Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (10 page)

Soon, everybody had climbed aboard. On the very day when the Masons were holding open houses all over the country, and on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the Templars’ last roundup, the Vatican announced that it would release copies of the minutes of the Templars’ trials.

The document—“Processus Contra Templarios”—had been unearthed in 2001 from deep in the Vatican archives. Now, the Vatican planned to publish a handsome, limited-edition, leather-bound collector’s edition of the documents, including expert commentary and reproductions of the seals used by the various inquisitors. And at only $8,333 a copy, too. The Vatican always was a little more open about its treasure-hunting than the Templars were.

“We were talking in the other room about the Vatican releasing this today,” says Larry Bethune, the Grand Master of the
Dalhousie Lodge. “Is it a coincidence that they release these documents on the seven-hundredth anniversary? This is how conspiracy, or conspiracy theories, get started.”

Bethune is the vice president for student affairs and dean of students of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and he got into Masonry through the De Molay Society, which he joined as a teenager in New Jersey. He cheerfully admits that his organization has benefited from the renewed interest in the various conspiracy theories involving the Masons. It’s not that dissimilar to the
Da Vinci Code
tours offered in Europe, which take devotees of the book around to the spots where the big moments in the novel take place, so that they can pester elderly museum guards with questions about exactly what secrets the elderly museum guards are being paid to conceal.

“It’s made a big difference,” Bethune explains. “We have to be careful now because there are a lot of people who come to us now because they’re taken by the mystery of it, and that’s not the point of the organization. The people who come thinking that, it’s very hard to argue with them because a lot of it is just hypothesis, even within the organization.

“They’ll come in here thinking it’s Indiana Jones and all that Knights Templar stuff and they’ll be sort of disappointed.”

Bethune himself is interested in the connection between the flight of the Templars and the rise of Masonry. In his ancestral home on the islands west of Scotland, he’s seen Templar graves, the monuments flat on the ground and depicting the knight interred there. “I happen to believe it’s true,” he says, “but it’s still just hypothesis. When Philip rounded them up, he hardly got any of them. A whole bunch of them were gone. They did disappear and the story is that they went to Scotland. And that part of Scotland where my family comes from had a lot of Masonic lodges. A connection between the Templars and the Masonic lodges, so far as I know, has never been proved.

“There are probably four or five million Masons, so there’s probably some group that’s doing something. I always say to potential candidates that they should come to one of our annual dinners first. Watch us plan that dinner and see if you think we’re capable of pulling off some major conspiracy. We can barely get that dinner done.”

Of course, that’s what they would say.

Hmmmmm.

EVEN
though the action in his novel takes place in Europe—the bones of the late Ms. Magdalene-Christ eventually are discovered to be resting beneath the Louvre—Dan Brown could not have tossed his novel more directly into the American wheel-house. For good or ill, there’s nothing more fundamentally American than conspiracies or, more precisely, conspiracy theories. There is always secret knowledge, somewhere, being kept from us somehow, by someone. It’s just not the secret knowledge everybody presumes is there.

For example, Brown published his novel concerning a secret cabal within the Roman Catholic church in 2003. At the time, the church in the United States was reeling from almost daily revelations about how its institutional structure had been used for decades as, at best, a conspiracy to obstruct justice. The newspapers that published the exposes ran into storms of criticism and disbelief. It seemed that people were more willing to suspend disbelief in the case of fictional murderous monks than they were concerning the elaborate lengths to which the church had actually gone to cover up its complicity in the sexual abuse of children.

Secret knowledge—at least, temporarily secret knowledge—was essential to the founding of the nation. In 1787, when the
delegates to the Federal Convention in Philadelphia agreed to debate and write the new Constitution in complete secrecy, they had a number of reasons to do so—most notably, the desire of some to maintain their political viability if the whole enterprise crashed and burned later.

Not everyone approved. (Lobbing his objections from Paris, Thomas Jefferson made it clear that he hated the idea of a secret convention.) When the Constitution finally did emerge, it was greeted by some people as though it were a collection of magic spells, written in mystic runes and decipherable only to a handful of initiates. According to political polemicist Mercy Otis Warren of Massachusetts, the convention was nothing less than a cluster of “dark, secret, and profound intrigues” aimed at creating, at best, an American oligarchy. In reply, the people defending the convention, and the Constitution that it produced, argued that they were afflicted on all sides by dark cabals. Some time passed before the Constitution was debated primarily on its merits. At first, everyone chose up sides to defend themselves and their position against the black designs of the conspirators arrayed against them.

Not much has changed. In November 2007, a Scripps Howard poll revealed that nearly 65 percent of Americans surveyed believed that the federal government ignored specific warnings prior to the September 11 attacks, and that fully a third believed in a whole host of other conspiracies, including a plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy and a government effort to conceal the truth about UFOs.

Conspiracy theories are basic to most American popular culture as well. The rise of black American music—blues, jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop—to a position of dominance within the culture is richly attended in history by a dynamic of Us versus Them. Aficionados enjoyed an undeniable frisson of underground
excitement that was sharpened and hardened by a demonstrable organized reaction from the predominant culture of the times. The endless, nearly incomprehensible “culture wars” are a manifestation of one side’s oppositional identity to the cabal meeting across the faculty lounge. There is a misapprehension about conspiracy theories that ought not to make us lose sight of their true value. In fact, it can be argued that a conspiracy theory—airy and vague and not entirely moored to empirical fact—can be more important than is the revelation of an actual conspiracy itself.

Conspiracy theories do engage the imagination. In their own way, they are fragments of lost American innocence in that they presume that the “government” is essentially good, but populated at some deep level by evil people. At the heart of some of them, at least, is a glimmering of the notion of self-government. They tumble into Idiot America when they are locked solely into the Three Great Premises, when they’re used merely to move units, and when they’re limited to those people who believe them fervently enough to say them loudly on television. To look at how that can work, you have to spend some time in Dealey Plaza.

There is an X in the middle of Elm Street, just down the little hill that runs away from the Book Depository and toward the
grassy hill with the fence behind it. The sun in Dealey Plaza is merciless on a summer’s day. People squint and shade their eyes. They toss a couple of bucks to the freelance experts who work the plaza every day, with their diagrams and their newsletters. They wander up the knoll, through the blessed shade, and behind the fence—not the original fence, long ago lost to souvenir hunters, but a newer one, rebuilt there because the fence is important to people who wander into the plaza and never find their way out. Even this fence is weatherbeaten now. On one board, almost in a line with the X in the roadway, there once was a line of graffiti.

“Thanks for Chicago and West Virginia,” it said. “Sincerely, Sam Giancana.”

In his study of the Kennedy presidency, the political writer Richard Reeves quotes Kennedy describing himself as the center of a spoked wheel and, in doing so, inadvertently posing an insoluble riddle to what would become, after his murder, a nation of his biographers. By the time he touched down in Dallas, Kennedy had grown comfortable living in the plural.

“It was instinctive,” Kennedy said. “I had different identities, and this was a useful way of expressing each without compromising the other.” Consider what we have come to know about him in the decades since he was killed: that he was an icon of vigor—vigah!—who was deathly ill and gobbling steroids and shooting speed just to function daily; that he was the golden child of a golden family with a sex life that can properly be called baroque; that he was a public intellectual whose books were ghostwritten; that he bought West Virginia in 1960, probably with the mob’s money, in a deal brokered by his good friend Frank Sinatra.

After all, every frontier is a New Frontier, landscape and dreamscape at once, a horizon but also an architecture of belief.
But frontiers are also wild and uncivilized places where people struggle to survive, where people die over private grudges, and where people, a lot of them, carry guns. John Kennedy needed every identity he’d crafted for himself to survive on the New Frontier he proclaimed. In 1960, he got up in Los Angeles and promised to make all things new. In his murder, three years later, he managed to do it for the ages.

Consider Dallas, the nexus of distrust that became the template for modern political paranoia, and consider that, while Kennedy was president, the executive branch was a writhing ball of snakes. A memo has survived in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff seriously suggest blowing up John Glenn on the launch-pad in order to concoct a casus belli for invading Cuba again. Consider that this lunacy made it all the way up the chain of command to the secretary of defense before someone finally turned it off. Consider Dallas when you consider how quickly theories sprang up about who might have known what before the airplanes were flown into the buildings in Washington and New York.

It turns out there were actual conspiracies going on throughout the brief history of the Kennedy administration. It was a fertile time for conspiracy, since so many things seemed to be changing all at once. The issue of civil rights had moved swiftly past the hope of easy compromise; there were murderous plots planned under the Spanish moss in Mississippi, and the people involved in them believed they were arming themselves against a conspiracy from the North that dated back to Lincoln. Elsewhere, there were off-the-books efforts to kill Fidel Castro in Cuba, and covert wranglings in (among other places) Iraq, where a young officer named Saddam Hussein backed the right side in a CIA-sponsored coup. A rat’s nest was growing in Southeast Asia that already seemed beyond untangling.

The Joint Chiefs were barely under civilian control; Fletcher Knebel did not pluck the plot for
Seven Days in May
out of the air. Knebel was a veteran Washington journalist who knew what he heard around town. The intelligence services vanished into the dark blue evening distance of the frontier in which John Kennedy had declared could be found the nation’s best new hope. These were actual conspiracies, many of which have come to light in the years since the assassination, just as the conspiracy theories about the president’s murder have hit high tide, but they have had less historical resonance in that context than the notion, completely unsubstantiated by anything resembling a fact, that Kennedy was shot from a storm drain beneath the street in the plaza.