Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (5 page)

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.

In her book,
The Age of American Unreason
, Susan Jacoby mercilessly lampoons the very American notion that, because there are two sides to every question, both deserve respect and both must, in some way, be true. The Gut tells us that this is only fair, and we are a fair people, after all. All one has to do is muster an argument with enough vigor, package it well, and get enough people to buy both the idea and the product
through which it is expressed. The more people buy, the more correct you are. The barriers that once forced American cranks to adapt or withdraw—or even merely to defend—their ideas all have fallen. It is considered impolite to raise them again, almost un-American, since we are all entitled to our opinion.

“The much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates,” Jacoby writes, “are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling block to deeper, instinctive ‘ways of knowing.’”

Two of America’s best-selling authors present a good case study in what Jacoby is talking about. In 2008, a conservative writer named Jonah Goldberg shook up the best-seller list with the publication of his
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Apparently written with a paint roller, Goldberg’s book is a lugubrious slog through a history without reliable maps, a pre-Columbian wilderness of the mind where, occasionally, events have to have their hearts ripped out of all context and waved on high to the pagan god of the unblinking sun.

The book is little more than a richly footnoted loogie hawked by Goldberg at every liberal who ever loosely called him a fascist. In that capacity, if not as history, it is completely successful. There are people who too blithely toss around the concept of fascism. Some of his gibes at liberalism are funny. If he had stuck with them, Goldberg would have stood as tall and as proud as any American crank before him. He even would have made just as much money.

Alas, his vengeful turgidity insisted on the conventional historical validity of its central premise—namely, that fascism is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the political left. Before Goldberg happened upon it, this provocative theory had eluded almost every serious student of fascism, including Mussolini. At
one point, though, Goldberg seems confused about whom he’s arguing with, and he winds up quarreling with the voices in his head:

This is an altogether remarkable bowl of word salad, containing morsels of almost every tasty treat from the All U Can Eat buffet at the Hofstadter Cafe. Especially piquant is that passage about “priestly experts” and about how liberals—or liberal fascists—use science to discredit traditional religion, as though, somewhere in a laboratory, physicists are studying the faintest echoes of the big bang and thinking, at first, not of the Nobel Prize and the nifty trip to Stockholm, but, rather, “Bite me, Jehovah!”

The general does not improve at all when it moves into the specific. Goldberg asserts that Woodrow Wilson—admittedly,
a hopelessly overrated president—was nothing less than “the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.”

Glorioski.

It seems that Wilson was a Progressive, and Goldberg sees in the Progressive movement the seedbed of American fascism which, he argues, differs from European fascism, especially on those occasions when he needs it to differ because he has backed up his argument over his own feet. Anyway, Wilson brought the country into World War I. Therefore, Progressives love war.

Of course, Wilson’s evil scheme was briefly derailed by a filibuster in the Senate in 1917. The filibuster was led by men who’d come from the same Progressive politics that had produced Wilson, most notably Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. It was so effective that Wilson memorably fumed against the tactics of “a small group of willful men” and fought for (and won) a change in the Senate rules that provided for the cloture system we have today. Every person involved in this episode—which involved no less important an issue than whether the United States would slide toward a war—was a Progressive. Caught in his astonishing assertion about Wilson, Goldberg deals with the filibuster by not dealing with it at all. This is no longer the admirable cri de coeur of a valuable American crank. It’s just a long-winded explication of an idea that’s wrong.

What Goldberg is to political history, Mitch Albom is to eschatology. Albom’s first breakthrough was
Tuesdays with Morrie
, an altogether unobjectionable stop-and-smell-the-roses memoir concerning his weekly conversations with a dying college professor. From these talks, the author learns valuable lessons about dealing with his fellow human beings.

Not content with passing along life lessons from real people, Albom branched out into the afterlife with
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
, a brief meditation on the great beyond that is what Dante would have written had he grown up next door to
the Cleavers. It is the story of Eddie, who dies unexpectedly in an accident on the job at an amusement park. Eddie finds himself in heaven, which looks very much like the amusement park he has left behind. He first encounters the Blue Man, who explains to him what heaven is all about. The Blue Man, it turns out, is a guy who died of a heart attack after the youthful Eddie ran out in front of his car chasing a ball. In his life, Eddie was not aware that this had happened. The Blue Man explains that, even though he’s in heaven, Eddie’s not getting off that easily. He is handed the kind of emotional ab-crunching that the three spirits gave Ebenezer Scrooge one Christmas Eve.

This makes Rick Warren read like St. John of the Cross. Compare it, for example, to the description of the New Jerusalem wrought by the half-crazed author of Revelation, who never sat on Oprah’s couch and never got a movie deal—and who, it should be noted, has had his work pillaged without proper credit in recent times by movie directors and by best-selling Christian authors who turn Jesus into one of the X-Men:

Now, that’s a heaven worth dying for.

By contrast, Albom’s heaven sounds more than anything like the old Catholic notion of Purgatory. And it’s made up entirely of other people—which, as you may recall, was Sartre’s precise description of hell. Albom’s writing doesn’t have any more to do with actual theology than Goldberg’s does with actual history.

The one thing they have in common is that they both were genuine phenomena. They sold wildly well. This immediately worked to immunize both authors from the carping of those who saw no logical connection between organic food and the Nuremberg rallies, or who resisted a vision of Paradise in which you spent eternity being as bored with your relatives as you were in life. It was the way his book sold that liberated Goldberg to dismiss as “trade-guild historians” even those critics who had dedicated their lives to the study of the very history he tossed blithely into his Mixmaster. For his part, Albom has developed a lucrative second career as an “inspirational” speaker, charming audiences of suburbanites with a vision of heaven not overly different in its banality from the one presented at the Creation Museum, where that eunuch Adam lounges around the Garden of Eden.

Goldberg and Albom are both cranks. There is much to admire in a culture that can produce—and, indeed, reward—
their work. There was a time in which they would have had to build their own personal soapboxes; their success would have depended on how their work bent itself to the general marketplace of ideas, and the marketplace to their work. Instead, their sales have brought their ideas into the mainstream whole and undigested. These works are products, purely and completely. Goldberg’s target audience is made up of those conservatives who see themselves beset on all sides by powerful liberal elites. Albom’s comprises an anxious nation hungering for a heaven with roller coasters. This quest for conventional credibility devalues an American crank, and the more loudly the crank insists on it, the less valuable he is to the rest of us.

Which leads us, inevitably, to the Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

Television sells. It sells notions as well as potions. It validates people and their ideas as surely as it does baldness cures and male-enhancement nostrums. Television is the primary vehicle through which America first misplaced its cranks, to the everlasting detriment of both America and the cranks. Commercial idiocy, for example, once required the deft mixing of noxious ingredients and the purchase of a stout wagon. It also required a keen eye, on the lookout for large groups of dissatisfied consumers carrying pine rails and hempen ropes. Political idiocy required tireless work at the grass roots, endless nights haranguing exhausted, half-broke, fully drunk farmers about how you and they were being played by easy money, eastern bankers, and the Bilderberg group. When your theory finally swept the nation—invariably, it would be described as doing so “like a prairie fire”—nobody gave a thought to how many hours you spent honing your pitch out in the dark places where the cold winds do blow.

And religious idiocy—where, often, commercial idiocy and
political idiocy came together to be purified, sanctified, and altogether immunized against the ridicule they all so richly deserved—required at least a loud voice and a busy street corner. The Mormons picked up and moved west. The Millerites gathered on a hill—more than once—and waited vainly for the world to end. There was a certain work ethic involved that, even leaving God out of the whole business, sanctified religious idiocy through the sheer physical effort people were willing to put in on its behalf. You try to carve a thriving state out of the bleak Utah desert.

Once upon a time, then, peddling your idiocy for profit was an up-by-the-bootstraps activity, embarked upon only by those brave souls strong enough to withstand the possibility that, sooner or later, in a country that valued knowledge and progress and innovation as much as this one did, someone was going to discover a virus or invent a steamboat, thereby making a crank’s entire public career vanish.

Television changed every part of this dynamic. Idiocy can come to the nation wholly and at once and, because idiocy is almost always good television, it can remain a viable product long after the available evidence and common sense has revealed it to be what it is. Television is the sturdiest medicine wagon, the biggest grange hall, the busiest street corner. And it is always open for business. Get your ideas on television—or, even better, onto its precocious great-grandchild, the Internet, where television’s automatic validation of an idea can be instant and vast—and it will circulate forever, invulnerable and undying. The ideas will exist in the air. They will be “out there,” and therefore they will be real, no matter what reality itself may be. Reality will bend to them, no matter how crazy they are.

The sheer inertial force created by the effort people are willing to put behind the promulgation of what they believe to be
true leads inevitably to the Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

On September 11, 2001, Ed Root of Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, was returning to the United States with his wife after a trip to Europe. Midway over the Atlantic, it struck Root as odd that they hadn’t yet been given their customs declaration cards. He asked the flight attendant about it, and she told him not to worry, that they’d been given the wrong cards for that flight. They were written in German, the flight attendant said. Root found this even more curious. Then Root felt the plane turn around. They were going back to Gatwick airport in London. There was a “security concern” about U.S. airspace, Root was told.

“A little bit further on,” Root recalls, “we were told that there were attacks in New York and in Washington, but nothing about Shanksville. So there was a brief period of time when I thought it was some kind of nuclear attack, and I thought everything I knew was gone.” Root had a son who worked in Manhattan and who, from his office window, had seen the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Root and his wife didn’t get home for almost a week.