prewar Assessments about Postwar Iraq is available online at http://intelligence.senate.gov/prewar.pdf, as is the report concerning the political interference with government scientists produced by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The strange history and influence of 24 were ably set out first by Rebecca Dana of the Wall Street Journal, and, most notably, by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

  The American Bar Association was kind enough to send along a transcript of the panel it conducted on the subject of high-profile cases that included both Judge Jones and Judge Whittemore. A précis of the event can be found at http://www.abanet.org/media/youraba/200702/article08.html.

  Ignatius Donnelly’s papers, including his vast diaries, are stored in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society, and those of John Richbourg are part of the Blues Collection at the Williams Library of the University of Mississippi. The Reminiscences of F. C. Sowell, p. 30, are in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. David Sanjak’s study of postwar popular music was published in American Music (vol. 15, no. 4, winter 1997, pp. 535-62). William Butler Pierce’s impressions of his fellow delegates was published in The American Historical Review (vol. 3, no. 2, January 1898, pp. 310-34). All material from these archives is used by permission.