Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (38 page)

T
his book
started as a magazine article—in the November 2005 edition of
Esquire
—and the article started as a three-line pitch that read, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” So the first toast goes rightfully to David Granger and to Mark Warren, who saw everything there was to see in those three words, and who saw the length and breadth of the story even before I did. There is no possible way to explain how much their faith in this idea meant to me, so I won’t really try except to wish upon every writer in the world the chance to work with people like them.

The best way to thank all of the people who found themselves dragooned into this project is chronologically through the text, so the first ones are Ken Ham and the staff at the Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky. Then comes Ralph Ketchum, who sat on his porch with me as a morning thunderstorm broke over Lake George and talked about James Madison, the great subject of his life. The conversation was too short in that it ended at all.

Ed Root shared his experience with the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, and Kit Hodges explained why scientists don’t explain themselves very well. My local Masons—and perhaps, shhh!, Templars—were gracious hosts, most notably Larry Be
thune. Sean Wilentz was generous enough to spend an hour on the phone talking about anti-Masons. Thanks also to Jack Horrigan, my local UFO host.

Michael Harrison and the staff of the New Media Conference in New York gave me the run of the place, and I thank Steve Gill, Tom Peace, and Patrick Blankenship at WLAC in Nashville for doing the same. Thanks also to radio guys Cenk Uygur, John Parikhal, and Holland Cooke, as well as Sgt. Todd Bowers. Andrew Cline took time to explain in detail his laws of modern punditry. Also thanks to Keith Olbermann for chatting over breakfast in the days before he became an authentic TV star, thereby confounding one of the central tenets of this book—and, as a wise man once said, that’s if you’re scoring at home, or even if you’re not.

Judge John Jones gave me the better part of a day, and was not in any way banal, but especially not breathtakingly so. Thanks also to Liz O’Donnell in Judge Jones’s office. And thanks to Pastor Ray Mummert for his patience and his honesty.

It’s not possible to measure the admiration I feel for the people at the Woodside Hospice. Their graciousness in talking about the worst few weeks of their lives was nothing short of a gift. This starts, of course, with Annie Santa-Maria, a very formidable and brave soul, but includes no less Mike Bell and Louise Cleary. Thanks also to Captain Mike Haworth and the Pinellas Park Police Department, and to Marcia Stone and the staff of the Cross Bayou Elementary School, as well as to Elizabeth Kirkman, who’s still a Point of Light.

Thanks to everyone in Shishmaref, especially the folks at the Fire and Rescue-cum-journalists’ hostel, but also to John Stenik, Luci Eningowuk, Tom Lee, Patti Miller, and all the Weyiounnas—Tony, John, and Emily. Special thanks to Emily for noticing that I’d won at bingo, or else there might have been
one more ironic twist to Idiot America. Thanks also to James Speth and Elizabeth Blackburn for their insights into politicized science.

There are a number of people who were willing to talk about their roles in what happened as the United States went to war in Iraq. All of them were painfully honest about it. Thanks, then, to Richard Clarke, Paul Pillar, Carl Ford, David Phillips, Anthony Zinni, and Eric Rosenbach. Louise Richardson—and her book,
What Terrorists Want
—was essential in understanding the roads not taken. Steve Kleinman’s clear-eyed assessment of torture was just as essential in understanding the roads that were. And finally, my profound gratitude to Andrew Bacevich, who found time to talk during what must have been a period of nearly insupportable sorrow. People like him need a nation worthy of them.

I advise everyone to visit the ongoing restoration of Mr. Madison’s place, Montpelier, down in the hills of Orange County in Virginia. Thanks especially to my tour guide, Elizabeth Loring, and to Will Harris at the Center for the Study of the Constitution. And, finally, thanks to Gary Hart, for a long conversation that informs almost every part of this book.

Three libraries were vital to portions of the book. My gratitude to Greg Garrison and the staff of the John Davis Williams Library at the University of Mississippi, the staff of the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, and to the staff of the Oral Histories Project at Columbia University. Special thanks to Matt Kane (Columbia ‘07) for expert emergency aid.

I bounced the idea of this book off a number of people and I am grateful for the way they bounced it back. Thanks, then, to Bob Bateman and also to the two Doc Erics—Alterman and Rauchway—for their help and support.

As always, I had a wonderful pit crew for this trip around
the track. Mulberry Studios in Cambridge again provided the transcriptions, and I thank again the Benincasa family of Watertown, Massachusetts, for their submarine sandwiches and for the use of the hall. David Black is my agent and my friend and, most of all, a conjurer of the first rank. Almost on the fly, he made a book out of a lot of amorphous notions. Everyone else at the giddily pinwheeling empire that is the David Black Literary Agency knows that I love them madly.

For about seven months, I was absolutely unable to explain what I wanted this book to be about. This did not faze Bill Thomas at Doubleday, who knew what it was supposed to be about and patiently waited for me to figure the damn thing out. My debt to his patience and deft way with the editing blade is huge and ongoing. (He got promoted while working on this project. I have not yet asked for a kickback.) Thanks also to Melissa Danaczko for her forbearance with my utter ineptitude at the task of sending electronic mail, and for her odd idea of what Pierce Brosnan should look like. Thanks also to the folks at my day job at the
Boston Globe Magazine
, especially editor Doug Most, for his understanding of why I one morning happened to be calling from arctic Alaska.

There is no explaining my family, and no measuring the debt I owe to them, especially to my wife, Margaret Doris, who is the strongest and bravest person I know, and who lived this project through a year in which she needed all of her strength and courage. Abraham, Brendan, and Molly know what I’m talking about, because there is so much of her in them. I am so damned blessed.

Charles P. Pierce
Autumn
2008

T
he author
is grateful to the authors and journalists whose work is cited directly herein. Some of these works also served as resources for this book’s spirit as well as its text. The ur-text was probably Richard Hofstadter’s
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
, which produced several invaluable offspring. These include:
The Assault on Reason
by Al Gore,
The Age of American Unreason
by Susan Jacoby, and
The Closing of the Western Mind
by Charles Freeman. The passages about James Madison and his work would not have been possible without Ralph Ketchum’s magisterial biography of the man, the Library of America’s collection of Madison’s writings, and Madison’s
Advice to My Country
, which was edited by David Mattern. I was able to make Ignatius Donnelly Madison’s curious doppelganger partly through a biographical piece in
Minnesota
magazine written by my friend and NPR quizmaster, Peter Sagal.

The chapter on WLAC in Nashville first gestated while I was reading the work of Peter Guralnick, especially
Sweet Soul Music
and
Feel Like Going Home.
The account of Michael Savage’s brief career as a host of a television program on MSNBC is drawn largely from James Wolcott’s hilarious
Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants.
The author also acknowledges a debt in his treatment of talk radio to the proprietors of Media
Matters for America, and to Eric Alterman’s
What Liberal Media?
and
Sound and Fury.
The discussion of the treatment of presidential candidate Al Gore would not have been possible without the work of the redoubtable Bob Somerby at
www.dailyhowler.com
.

In addition to Gordy Slack’s
The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything
, my account of the Dover intelligent design case, and of the intelligent design controversy in general, also depended on
Before Darwin
by Keith Thomson;
The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design
by Ronald Numbers;
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons
by Peter J. Bowler; Margaret Talbot’s contemporaneous reportage in
The New Yorker;
and P. J. Myers’s work at his blog,
www.science blogs.com/pharyngula
.

The account of the death of Terri Schiavo was aided immeasurably by
The Case of Terri Schiavo
, a collection of essays edited by Arthur Caplan, James McCartney, and Dominic Sisti. The story of Elizabeth Blackburn’s experiences on the President’s Council on Bioethics can be found most completely in
Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres
by Catherine Brady. Also immensely helpful were Michelle Goldberg’s
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
and Esther Kaplan’s
With God on Their Side.

The brief account of the history of whaling in and around the Chukchi Sea is drawn from the work of NASA’s Jeremy Project (
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/arctic/explore/ship_history.html
) and the online resources of the New Bedford Whaling Museum (
http://www.whalingmuseum.org/library/amwhale/am_arctic.html
). A. F. Jamieson’s account of the
Baychimo
comes from
www.theoutlaws.com/unexplained8.htm
. The author also acknowledges a debt to the previous reporting on Shishmaref done by Margot Roosevelt of
Time
magazine.

A number of accounts have been published concerning how the Iraq war came about. The author is especially indebted to
Hubris
by David Corn and Michael Isikoff,
Fiasco
by Thomas Ricks,
Losing Iraq
by David Phillips,
The Limits of Power
by Andrew J. Bacevich,
Imperial Life in the Emerald City
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and
The Italian Letter
by Knut Royce and Peter Eisner. The Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Prewar Assessments about Postwar Iraq is available online at
http://intelligence.senate.gov/prewar.pdf
, as is the report concerning the political interference with government scientists produced by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The strange history and influence of
24
were ably set out first by Rebecca Dana of the
Wall Street Journal
, and, most notably, by Jane Mayer of
The New Yorker.

The American Bar Association was kind enough to send along a transcript of the panel it conducted on the subject of high-profile cases that included both Judge Jones and Judge Whittemore. A précis of the event can be found at
http://www.abanet.org/media/youraba/200702/article08.html
.

Ignatius Donnelly’s papers, including his vast diaries, are stored in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society, and those of John Richbourg are part of the Blues Collection at the Williams Library of the University of Mississippi. The Reminiscences of F. C. Sowell, p. 30, are in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. David Sanjak’s study of postwar popular music was published in
American Music
(vol. 15, no. 4, winter 1997, pp. 535-62). William Butler Pierce’s impressions of his fellow delegates was published in
The American Historical Review
(vol. 3, no. 2, January 1898, pp. 310-34). All material from these archives is used by permission.

Portions of this book previously appeared in other forms in
Esquire
and in
The American Prospect Online.

DOUBLEDAY

Copyright © 2009 by Charles P. Pierce

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY
and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pierce, Charles P.
Idiot America : how stupidity became a virtue in the Land of the Free /
by Charles P. Pierce. — 1st ed.
p.   cm.
1. United States—Politics and
government—1989—Philosophy.
2. Stupidity—Political aspects—United States. I. Title.
JK275.P378 2009
973.93—dc22          2008046604

eISBN: 978-0-7679-3208-0

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