Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (6 page)

At about the same time that Ed Root’s plane was turning back to Great Britain, United Airlines Flight 93, apparently headed for the U.S. Capitol, crashed in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Passengers aboard the plane had apparently engaged the hijackers in a desperate struggle for control of the aircraft. One of the people killed in the crash was a flight attendant named Lorraine Bay. She was Ed Root’s cousin. In her memory, Root got involved with the effort to build a memorial to the passengers and crew of Flight 93 in the field where the plane went down.

In conjunction with the National Park Service, several groups, including a task force made up of members of the families of the victims of Flight 93, winnowed through more than a thousand responses from architects bidding to build the memorial. They settled on five finalists, whose designs were on display for several months. Ed Root, who by then had become the president of the Board of Families of Flight 93, was a member of the jury that settled on a proposal by Paul Murdoch, a Los Angeles-based architect whose previous work had included the Bruggemeyer Library in Monterey Park, California, and Hawaii’s Malama Learning Center.

Root was happy with Murdoch’s plan, a gently curved structure that would comprise the names of the forty passengers and crew of Flight 93 engraved in white marble, a line of trees leading into the memorial itself, and the Tower of Voices, a structure containing forty wind chimes. However, Root saw that one local man had noted on a comment card that the memorial seemed to be in the shape of a crescent, and that the man thought this constituted a surreptitious attempt by the architect to memorialize not only the passengers and crew but the hijackers as well.

Root thought little of it. The events of September 11 had become fertile ground for conspiracy theories. There were people who believed that the towers had been rigged to fall, that a missile had hit the Pentagon, that Flight 93 itself had been shot down by a mysterious white jet. This was just another wacky idea, Root thought. Either by accident or because it was purposely brought to his ears, a blogger named Alec Rawls heard about it and ran with it.

Rawls, a son of the eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, was so sure that the memorial’s design was a subliminal tribute to radical Islam that he actually wrote a book,
Crescent of Betrayal
,
that someone actually published. Rawls argued that the plot was clearly indicated by the memorial’s crescent shape, that it was oriented to face Mecca, and that the Tower of Voices was positioned so that it would function as a sundial that would point Muslims to the east for their daily prayers. Rawls also claimed that the design would include forty-four glass blocks along the plane’s flight path, one for each passenger and crew member as well as one for each of the four terrorists. There were no glass blocks in Murdoch’s design at all.

To believe Rawls, one has to believe that the National Park Service, working in concert with an architect and the families of the forty murdered people, developed a memorial that honors the murderers. In an earlier time, this idea might have been mocked into silence long before it got within a mile of a publishing house. But Rawls made noise, and the noise drew the media, and the noise was enough.

Rawls’s theories were picked up throughout the blogosphere—the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin was one of his earliest champions—and spread widely enough that a congressman from Colorado, Tom Tancredo, wrote a letter to the NPS championing them. Rawls also managed to convince at least one member of the jury in Pennsylvania that his claims were worthy of examination. “Alec Rawls should be listened to,” Thomas Burnett, Sr., told the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
in 2007. “If it turns out he’s all wet, OK. It’s hard for me to believe that this was all by accident.” Burnett’s son died on Flight 93, and Burnett requested that his son’s name not appear on the memorial.

The memorial commission spent hours consulting with religious experts who concluded that Rawls’s theory was so much conspiratorial moonshine. It paid for and issued a white paper refuting his claims. Murdoch changed the name of his design
from “Crescent of Embrace” to “Arc of Embrace.” He even adapted the design so that it looked less like a crescent and more like a semicircle. Rawls’s ideas kept circulating. Resentment and ill-feeling suffused the project and ran through the region like a low-grade fever. Rawls kept showing up at the meetings in Pennsylvania. Ed Root refused to shake his hand.

Debate over the building of memorials is not uncommon. Indeed, Kenneth Foote, of the University of Colorado, argues that wide-ranging debate is a necessary part of the process, particularly in situations regarding memorials of traumatic events such as the September 11 attacks. “Debate,” Foote writes, “is an essential part of honoring victims and preserving memory…. Debate over what, why, when and where to build is best considered part of the grieving process.” However, Foote further argues, such debate is productive only if it leads to a consensus over the eventual memorial. Persistent hecklers, no matter how well amplified, do not contribute to that process at all.

“Initially,” Root explains, wearily, “it didn’t have any legs. The only legs it had originally was in the blogosphere-type thing. Very few of the mainstream media picked up on it, originally…. Over time, there’s been different benchmarks in the process [of building the memorial] and, every time one of these benchmarks happened, Rawls would come out of the woodwork. He’d raise his head, and the blogs and everything would start to come all over again.

“I mean, it’s a free country and he’s got a right to say what he wants to say, and I think there are people out there for whatever reason who are susceptible to conspiracies in this type of thing. And I honestly don’t know that I’m qualified to judge those people as to why they believe what they believe, but I think those people have a tendency to make noise in greater numbers.

“It becomes more than a distraction. The park service, by
definition, they have to respond to citizen complaints, and my belief is that the park service has bent over backwards to accommodate this person—more so than any one person deserves who came up with a theory that’s been debunked by every mainstream person that I can think of.

“On a personal level, that anybody would think that I would be in favor of anything that honors the people that attacked our country and murdered a member of my family, well, it’s pretty much of a reach, I’d say.”

Under the Third Great Premise, respect for the effort required to develop and promulgate nonsense somehow bleeds into a respect that validates the nonsense itself. Religion is the place where this problem becomes the most acute, where the noble tradition of the American crank is most clearly spoiled by respectability and by the validation bestowed by the modern media. Push religion into other spheres—like, say, politics and science—and the process intensifies. “Respect” for religion suddenly covers respect for any secular idea, no matter how crackpot, that can be draped in the Gospels.

Thanks to the First Amendment and the godless Constitution to which it is happily attached, mainstream churches flourished in the United States. The country even made peace with Catholics and Jews, after a while. Meanwhile, a thousand-odd flowers bloomed: American Baptists and Southern Baptists, splitting over slavery, and First Baptists, the grandchildren of the slaves themselves. Anabaptists and Amish. Quakers and Shakers. Splinters of all of them, forming and re-forming. A main characteristic of many of these religions was that they withdrew from the culture at large. They did not seek validation for their ideas. They didn’t care whether they were respected. They preferred to be left alone. The desire to be left alone sent the Mormons to Utah and explains why the Amish still drive
their buggies through the hills of southern Pennsylvania. Some sects, for example the Shakers, took it so seriously that they died out almost entirely. Even American fundamentalism, shaken by the consequences of having won the Scopes trial in 1922, withdrew from secular politics entirely before coming back with a vengeance in the 1970s. Neither the country nor the faith was better for their return.

Susan Jacoby cites a writer named Carson Holloway who, in a 2006 article in the conservative
National Review
, called the British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins a “poor public intellectual” essentially because Dawkins’s scathing critiques of all religions failed to take into account the feelings of their adherents. “It is hard to imagine,” Jacoby writes, “exactly how anyone might function as a public intellectual while taking care to avoid all issues that might trigger a spiritual, emotional, or intellectual crisis among his or her readers.”

Having freed up religion to grow in its own sphere, the founders went back to being inveterate tinkerers and arguers. These were fundamentally curious men. (Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the Louisiana Territory, Thomas Jefferson ordered the pair to categorize as many new plant and animal species as they found. Considering they were also mapping all the terrain from Missouri to Oregon, this must have been a considerable pain in the canoe.) Further, the founders assumed that they had established a polity that guaranteed their posterity would be curious as well. In 1815, appealing to Congress to fund a national university, James Madison called for the development of “a nursery of enlightened preceptors.”

It’s a long way from that speech to the morning of February 18, 2004, when sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a report accusing the Bush administration of manipulating science for political ends. It is an even longer way from Franklin’s kite to George W. Bush, in an interview in 2005,
suggesting that intelligent design be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the nation’s science classrooms. “Both sides ought to be properly taught,” the president said, “so people can understand what the debate is about.”

The “debate,” of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are required for a debate. The very notion of a debate on evolution’s validity is a measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, have slipped, through lassitude and inattention, across the border into Idiot America. Intelligent design is religion disguised as science, and it defends itself as science by relying largely on the “respect” that we must give to all religious doctrine. Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural, and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable, because there the Gut truly holds sway. By the rules governing those realms, any scientific theory is a mere opinion, and everyone’s entitled to those. Scientific fact is as mutable as a polling sample.

The rest of the world looks on in wide-eyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein so wanted to be a part that he moved here, seems to have enveloped itself in a fog behind which it’s tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity’s sake, and over the relative humanness of blastocysts and the victims of Parkinson’s disease.

Kit Hodges is a scientist who studies the geology of the Himalayas, when he is not dodging the local Maoist guerrillas. Suffice it to say that Hodges’s data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old earth of the Creation Museum, whereupon dinosaurs and naked people do gambol together.

“Even in the developing world, where I spend a lot of time
doing my work, if you tell them you’re from MIT and you tell them that you do science, it’s a big deal. If I go to India, and I tell them I’m from MIT, it’s a big deal. If I go to Thailand, it’s a big deal. In Iowa, they could give a rat’s ass. And that’s a weird thing, that we’re moving that way as a nation.

“Scientists are always portrayed as being above the fray, and I guess to a certain extent that’s our fault, because scientists don’t do a good enough job communicating with people who are non-scientists that it’s not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another. The reason, for example, that the creationists have been so effective is that they’ve put a premium on communications skills. It matters to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it’s important to them, and they are hugely effective at it.”

Bush was not talking about science—not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct—ostensibly without God, but with a Designer that looks enough like him to be his smarter brother—and an attempt to gussy creationism up in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified—or, more important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain cachet ought to be irrelevant. A higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there’s no great push to “teach the debate” about what happened in Dallas in the nation’s history classes. Bush wasn’t talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and how many votes there were in breaking Ganesh’s theological monopoly over the elephant paddock.