Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (13 page)

Miller lists some antigovernment punk songs without noting that the government in question was run by that longtime
National Review
pinup Maggie Thatcher. The Sex Pistols as an anti-abortion band? The notion of the Clash as spokesfolk for adventurism in the Middle East might have been enough to bring Joe Strummer back from the dead. To his credit, Miller was sharp enough to immunize himself against any family-values tut-tutting from his side of the aisle by admitting that a number of the songs on his list were recorded by “outspoken liberals” or “notorious libertines.”

Led Zeppelin? Notorious libertines? Who knew?

Thanks to that disclaimer, Miller could write, with a straight face, that the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” is pro-abstinence and pro-marriage, although it was recorded at
a moment when Brian Wilson was hoovering up the Chinese heroin. Possibly Miller saw Wilson as following a trail through moral consistency already blazed by Newt (“Got a cold, dear? I want a divorce”) Gingrich, Rush (“Why wasn’t I born an East German swimmer?”) Limbaugh, and Bill (“Where the hell’s ‘Tumblin’ Dice’?”) Bennett. In any event, he can listen to the Kinks while being completely deaf to Ray Davies’s sense of irony, which is roughly akin to listening to the “1812 Overture” and failing to hear the cannons.

This is disorder. There are so many things in the wrong place here—entertainment standing in for identity, identity standing in for politics—that any actual appreciation of the art is impossible to find. It’s on the wrong shelf. Or it’s slipped down off the windowsill and behind the radiator where nobody will find it. Mr. Madison was right to be worried. Americans do nothing better than we choose up sides and, once we do that, we find it damn easy to determine that someone—the Masons! the refs! liberals! dead white males!—is conspiring against us. And sometimes, they are. Or so the Gut whispers. The Gut is, if nothing else, a team player.

THE
New Media Conference begins with an old joke.

“I go back to the days when the Dead Sea was just sick,” says Joe Franklin, a man who has been broadcasting from New York since shortly after Peter Minuit blew town. His audience takes just a moment to laugh, possibly because the joke does not translate well from the original Sumerian.

The conference is being held in a hotel in lower Manhattan, about three blocks from Ground Zero and two blocks from the Hudson River. “New Media” is a little misleading, since
by now it’s a general term for everything that isn’t CBS or the
New York Times.
The new media include blogs and webcasts and podcasts. The New Media Conference, however, is a talk show convention.

There is a great homogeneity to the gathering. Golf shirts and khakis are the uniform of the day. The conventioneers do morning drive in Omaha and evening drive in Nashville. As a matter of fact, the conference isn’t even a “talk show” convention per se. One of talk radio’s most successful and profitable genres, sports talk, isn’t represented at all. There are very few people here who dispense home improvement advice on Saturday morning, or run the Sunday afternoon gardening show. Rather, this is a convention for people who do “issue-oriented” talk radio. It is sponsored by
Talkers
magazine, the bible of the industry, and its majordomo is Michael Harrison, an Ichabod Crane-ish character who bustles about the lobby, snapping photos of talk radio stars like Laura Ingraham and G. Gordon Liddy, and saying “Wow!” a lot.

Liddy’s very presence says a great deal not only about the conference but about the industry it’s celebrating. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Gordon Liddy is an authentically dangerous man. Back in the 1970s, he was the Nixon campaign operative who proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution, murdering the news columnist Jack Anderson, and hiring yachts as floating brothels for the purposes of blackmailing delegates to the Democratic National Convention. And he did all this from inside the executive branch of the government. Even Nixon’s felonious attorney general, John Mitchell, thought Liddy was a lunatic, and Mitchell was no field of buttercups himself.

Liddy crashed and burned when burglars he’d organized got caught in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, touching off Nixon’s prolonged Götterdämmerung.
Liddy went to prison, having named no names, but not before he offered to present himself on any street corner in case anyone from the White House wanted to silence him. Alas for that plan, the only person working for Nixon crazy enough to shoot Gordon Liddy in public was Gordon Liddy.

So off to the federal sneezer he went for a while, and then he came out again and gradually, improbably, made a celebrity out of himself. He toured college campuses with the LSD guru Timothy Leary, whom he had busted years ago as a local prosecutor in upstate New York. This is not so bad. Everybody has to earn a living. It was clear, though, that no country serious about its national dialogue on any subject would allow Gordon Liddy near a microphone, for the same reason that we would keep Charlie Manson away from the cutlery. There was a time in this country when Gordon Liddy could have moved along to a notable, if unprofitable, career as a public crank.

However, in “issues-oriented” talk radio, threatening to poison a journalist is a shining gold star on the résumé. Westwood One, a huge radio syndicator, gave Liddy a national platform, and Liddy did with it pretty much what you might expect. On one memorable occasion, he gave his radio audience pointers on how to kill a federal agent. (“Head shots,” he advised.) The comment caused no little outrage, particularly among federal agents with heads. President Bill Clinton mooed earnestly about the corruption of our national dialogue. This sent the talk radio universe into such collective hysterics that the New Media Conference in 1995 gave Gordon Liddy its coveted “Freedom of Speech” award for boldly speaking truth to power. Which is why Gordon Liddy is here today, and why Michael Harrison is taking his picture and saying “Wow!” a lot. Harrison will help the conference hand out this year’s “Freedom of Speech” award, a subject on which he waxes particularly messianic.

“There’s always a big battle around this award,” he says in his opening speech to the conference, “and a lot of it goes back to when G. Gordon Liddy got it. That was a defining experience for so many people with this award. The press likes to take things out of context and blow them up for their own political agenda.”

Harrison is glowing with pride now over how his organization handed its most important award to a guy who, inside the government and out, has counseled murder. “People who don’t understand this don’t understand the First Amendment. Even people who claim to defend the First Amendment don’t understand it,” Harrison continues. “This is an ongoing battle because if we don’t understand the First Amendment, we don’t understand America. The process of America is very different than the flag or the president or the government. Presidents or governments are very dangerous whether they are American or Soviet or whatever. Names don’t mean anything. Processes mean things. The spirit in which something is done means something.”

Everybody in the room sits up a little straighter. Heads nod. Chests puff out a bit. It’s hard to know how many of those present actually buy the bafflegab that Harrison is slinging them—that Gordon Liddy was what Mr. Madison had in mind, and that they are information warriors of free expression, keeping the Enlightenment values of the founders alive between jokes about Hillary Clinton’s hindquarters and the 5:15 traffic report. Some of them may in fact believe that Harrison is correct in his lemonade libertarianism about the great beast Government, that there is no true difference between the authoritarian ambitions of, say, Bill Clinton and those of Leonid Brezhnev. It’s impossible to gauge the effect of all that blather at the end about America being a “process” and about “the spirit of things,”
probably because it sounds like de Tocqueville filtered through Tony Robbins.

One hungers at this point for someone—anyone!—to come out and make the simple point that talk radio exists because it makes money. “The trick is to be what your bosses also call revenue,” confides a consultant named Holland Cooke. This comes like a cool breeze, cutting through the stagnant self-congratulation of Harrison’s quasi-profound rambling. “If you are good at this, you could be bulletproof.”

Talk radio is a very big fish in a very small barrel. It has a longer history than is usually believed. It probably dates back in its essential form to the likes of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest from Michigan, whose career cratered when he abandoned his support for the New Deal in favor of nativism and (ultimately) anti-Semitism. As it has evolved, talk radio is a conversation between Coughlins.

Many markets took up talk radio in the 1950s and 1960s, when it coexisted with AM Top 40 radio. As the music moved over to the FM dial, talk filled the void on AM. But the format did not truly explode until 1987, when, in the deregulatory fever of the Reagan years, the Federal Communications Commission revoked the Fairness Doctrine. This rule, adopted in 1949, had required licensed broadcasters to air all sides of the debate on controversial issues.

Some very farsighted young conservative leaders saw the demise of the Fairness Doctrine as a way to develop a counterweight to what they perceived as the overwhelming liberal bias of the rest of the mass media. Even some liberal groups joined in, attacking the regulation on First Amendment grounds. (Ironically, some older conservatives argued for the retention of the Fairness Doctrine, which they had used for years in order to be heard.) After a favorable ruling in a federal court, and after Reagan
vetoed a revival, the Fairness Doctrine was dead. Talk radio exploded on the right. As more and more stations became the property of fewer and fewer companies—the repeal was only a small part of the general deregulation of the public airwaves—the medium’s ideology hardened like a diamond. These days, the conservatives’ dominance of AM radio is overwhelming.

According to a 2007 joint study by the Free Press and the Center for American Progress, on the 257 stations owned by the five largest owners of commercial stations, 91 percent of weekday talk programming is conservative. On an average weekday, the study found, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk is broadcast, but just 254 hours of what the study called “progressive” talk. Ordinary demographics wither in the face of this juggernaut. A 2002 study focusing on Eugene, Oregon, the crunchy-liberal home of the University of Oregon, found that the local stations pumped out 4,000 hours of conservative talk per year,
none
on the other side. This is nothing short of a triumph in how we choose up sides in our national life.

(Today, the Fairness Doctrine is what conservative talk radio hosts use to scare their children at bedtime. The conference was alive with terror that the newly elected Democratic Congress might bring the beast back to life. Almost every speaker warned ominously of that possibility, even though Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, already had rejected it out of hand.)

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 ratings needle. (First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units.) If the needle moves enough, then the host is adjudged an expert (Second Great Premise: Anything
can be true if someone says it loudly enough) and, if the host seems to argue passionately enough, then what he is saying is judged to be true simply because of how many people are listening to him say it (Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it). Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.

Talk radio was the driving force in changing American debate into American argument. It moved discussion southward from the brain to the Gut. Debate no longer consists of thesis and antithesis, moving forward to synthesis; it is now a matter of choosing up sides, finding someone on your team to sally forth, and then laying the wood to each other in between commercials for male-enhancement products.

Talk radio provides a template for the clamorous rise of pundit television and for the even swifter interactivity on the Internet. And, because the field of play has moved from the brain to the Gut, talk radio has helped shove the way we talk to each other about even the most important topics almost entirely into the field of entertainment. In doing so, it has created a demand for inexpertise—or, more accurately, anexpertise—whereby the host is deemed more of an authority the less he is demonstrably polluted by actual knowledge.

After an extensive study of talk radio, and of the television argument shows that talk radio helped spawn, Professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis came up with a set of rules for modern American pundits:

1. Never be dull.
   

2. Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.
   

3. The American public is stupid; treat them that way.
   

4. Always ignore the facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.