Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (37 page)

They really have done it well. The hilltop in Hebron contains not only the museum itself, but a petting zoo, a picnic area, and a nature walk around the perimeter of a small lagoon alive with perch and echoing with the low sound of croaking bullfrogs. Like any other museum, the kids are entertained for a while by all the bells and whistles, but by the time everyone gets to the picnic area, everyone’s pretty hot and sweaty and praying, not for guidance, but for Coca-Cola.

Inside, of course, the museum is cool and shady, dark in many places and in many different ways. It shrewdly mimics
other museums with its exhibits and interactive diversions for the younger crowd. The walls are filled with small signs explaining what the visitor is looking at. Of the respectable collection of fossils, none, the visitor is told, can be older than four thousand years. The museum has animatronic people and animatronic dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are almost everywhere you look; walk in the front door, and the neck of a huge herbivore looms over you, chewing away on plastic grass. In fact, dinosaurs are a lot more visibly present in the place than anything else. There’s more Jurassic than Jesus here.

The Creation Museum is also a richly appointed monument to complete barking idiocy, from start almost all the way to the finish.

Anyone who’d visited while it was under construction came away thinking to themselves, “Well, a lot of what they say is basically to flush the rubes to raise money.” But, no, they actually believe it. The planetarium show is fairly conventional, although the narrator occasionally reminds people who might be overly awed by Alpha Centauri that “all these worlds are marred by the Curse,” which is to say that Adam’s sin dropped the hammer on some Venusians who never did anything to anyone.

The museum is organized as a scientific walk through Genesis. Poor Adam likely is still dickless, but in his two appearances he’s lounging in the Garden with shrubbery in front of his naughty bits, and standing hip-deep in a pond with water lilies around his waist, so a firsthand examination is impractical. Eve still has the long hair, arranged conveniently so as not to scandalize the faithful.

“Hey, come on down here,” yells a young boy who has gotten ahead of the story. “Eve’s pregnant!”

Walking through the exhibits is an airless, joyless exercise. Among other things, you learn that there were no poisonous
creatures, nor any carnivores of any kind, until Adam and Eve committed their sin. Then, it seems, velociraptors developed a taste for hadrosaur tartare, and we were off. Things get a little dicey when an exhibit tries to explain why it was all right for Cain to have married his sister. (The answers seem to be, in order: (1) there weren’t many women around; (2) everybody was doing it; and (3) who are you to be asking these questions, you infidel bastard?) Out of that room, past a grumpy robot Methuselah, and you come to a huge exhibit depicting the construction of the Ark.

Noah and his sons are milling about, moving their arms and heads like mechanical Santas and talking about the upcoming disaster. Now, it would be unkind to point out that there probably weren’t many Jewish people involved in the construction of the Creation Museum. So let’s just say that the people who built it can possibly be excused for believing that every Jew since Abraham has sounded like Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof.
Noah himself seems to favor Topol from the movie, rather than Zero Mostel’s broader performance in the original stage musical.

The flood is central to the museum’s “science.” The exhibit contends, quite seriously, that Noah took two of everything, including two of every species of dinosaur, and that he was able to load up the latter because he took baby dinosaurs rather than the full-grown kind. The flood is vital not only to the museum’s paleontology, but to its geology and topography as well. As the tour goes drearily on, you wander half-awake through the Hell in a Handbasket sections depicting the modern world. (Poor Darwin comes in for a real hiding here.) But what’s startling you is their theory that, if dinosaurs got on the Ark, then they must have gotten off it as well. Which means that they survived into human memory.

That compelling notion—catnip for kids, no matter what
age they are—illuminates the museum’s collection of fossils. As wretchedly Stalinist as the explanatory cards are—one refers to “the false idea” that birds are descended from dinosaurs, reflexively couching scientific disagreement in the clumsy language of doctrinal dispute—the fossils are quite good, and the room is bright and alive with the sounds of children released from those parts of the museum that warn them that evolution is the gateway to sin, death, graffiti, and eternal damnation. The place almost seems like fun.

At the end, over by the snack bar and just short of the gift shop, there is the Dragon’s Theater, where a film explains that, not only did dinosaurs survive the flood, they may well have lasted long enough to account for the multiplicity of dragon legends that exist in all the cultures of the world. Absent its obvious religious filigree, this notion is a blessed piece of pure American crankhood amid the religious eccentricity of the museum. The impulse behind it is the same that compels secular cryptozoologists to go haring off to the Congo to look for Mokele-mbembe, or all those film crews haunting the Himalayas trying to capture the Yeti for the History Channel. People seeing dinosaurs in dragons are no different from people going off their heads looking for the Templar gold.

This little film places into stark relief what is truly depressing about the place—its conventionality, its unseemly lust for credibility in the wider world. In Dealey Plaza, for example, there are dozens of independent crackpots who will gladly take a couple of bucks to explain to you who shot John Kennedy, and from where, and who was behind them. They work their territories by themselves and for themselves, and none of them is demanding that the country’s historians take their theories seriously. (The Sixth Floor Museum inside the Texas School Book Depository is resolutely agnostic on the big questions.) Counternarratives
are designed to subvert conventional ideas, but there is nothing at all subversive about the Creation Museum. The ideas in it are not interesting. They’re just wrong. It’s a place without imagination, a place where we break our dragons like plow horses and ride them.

The dinosaur with the saddle (still English) is tucked into the end of the tour now; but you can almost miss it as you come around the corner. The kids spot it, though. They climb up and smile and wave for the camera. Something is there that’s trying to break out, but it never really does, God knows.

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.