Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (9 page)

It was a loop, growing stronger and stronger, until a White House aide (rumored to be Karl Rove himself) opened up to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2004 and gave him the money quote for the whole era. Suskind, and those like him, the aide said, “represent the reality-based community,” which is to say, the kind of people who believe “that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernable reality…. That’s not the way the world works anymore.” If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right, that’s because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and succeeded very well.

Which brings us, for the moment, to the two U.S. senators from the great state of Oklahoma, a pair of the most entertaining primates ever to sit in the world’s greatest deliberative body. Once, they might have been beloved local cranks, amusing their neighbors, scandalizing their friends, and enlivening the meetings of the local town council with their explanations of how everything went to hell once the Illuminati took us off the gold standard. Now, though, they are members of the U.S. Senate. And, even given the proud history of that great deliberative body, which includes everything from the fulminations of Theodore Bilbo to Everett Dirksen’s campaign to make the marigold the national flower, the Oklahoma delegation is a measure of how far we have come.

Usually, states will elect one boring senator and one entertaining one. For example, until 2006, Pennsylvania was represented by Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum. The former was aging and bland, but the latter was the funniest thing about Christianity since the Singing Nun fell off the charts in 1964. Massachusetts has as its senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, which is like being represented simultaneously by Falstaff and Ned Flanders. However, Oklahoma has demonstrated almost unprecedented generosity in sharing with the nation its more eccentric political fauna.

The senior senator is James Inhofe, who once chaired the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works. In that capacity, he once informed the nation that global warming “might be the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state.”

With all due respect to Senator Inhofe, he doesn’t know his great American hoaxes. Global warming isn’t much of one, what with all that pesky scientific data, all those pesky collapsing ice shelves, all those pesky tropical diseases, and all that other troublesome reality. And Inhofe has the same problem with that church-and-state business. The founders wrote an awful lot about it and it’s hard to believe that they all died without writing down the punch line. These are great American hoaxes? What about the spiders in the beehive hairdo, and the prom-night hitchhiker, the thumb in the bucket of fried chicken, the maniac on the other phone in the house? What about the hook on the handle of the car door? Whatever happened to the classics?

This is the country where the Cardiff Giant, the Ponzi scheme, and the Monkees were concocted. Aimee Semple McPherson worked this room, and so did P. T. Barnum. Inhofe’s hoaxes don’t deserve to stand in the proud tradition of American bunkum—not least because they’re, well, true. Unfortunately for
Inhofe, his sad misreading of the history of American suckerdom was surpassed almost immediately by his junior colleague Tom Coburn, a doctor elected in 2006.

Coburn showed promise during the campaign, when he happened to mention that he’d been talking to a campaign worker from the tiny town of Coalgate in central Oklahoma. This person, Coburn said, told him that, down around Coalgate, lesbianism was “so rampant in some of the schools … that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”

Presumably, Coburn meant one girl
at a time.
Otherwise, some young lady had been accorded a rather dubious honor on behalf of her classmates. She’d probably have preferred to be elected prom queen. Speaking of which, one can only imagine what dark conspiracies must have occurred to young Tom Coburn at his prom, when all five girls at his table excused themselves at once.

On the other hand, Coburn likely could teach Inhofe a little something about great American hoaxes. According to the most recent figures, there are only 234 students at Coalgate High School, and fewer than half of them are girls. It’s doubtful that much of anything can be said to be “rampant” in that small a sample, except, perhaps, gossip about something being “rampant.” (Yeah, right. Whatever. As if.) Coburn probably should check to see if there’s a cannibal murderer listening on his upstairs phone.

Encouraged by the infrastructure of movement conservatism, and insulated by its success from any carping that might arise from outside a mainstream political establishment that respects success and power more than it does logic, these two paid no political price for saying things in their official capacity that would have cleared out their end of the bar in any respectable saloon. It wasn’t always this way. Once, aggressively promulgating
crazy ideas could cost you dearly. Global warming a hoax? Rampant lesbianism on the Oklahoma prairie? You might as well believe in Atlantis or something.

IT
is October 13, 2007. Exactly seven hundred years ago, King Philip IV of France undertook to round up all the members of the crusading order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar. The Templars had amassed great wealth; supposedly, they found their seed money while excavating the site of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. They also accrued considerable influence as a protected prefecture of the Vatican, so much so that they scared Pope Clement V as well, and he signed off on the dragnet personally. (This is a dreadfully ungrateful way to treat people who invented, among other things, the traveler’s check.) Philip picked up many of the French Templars, including most of the leadership. He tortured them horribly and killed them even more horribly. But most of the order got away—probably on a fleet of ships that the Templars kept, as the Wizard of Oz says about his balloon, “against the advent of a quick getaway”—and reportedly the majority wound up in Scotland where, legend has it, they came riding out of the mists at Bannockburn to help Robert the Bruce kick the English king back across the border where he belonged. And that was pretty much it for the Templars—unless, of course, they’ve been controlling the world ever since.

Perhaps they’re doing so from deep in a place like this one, on Walnut Street, in Newtonville, Massachusetts, a tall, handsome brick building across the street from a massive old Congregational church that most recently has done service as an
office complex and a Chinese restaurant. The brick building has one round corner, a series of spires on its roof, and carefully wrought carvings on its façade. At street level, it houses a bookstore and a defunct Christian Science reading room. The people who may be controlling the world are upstairs, on the second and third floors. They’re having an open house today.

The Dalhousie Lodge of the Freemasons was founded in Newton in 1
861
, in the upper story of a Methodist church. An earlier anti-Masonic fever in Massachusetts had largely subsided, and Masonry was beginning to revive again. Not only the Dalhousie Lodge, but various Masonic subgroups, such as the Royal Arch Masons and the Gethsemane Commandery of Knights Templar, were flourishing in town, and they all needed a larger place for their meetings. In 1895, they bought the property on Walnut Street, laying the cornerstone of their temple in September 1896 in a ceremony that shared the front pages of all three Newton newspapers with news of local men involved in that fall’s heated presidential campaign. “The craze for political secret societies, advertising, and slangy buttons is particularly widespread now,” one of the papers noted. The combined membership of the three lodges helped put up the building. It was dedicated on December 6, 1907. The Masons expected to rent the ground and second floors out to local businesses and to use the third and fourth floors for their functions.

The upper floors of the old building are awash in dusty autumn sunlight, the corridors sweet with the smell of old wood and varnish. In the past, the building has hosted reunion meetings of the Grand Army of the Republic; one wall displays the autographs of Generals Grant, Sherman, and McClellan. The club room features the mounted heads of big game killed by Masons past. On one wall is an impressive old print of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where the Templars supposedly
found the treasure—or the Holy Grail, or some valuable, if theologically inconvenient, evidence regarding the early Christian church—that supplied the basis for their wealth and power and influence. The connection between the Templars and the Masons seems to have been made first by those Templars who escaped to Scotland, most notably in the construction of the famously symbol-laden Rosslyn Chapel.

In truth, nobody knows exactly what the Templars found in Jerusalem, if they found anything at all. But the order’s secretive nature and the elaborate plot under which they suddenly were hunted down have made them central to almost every conspiracy theory that arose in Europe after their fall from grace. Meanwhile, the Masons prospered in Europe, particularly through their role in building the great cathedrals. They were particularly careful to keep the secrets of their trade away from ambitious competitors. They became adept at codes and various other forms of sub-rosa communication. Many of their vaunted symbols were little more than rudimentary copyright emblems carved into the stone by individual craftsmen—what Philip Ball calls “medieval bar-codes.”

“There seems to be no indication of any ‘esoteric’ content in Freemasonry until the lodges began to admit ‘non-operative’ members in the seventeenth century,” writes Ball in
Universe of Stone
, his history of the building of the great cathedral at Chartres. “Gradually, these non-operatives, who did not work in stone but instead had antiquarian interests in the masonic tradition, came to dominate the organization, transforming it from a trade guild into the ‘speculative’ fraternity that still exists today.” The Masons’ role in American history centers largely on the actions—alleged and real—of these “non-operatives.” George Washington was famously a Mason, but nobody would ever have hired him to build a wall.

The Masons, then, right here on Walnut Street, renting space to the Christian Scientists and having their open house on a fine fall day in an American suburb, have long been assumed by the fertile American conspiratorial mind to be either the heirs to the Templars, or their ideological stepchildren. And, the unfortunate historical resonance of the day aside, it’s a good time to be a Mason. Or a Templar.

The Masons are having an open house because the national organization is in the middle of a thoroughly modern membership drive. There are television commercials featuring an actor portraying Benjamin Franklin, a Mason himself, talking about the benefits of membership. Their official recruitment pitch has been helped immeasurably by the explosion of interest in the Templars prompted by Dan Brown’s speculative literary supernova,
The Da Vinci Code
, which postulates that the Templars discovered the bones of Mary Magdalene, who was actually the wife of Jesus Christ. In Brown’s book, Mary flees Jerusalem after the crucifixion and takes up residence in France, where she gives birth to little Sarah Magdalene-Christ, their daughter.

For the benefit of the eleven human beings who have neither read the book nor seen the movie: The Templars dedicate themselves to guarding Mary Magdalene’s bones, blackmailing the Vatican with what they know until Clement V gets fed up and sets Philip on them. Some of them escape with the bones, set up an absurdly complex system of perpetual guardianship that inevitably breaks down, and protect their secret down through the years against a network of shadowy clerical operatives, including a self-flagellating albino monk. The book ends with the discovery that the gamine French detective who has been helping the hero is actually the long-lost Magdalene-Christ heir. To his credit, Brown wrote an intriguing thriller. It’s hardly his fault that people read it and integrated it into their personal views of
the hidden world. The Masons, for example, play a tangential role in the book, but by all accounts, the novel’s success spurred a great burst of interest in Masonry worldwide.

In fact,
The Da Vinci Code
touched off a Templar frenzy in the popular culture. The hit movie
National Treasure
has Nicolas Cage running down the Templars’ treasure—which, in this case, actually is a treasure, and not a desiccated figure from the Gospels—by following a map that the various Masons who signed the Declaration of Independence secretly drew on the back of the original parchment. This map can only be read by someone wearing complex multifocal glasses invented by that future Masonic television pitchman Ben Franklin. (The movie posits that the treasure was whisked off to the New World on that famous Templar fleet.) The History Channel ran so many programs about the Masons, the Templars, and the Holy Grail that the subject actually threatened the long-standing primacy of World War II on that outlet.