Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (36 page)

For all its whiz-bang action and pinballing plotlines,
24
is as resolutely and deliberately free of actual expertise in interrogative techniques as
F Troop
was of actual conditions on the American frontier. There are actual experts in interrogation, and most of them agree that the “ticking bomb” scenario is largely fantastical and, anyway, even in that situation, torture probably won’t yield the information you need to foil the plot. Significantly, Mayer reported, when a team of experienced Army and FBI interrogators flew to California to meet with the people behind
24
, and to explain their concern that the show was mainstreaming torture in a dangerous way, Surnow blew off the meeting to take a call from Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News Channel.

According to Mayer, an Army general named Patrick Finnegan
told the people behind
24
that the show was complicating his job teaching the laws of war to his students at West Point. “The kids see it,” Finnegan later told Mayer, “and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about
24?’
“

Finnegan’s students are not alone in this. The show’s reach has extended into some extraordinary places. Surnow was the guest of honor at a dinner party thrown at Rush Limbaugh’s house by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The Heritage Foundation, the de facto headquarters of respectable conservative opinion in Washington, threw a laudatory panel discussion on the show that included, among other people, Michael Chertoff, then the secretary of Homeland Security. On that same trip, Surnow and some other people from the show got to have lunch at the White House with Karl Rove and with the wife and daughter of Dick Cheney.

The show was cited in a book by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer whose memos justified much of the actual torture that was being carried out by the United States. The talk show crowd inferred support for torture from the show’s ratings. In 2007, attending a panel on the subject in Canada, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that torture can be justified: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles…. He saved thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that the criminal law is against him, is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.”

And perhaps the apotheosis of the show came when it was revealed by an international lawyer named Philippe Sands that, during high-level administration meetings regarding the treatment of detainees, “People had already seen the first [season]…. Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantanamo. He gave people lots of ideas.”

“I am quite pleased to report,” says Colonel Steve Kleinman,
an Air Force intelligence officer, “that I have never seen that show.”

Kleinman has spent his career in what is called human intelligence, and specifically, in the interrogative techniques best suited for getting actionable information out of people reluctant to give it up. “I was reading Jane Mayer’s piece this morning and she’s got Chertoff, who’s described as a big fan, and all these other people, and I’m thinking, ‘Wait a second. That’s the way we’re conducting ourselves? Our senior people are being informed by Hollywood, by a guy who was a former carpet salesman? They’re just making it up as they go.’

“I guess we are informed by the mass media and this very silly show, where interrogation is a very visible means of revenge. So we have this person and, if we have to shake him up to get information, well, that’s just part of the process, and I say, ‘Wait a second. Interrogation is not punishment. Interrogation is not supposed to be some form of retribution. Interrogation is a very sophisticated and very critical intelligence platform, and it’s a methodology that needs to be employed with some foresight, with care, and with diligence. It’s not to wreak revenge. What your gut tells you to do, what your gut says the other person is thinking, is almost always wrong.’”

IN
February 2008,
Forbes.com
noted that reality programming might have topped out. The genre’s initial shock value had worn off, and attempts by the networks to push the boundaries of the form further were greeted with at best apathy and, at worst, public revulsion, as was the case with CBS’s
Kid Nation
, an extraordinarily bad idea that went even more wrong in the execution. Children left on their own to go feral on camera in
New Mexico turned out to be nothing anyone wanted to see, and there weren’t enough William Golding fans left in America to save the project. At the end, the network reality shows that maintained their large audiences were mainly those most clearly descended not only from
Queen for a Day
, but also from the old
Hollywood Palace
—most notably,
American Idol
and
Dancing with the Stars.
Thus did reality shows bring the variety show back to prime time.

Around the same time, the producers of
24
gave an interview to
The Wall Street Journal
in which they explained that their show was in trouble because torture didn’t seem to be as popular as it had been a few years earlier. News reports about the Bush administration’s predilection for Jack Bauer solutions to real-world problems had soured the audience on Jack Bauer solutions to Jack Bauer’s problems. (The
WSJ
piece tracked the slide in
24
’s ratings as almost perfectly paralleling the decline in George W. Bush’s approval ratings.) Actors declined to appear. Jane Mayer’s piece in
The New Yorker
made the show’s producers sound like braying jackasses and thumbscrew salesmen. “The fear and wish-fulfillment the show represented after 9/11 ended up boomeranging against us,” lamented the show’s head writer. The problem with torture, it seemed, was not that it had proven to be ineffective and immoral and illegal under any conceivable circumstance, but that it couldn’t hold an audience anymore. The producers took the show off the air for some extended retooling.

But torture remained, a shadowy issue on the edges of the presidential campaign, which was just hitting its stride as the reality shows came back and
24
went into the shop. Jane Mayer’s
The Dark Side
, a book about how, slowly but quite willfully, the United States had established forms of torture as a national policy, sold well, but the issue was strangely absent from the political
news of the moment; most of
that
concerned the election of the next president, for whom torture was going to be a fait accompli whether he wanted it to be or not.

Writing in
Salon.com
, Rosa Brooks noticed that torture was becoming the new abortion, a litmus test among conservative Republicans to measure a candidate’s fealty to a unilateral and aggressive approach to a war on terror, and among Democrats a measure of a candidate’s commitment to constitutional guarantees. In her acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin got a big hand when she said, “Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and [Barack Obama’s] worried that someone hasn’t read them their rights.” So, of course, torture is an issue like all the other issues, a way of measuring one’s commitment to the team in which people vicariously invest themselves.

Torture turned out to be no more or less important, as the campaign went on, than John Edwards’s hair, Hillary Clinton’s laugh, or John McCain’s age, and far less important than the crazy things that emanated from the pulpit of Barack Obama’s church. In April 2008, the blogger Glenn Greenwald put “torture” through a Nexis search along with the name of John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who drafted the memos that gave the administration cover for what it was doing. Greenwald came up with 102 entries over one two-week period as the story of Yoo’s opinions was first breaking. In that same period of time, Greenwald’s search rang up more than three thousand entries containing both Obama’s name and that of his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright. There were more than a thousand stories about Obama’s public ineptitude as a bowler.

“Torture” was now just another political product, a brand name, a trademark issue among dozens of others involved in an extended national transaction that was not going the way it was
supposed to go but, rather, the way it always did—according to the Great Premises of Idiot America, where anything can be true if enough people believe in it.

THE
problem is not that America has dumbed itself down, as many people believe. (Reality shows are often cited as Exhibit A for the prosecution here.) It’s that America’s gotten all of itself out of order, selling off what ought never to be rendered a product, exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself. Real people get ground up in these transactions. Sell religious fervor as science, and Annie Santa-Maria’s checking the rearview mirror as she drives home in the dark. Sell corporate spin as science, and the people of Shishmaref watch their homes get eaten by the sea. Sell propaganda as fact, and hundreds of thousands of people die. For real. None of these people lived in Idiot America. They were shanghaied there.

In 2007, a man named Scott Weise was in a bar in Decatur, Illinois, watching his beloved Chicago Bears play the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. Perhaps well lubricated, perhaps not, Weise made a bet with the assembled fans in the bar that, if the Bears lost, he would change his name to Peyton Manning, the name of Indianapolis’s star quarterback. Weise even signed a pledge to that effect, which his fellow patrons duly witnessed.

The Bears were pretty awful that day, and Indianapolis won from here to there. Manning was voted the game’s Most Outstanding Player. Weise stood by his pledge. However, a judge subsequently ruled that Weise couldn’t legally change his name to “Peyton Manning” because to do so would be to violate the quarterback’s privacy.

“I had told the judge that I was not doing this because I
wanted to change my name, but I was doing it because I was honoring a bet,” Weise told the local newspaper. “I think she understood that.”

There are people who will believe that a man named Scott Weise represents Idiot America. But they would be wrong. He was merely a crank, making a crank’s wager and accepting the consequence when he lost. And when the court ruled against him, he accepted the ruling because he didn’t really want to be “Peyton Manning” anyway. It was an honorable transaction all the way around. There was nothing out of order about it. By comparison, though, consider Antonin Scalia, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, citing a fictional terror fighter as a justification for reversing literal centuries of American policy and jurisprudence, and citing that fictional character, furthermore, on a panel that had gathered to discuss international law. Consider the highest level of the U.S. government, gathering in the White House in order to set American law back to a point ten minutes before Magna Carta was signed, and tossing around ideas they’d heard on the same television show. And people are worried that this country pays too much attention to
American Idol?
That’s just a reality show, which is more show than reality, because somebody has to write it. That meeting in the White House is what happens when you’ve already made reality a show.

Idiot America is always a matter of context, because it is within the wrong context that things get out of order. Idiot America is a creation of the mind in which things are bought and sold under the wrong names and, because some of those things sell well, every transaction is treated as though it had a basis in reality. Put things back in order and it becomes plain. Scott Weise is an American crank who did something any American crank would be proud of. Antonin Scalia, and the people at that White House meeting, are representatives of Idiot America. The sad irony is that they think everyone else lives there.

T
he flat
heat of early summer floats, shimmering, just above the asphalt of the parking lots. The Creation Museum has been open for just over a year now, and the parking lots are respectably crowded for a Monday in June. The cars are from Mississippi, and from Wisconsin, and from Minnesota. There’s a minivan from West Virginia with a vanity license plate: “JESUSROX.”