Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (20 page)

He did not believe that the pro-ID people had dealt with his court in good faith, and he did not believe their hired lawyers
had the best interests of the town in mind. Over the summer of 2005, while the trial was proceeding, the citizens of Dover seemed to come to the same conclusion. In November, they voted out the entire school board but for the one member not up for reelection. An anti-ID majority rode a huge turnout to victory. Politically, if Jones ruled against intelligent design, the fight was over. This new board was not going to finance the appeal all the way through the federal court system.

By this time, Jones was bunkered with his staff, writing his decision in the case. One of his clerks, Adele Nyberg, pulled together the post-trial submissions from both sides and began to sketch out a rough draft from a preliminary outline Jones had prepared. Nyberg wrote some of the opinion and Jones wrote some of it. They swapped ideas back and forth. It was a long, grueling process.

“You just close the door and work on it,” Jones recalls. “I can’t tell you the number of drafts we went through.” He kidded Nyberg that she should look at the drafting of the opinion as the vegetable she least liked to eat. “I kept finding edits and corrections I wanted to make,” he says. “At the end, I couldn’t look at the thing.”

Every draft had one thing in common, though: Jones was angry, and it showed. He took one version home to show his wife, who told him it was too strident. He toned it down, a little. On December 20, 2005, he released the opinion to the world, and into the media maw that had gaped outside his office for going on two months.

If the earlier drafts were tougher, they must have been tied around a brick. The opinion ran 139 pages, and Jones determined that teaching ID was unconstitutional on the third page. Then he got going. His language was blunt and devastating. He found ID ludicrous as science and preposterous as law. He saw
the attempts to foist it on high school students as the worst kind of bunco scheme, dealing harshly with the notion of “teaching the controversy”—a “canard,” he wrote, designed merely as the next form of camouflage by which creationism hoped to insinuate itself into the public schools. ID, Jones concluded, was “a mere re-labelling of creationism.” He saved his most memorable scorn for a passage in which he described the damage the fight over ID had done to the people of Dover.

“This case came to us as a result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board,” Jones wrote, “aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.

“The breathtaking inanity of the board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

That “breathtaking inanity” rang the loudest. (In fact, the phrase had survived from the earlier draft that Jones had revised at the suggestion of his wife.) For a federal judge, language like this was the equivalent of throwing a pie in someone’s face. Commentators on both sides of the issue seized on the line. The opinion was released at 10:30 in the morning. By 10:45, people were yelling about it on CNN.

“I have these twenty-something clerks,” Jones recalls, “and they kept looking at me and looking at the TV like, ‘What in the hell have we done?’ I was very satisfied that I’d got the decision out before the end of the year, so there’s a sense of, Well, you cleared the deck. You did the heavy lifting.” Channel surfing at home that night, Jones came upon Bill O’Reilly’s nightly
show on the Fox News Channel. O’Reilly and his guest, a former judge named Andrew Napolitano, chewed on Jones for a solid ten minutes. By the end of it, O’Reilly was calling him a “fascist.” Subsequently, the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson called him “absurd.” The next day, the death threats started rolling in.

“They turned them in to the U.S. marshals, and the marshals said, immediately, that they were going to put me under twenty-four-hour protection,” Jones says. The marshals set up a command post at his house. One of them went out with Jones’s wife when she walked their dog. “I figured if I ever got a threat, it would be because I sentenced a crack dealer,” Jones said.

Gradually, the furor died down. In January, however, the ultraconservative activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote a syndicated column in which she pointed out how vital evangelical voters had been to the election of George W. Bush, and Bush had appointed Jones, and Jones had stabbed the evangelical community in the back. However, the notion that he owed his allegiance to some political team got Jones angry enough to speak out. “I thought, ‘Enough,’” he says. “I started to talk about exactly how judges decide cases. I wanted to pivot off that and talk about my experiences, and the experiences of other judges, with cases like this.

“In my view, the punditry—and to some extent, the mainstream press is responsible, too—has been responsible for dumbing down people about how our political system works and, in particular, in my case, how the judicial branch works.

“These are purely political creatures who don’t understand what Article Three of the Constitution says. If you poll the United States today, you find that over forty percent, sometimes over fifty percent, of the people in the United States believe in creationism and not evolution. And they think that creationism
should be taught alongside, or even supplant, evolution in the public schools. So they don’t understand why this federal judge in Pennsylvania, in my case, won’t get with the program and bend to the popular will.

“Well, that’s not the way the Framers designed the judiciary. We are supposed to be a bulwark against the popular will at a given time and responsible to the Constitution and to the law. But, boy, that’s lost. People should get that.”

Six months later, browsing in a bookstore, Jones came upon
Godless
, the most recent work by the right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter, whose gifts as an evolutionary biologist had been fairly well disguised heretofore. Coulter parroted much of the ID evidence that had been left in tatters during the trial; compared Jones to Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador whose criticism of the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War drew the ire of the Bush administration; and concluded that all you needed to know about Jones’s intellect was that Tom Ridge had been his mentor. All of which made even less sense than the case for ID. “An ‘activist judge.’ That term is so misused,” Jones says. “It’s misused to the extent it’s become useless. You know what it means? It means a judge that you disagree with. It doesn’t mean anything else besides that. If I don’t agree with a judge’s decision, then he’s an activist judge. It’s ludicrous.”

Like so much of the blasted landscape of Idiot America, the Dover trial was a war on expertise, and Judge Jones was the last expert standing. Pastor Mummert had laid out the shape of the battlefield early on, when he described Dover as besieged by its intelligent and educated elements. The people to be most distrusted were those who actually knew what they were talking about. This is how people get elected while claiming not to be politicians. This is how, through the new mass media technologies best exemplified by the successful know-nothingism of talk
radio, everyone is an expert, if they can move units or budge the needle. Everyone is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a political sage. Why should anyone pay Sean Hannity, an NYU dropout, a dime to talk about stem-cell research?

Why not ask the guy who fixes your car?

Why not the guy on the next bar stool?

Why not you?

Of course, if everyone is an expert, then nobody is. The worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

It used to be that parents wanted their kids to be smarter than they were. It used to be that, when we had outbursts of primitive enthusiasms, as in the Scopes trial, we treated them as understandable interruptions in the relentless march of the American mind. It used to be that people scrapped and clawed their way up so that they could send their kids to Ivy League schools. Now so many of those children have emerged from the Ivy League as newly minted conservative friends of the soil, brimming with ersatz proletarian outrage and railing on behalf of the rubes in places like Dover against the kind of expertise produced in—wait for it—the Ivy League.

The founders wanted a nation of educated people: this, they believed, was essential to self-government. Some of the most heated arguments among them involved who would make up the educated elite. High Federalists like John Adams thought the elite should be exclusive and uncomfortably Anglophiliac in its attachment to the upper classes. The old democrats—most notably, Jefferson and Madison—suspected that the educated elite might just be everyone, although neither of these two plantation masters was completely convinced. What none of the founders believed was that the elite should be everyone and no one at the same time.

Three intermingled schools of idiocy are produced by this kind of society. All have proud histories as American phenomena, but all have been cheapened by their insistence on material success in their most unalloyed forms. (For example, intelligent design would have been perfectly unremarkable as a fringe religious theory. It became intolerable when it insisted on its commercial validity as actual science.) Political idiocy is best represented on the AM radio dial and on those evening cable television news programs, the booking philosophies of which seem to differ little from those once employed by soup kitchens on the Bowery. How much more interesting would Ann Coulter be if, instead of sprawling on the cover of
Time
, she was fighting to be heard in front of small, fervent audiences in rural Missouri? Coulter fumed for weeks after she was dismissed as a columnist by
USA Today.
If your biggest public gripe is that you got canned from that blob of mayonnaise, you have no right to stand in the company of Ignatius Donnelly. The Prince of Cranks was an American, dammit, and not an idiot. He never would’ve taken the job with
USA Today
in the first place. The man had his pride.

Commercial idiocy is the mechanism through which political idiocy (among other things) thrives, the mechanism through which the authentic revolution fostered by WLAC was diluted and homogenized into profitable syndicated outrage. Religious idiocy, formidable on its own, also functions as a baptismal font for political and commercial idiocy. Gussy up your extremist politics, or your bunco museum in which dinosaurs wear saddles, with the Gospels, and you can paint anyone who suggests that your goods are ridiculous a member of the intelligent, educated segment of the population, come to discomfit the faith-based folks.

Thus, it is considered impolite to point out, as Judge Jones
did, that millions of Americans are paying millions of dollars to be willingly taken in by obvious hooey, such as books in which the loving Savior comes back to earth for his glorious premillennial encore as someone sprung full-blown from the mind of Stan Lee; or that the fringe interpretation of Scripture on which the books are based dates back only as far as the Taft administration.

American secular eccentrics once stood as proudly outside the world as any insular religious community did, rendering to God what is his, and rendering to Caesar not at all. Which made it all the more disappointing that the fight over intelligent design in Dover ever made it to the courthouse at all. And even more disappointing that it didn’t end there. In the spring of 2008, a movie called
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
was released. Yet another defense of ID, this was a vanity project by Ben Stein, an economist who’d also been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, a freelance pundit, a movie extra, a game-show host, and the spokesman for a popular brand of eye drops. Now that he had come to pitch intelligent design, Stein’s career arc could safely be said to have gone from hogwash to eyewash and all the way back again.

The movie had two themes. It contended that scientists who believed in ID were being crushed by the academic establishment. (Stein’s examples were fairly threadbare. It’s easier to believe in ID than it is to believe that godless secularists have taken things over at places like Baylor and Iowa State.) However, the movie’s second basic theme is startling and disturbing. Stein argues, seriously, that Darwinism led to the depredations of the Nazis. In a moment that seemed drawn from early Monty Python, Stein visits the place where the Nazis perfected their methods of genocide and then visits Darwin’s house. The sequence ends with Stein staring balefully at a statue of Darwin. In an interview
with a Christian radio network, Stein said: “When I saw that man … talking about how great science was, I was thinking to myself that the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do, they were telling them to go to the showers and get gassed…. That was horrifying beyond words…. That’s where science leads you.

“Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a truly glorious place and science leads you to killing people.”

Science leads you to killing people.

Crazy history had been mustered to the defense of lunatic science. In the years since the end of World War II, none of Stein’s relatives apparently ever rode a subway, or took a flu shot, or watched men walk on the moon. However, in an increasingly vicarious public discourse, if Jonah Goldberg can make money calling Woodrow Wilson a fascist, it was relatively simple for Ben Stein to drop the gangplank of H.M.S.
Beagle
at the gates of Auschwitz. This line—that science leads somewhat inevitably to inhumanity—was adopted sub rosa by conservative politicians who wanted to keep ID alive as a political weapon regardless of its transparent worthlessness as actual science. Stein did nothing less than confirm every word in Judge Jones’s decision. He brought ID back to its creationist roots. He demonstrated that it is always and primarily a moral and religious concept.