Esquire
October 31, 2005
GREETINGS FROM IDIOT AMERICA
Creationism. Intelligent Design. Faith-based this. Trust-your-gut that.
There's never been a better time to espouse, profit from, and believe in
utter, unadulterated crap. And the crap is rising so high, it's getting
dangerous.
There is some undeniable art -- you might even say design -- in the way
southern Ohio rolls itself into northern Kentucky. The hills build gently
under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and
thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of
Hebron -- a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near
Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the
Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which
is the case with a great deal of Scripture.
At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there is an
unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling
people are trickling in through the gate this fine morning, one minivan at a
time. They park in whatever shade they can find, which is not much. It's hot
as hell this morning.
They are almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars come
from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and as far away as New
Brunswick, Canada. There are elderly couples in shorts, suburban families
piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle-Resistant and
Stain-Released. There is a clutch of Mennonite women in traditional dress --
small bonnets and long skirts. All of them wander off, chattering and waving
and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that
seems from the outside to be the most finished part of the complex.
Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They have
come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her feet,
because they have been home-schooling their children and they have given
them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole group then bustles
into the lobby of the building, where they are greeted by the long neck of a
huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run past that and around a corner,
where stands another, smaller dinosaur.
Which is wearing a saddle.
It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a
dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working
dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs
along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy western saddle.
This is very much a show dinosaur.
The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation
Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an
Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an
organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The
people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become
"charter members" of the museum.
"Dinosaurs," Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors, "always
get the kids interested."
AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation
of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation
and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted with man (hence the
saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly
had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along
with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to say nothing of green
ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels and all the rest.
(Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a
three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from sinking under the weight of
dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were
young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)
"We," Ham exclaims to the assembled, "are taking the dinosaurs back from the
evolutionists!" And everybody cheers.
Ham then goes on to celebrate the great victory won in Oklahoma, where, in
the first week of June, Tulsa park officials announced a decision (later
reversed) to put up a display at the city zoo based on Genesis so as to
eliminate the "discrimination" long inflicted upon sensitive Christians by a
statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that decorated the elephant exhibit.
This is a serious crowd. They gather in the auditorium and they listen
intently, and they take copious notes as Ham draws a straight line from
Adam's fall to our godless public schools, from Darwin to gay marriage. He
talks about the triumph over Ganesh, and everybody cheers again.
Ultimately, the heart of the museum will be a long walkway down which
patrons will be able to journey through the entire creation story. This,
too, is still in the earliest stages of construction. Today, for example,
one young artist is working on a scale model of the moment when Adam names
all the creatures. Adam is in the delicate process of naming the
saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a woolly mammoth seems
to be on the verge of taking a nap.
Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if unpainted, and
waiting to be installed. This Adam is reclining peacefully; eventually, if
the plans stay true, he will be placed in a pool under a waterfall. As the
figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is completely naked. He also has no
penis.
This would seem to be a departure from Scripture inconsistent with the
biblical literalism of the rest of the museum. If you're willing to stretch
Job's description of a "behemoth" to include baby brachiosaurs on Noah's
Ark, as Ham does in his lectures, then surely, since we are depicting him
before the fall, Adam should be out there waving unashamedly in the
paradisaical breezes. For that matter, what is Eve doing there, across the
room, with her hair falling just so to cover her breasts and midsection, as
though she's doing a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film?
After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their lives, "And
the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed." If Adam
courageously sat there unencumbered while he was naming saber-toothed
tigers, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a
eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what
Scripture says was rightfully his, then why can't Charles Darwin and the
accumulated science of the past 150-odd years take away all the rest of it?
These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked
into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates,
either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and
why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be
educated, if it wasn't so that we would all one day feel confident enough to
look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont
and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that
anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp
objects and his own money.
Dinosaurs with saddles?
Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?
Welcome to your new Eden.
Welcome to Idiot America.
Let's take a tour, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last
year or so.
A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted
through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay
authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And
nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case,
having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn.
James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the
Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent
conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to
the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book
of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and
snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.
The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised
spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of
the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited
videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues
against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying
that "an embryo is a person.... We were all at one time embryos ourselves.
So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at
him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or
whoever invented the baby-back rib.
And, finally, in August, the cover of Time -- for almost a century the
dyspeptic voice of the American establishment -- clears its throat, hems and
haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite
seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"
Fights over evolution -- and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design,
a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is
inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be
considered -- roil up school districts across the country. The president of
the United States announces that he believes ID ought to be taught in the
public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in
Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many controversies, a pastor named
Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real
sense, sums it up:
"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment of the
culture."
And there it is.
Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's not the
place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people
go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot
America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs.
Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the
considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and
complete.
The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so
much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard
Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of
those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today
represents -- for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political
advantage and in the pursuit of power -- the breakdown of a consensus that
the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the
notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who
best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a
historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an
expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where
everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron,
as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an
errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it
"common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly
refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the
roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is
faith-based.
It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap
huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial
flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for
people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not
only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith
but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.
After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence.
Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and
profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its
politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not
a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the
world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.
Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he
wrote, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It
is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect
stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the
diabolical."
The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these
truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise
moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how
fervently they believe it.
How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of
the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They
have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of
modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages
and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."
A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous
as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It
makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running
someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn't matter what
percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and
fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got,
he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish
that the only real news in it is where it appeared.
On the front page.
Of The New York Times.
Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live, in
which Larry asked the following question:
"All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out
turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still
monkeys?"
And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?
This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides,
en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that
because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or
at least not wrong. And the poor biologist's words carry no more weight than
the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ's
Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our
scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his
books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but his Gut's the
same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool.
This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country
ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated
itself to the proposition that not only should its people hold nutty ideas
but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them
right there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which
to peddle complete public lunacy. The right to do so is there in our
founding documents.
After all, the Founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country
out of new ideas--or out of old ones that they excavated from centuries of
religious internment. Historian Charles Freeman points out that in Europe,
"Christian thought...often gave irrationality the status of a universal
'truth' to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the
uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation
of natural laws."
In America, the Founders were trying to get away from all that, to raise a
nation of educated people. In pledging their faith to intellectual
experimentation, however, the Founders set freedom free. They devised the
best country ever in which to be completely around the bend. It's just that
making a respectable living out of it used to be harder work.
They call it the Infinite Corridor, which is the kind of joke you tell when
your day job is to throw science as far ahead as you can and hope that the
rest of us can move fast enough to catch up. It is a series of connecting
hallways that run north through the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The hallways are lined with cramped offices, their doors mottled
thickly with old tape and yellowing handbills. The Infinite Corridor is not
a straight line. It has branches and tributaries. It has backwaters and
eddies. You can get lost there.
One of the offices belongs to Professor Kip Hodges, a young and energetic
North Carolinian who studies how mountain ranges develop and grow. Suffice
it to say that Hodges's data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old
earth of the creationists, whereupon dinosaurs and naked folks doth gambol
together.
Hodges is recently returned from Nepal, where he rescued his research from
encroaching Maoist rebels, who were not interested in the least in how the
Himalayas became the Himalayas. They were interested in land, in guns, in
power, and in other things of the Gut. Moreover, part of Hodges's duties at
MIT has been to mentor incoming freshmen about making careers in science for
themselves.
"Scientists are always portrayed in the literature as being above the fray
intellectually," Hodges says. "I guess to a certain extent that's our fault,
because scientists don't do a good enough job communicating with people who
are nonscientists -- that it's not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and
nonbrainiacs doing another."
Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier
generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics
and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its
way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.
"My earliest memory," Hodges recalls, "is watching John Glenn go up. It was
a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering -- particularly
science, at that time -- people greatly respected you if you said you were
going into those fields. And nowadays, it's like there's no value placed by
society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.
"It's more than a general dumbing down of America -- the lack of
self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It's like you're happy
for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say,
global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I
should be worried about global warming. So it's like this abdication of
intellectual responsibility -- that America now is getting to the point that
more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them."
The country was founded by people who were fundamentally curious; Thomas
Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name only the most obvious examples,
were inveterate tinkerers. (Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the
Louisiana Territory, Jefferson insisted that the pair categorize as many new
plant and animal species as they found. Considering they were also mapping
everything from Missouri to Oregon, this must have been a considerable pain
in the canoe.) Further, they assumed that their posterity would feel much
the same as they did; in 1815, appealing to Congress to fund the building of
a national university, James Madison called for the development of "a
nursery of enlightened preceptors."
It is a long way from that to the moment on February 18, 2004, when
sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a
report accusing the incumbent administration of manipulating science for
political ends. It is a long way from Jefferson's observatory and 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
classes. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," said the president, "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. Nevertheless, the very notion of it is a measure of
how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, has
slipped through lassitude and inattention across the border into Idiot
America -- where fact is merely that which enough people believe, and truth
is measured only by how fervently they believe it.
If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so
by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument,
where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules.
Held to this standard, any scientific theory is rendered mere opinion.
Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how
there's a "debate" over the very existence of global warming, even though
the preponderance of fact among those who actually have studied the
phenomenon renders the "debate" quite silly. The debate is about making
people feel better about driving SUVs. The debate is less about climatology
than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank and voting in tax
incentives for oil companies.
The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin
and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo
program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be
enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying itself in knots
over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative humanity of
blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease.
"Even in the developing world, where I spend lots of time doing my work,"
Hodges says, "if you tell them that you're from MIT and you tell them that
you do science, it's a big deal. If I go to India and tell them I'm from
MIT, it's a big deal. In Thailand, it's a big deal. If I go to Iowa, they
could give a rat's *****. And that's a weird thing, that we're moving in that
direction as a nation."
Hence, Bush was not talking about science -- not in any real sense, anyway.
Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based attempt to
gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be
experimentally verified -- or, most important, falsified. That it enjoys a
certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage of Americans
believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes
in intelligent design, but there is no great effort abroad in the land to
include that conspiracy theory in sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn't
talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting
saddles on the dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh's theological monopoly over the
elephant paddock.
"The reason the creationists have been so effective is that they have put a
premium on communication skills," explains Hodges. "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."
It is the ultimate standard of Idiot America. How does it play to Joe
Six-Pack in the bar? At the end of August 2004, the Zogby people discovered
that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a beer with George
Bush than with John Kerry. Now, how many people with whom you've spent time
drinking beer would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? Not only is
this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it's not even a
question for a nation of serious drunkards.
If even scientific discussion is going to be dragged into politics, then the
discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level.
Again, the Founders thought it should. They considered self-government a
science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to
make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today we have the Kabuki
politics and marionette debates best exemplified by cable television.
Instead, the discussion of everything ends up in the bar.
(It wasn't always this way. Theodore Roosevelt is reckoned to be the
manliest of our manly-man presidents. He also was a lifelong science dweeb,
cataloging songbirds, of all things. Of course, he shot them first, so maybe
that makes all the difference.)
It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run riot
within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It is not that
there is less information on television than there once was. (That there is
less news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much
information that fact is now defined as something that so many people
believe that television notices it, and truth is measured by how fervently
they believe it.
"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the
erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative.
You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things
that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.
"There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news
that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to them, 'This is
what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it is,'" Olbermann
says. "And that's what they get -- two or three million frustrated paranoids
who sit in front of the TV and go, 'Damn right, it's those liberals' fault.'
Or, 'It's those -- what's the word for it? -- college graduates' fault.' "
The reply, of course, is that Fox regularly buries Olbermann and the rest of
the MSNBC lineup in breaking off a segment of a smidgen of a piece of the
television audience. Truth is what moves the needle. Fact is what sells.
Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of
them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into
the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country
loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots
used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their
peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals,
TV shows, and cases pending in federal court.
Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very easy to fall
out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal, and all the
hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter nights was for
nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling with both fists, but
if your books still sell, you can continue to scold the nation about its
sins. You can be Bill O'Reilly, calling up subordinates to proposition them
both luridly and comically--loofahs? falafels?--and if more people tune in
to watch you than tune in to watch some other blowhard, you can keep your
job lecturing America about the dangers of its secular culture. Just don't
be boring. And keep the ratings up. Idiot America wants to be entertained.
Because scientific expertise was dragged into political discussion, and
because political discussion is hopelessly corrupt, the distrust of
scientific expertise is now as general as the distrust of politicians is.
Everyone is an expert, so nobody is. For example, Sean Hannity's knowledge
of, say, stem-cell research is measured precisely by his ratings book. His
views on the subject are more well known than those of the people doing the
actual research.
The credibility of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania on the subject of
the cultural anthropology of the American family ought to be, well, minimal.
He spent the summer promoting a book in which he propounded theories on the
subject that were progressively loopier. "For some parents," he writes, "the
purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a
convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the
home." He goes on later to compare a woman's right to choose an abortion
unfavorably with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, he's welcome in
the mainstream, at least until either he's defeated for reelection or his
book doesn't sell.
"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success
and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann says. We're all
in the bar now, where everybody's an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so
very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No voice is more authoritative
than any others; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is
that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody will remember in the clear
light of the next morning, some noisy ***** picks a fight. And it becomes
clear that the rise of Idiot America has consequences.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American government knew
more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a shadowy terrorist network
called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He had watched it strike -- in New
York and in Africa and in the harbor in Yemen. That morning, in the
Situation Room in the White House, Clarke watched the buildings burn and
fall, and he recognized the organization's signature as well as he'd
recognize his own. Instead, in the ensuing days a lot of people around
him -- people who didn't know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat --
wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew, over
and over again. He left the government.
"In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the
traditional diplomats couldn't do the negotiating because that negotiating
involved science and engineering," Clarke recalls. "Interagency decision
papers were models of analysis, where assumptions were laid out and tested.
"That's the world I grew up in. [The approach] still applied to issues, even
terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how
to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, Wait a
minute. That isn't analysis. It's the important issues where we really need
analysis.
"In the area of terrorism, there is a huge potential for emotional reaction.
The one thing I told my team [on September 11] -- they were mad and they
were crying, the whole range of emotions -- was that we didn't have time for
emotion that day."
Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been
inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle, humming
engine of its success -- against John Kerry, surely, but most vividly
against poor, cerebral Al Gore -- was a celebration of instinct over
intellect, a triumph of the Gut. No campaigns in history employed the saloon
question with such devastating success or saw so clearly the path through
the deliberate inexpertise of the national debate. No politician in recent
times has played to the Gut so deftly.
So it ought not shock anyone when the government suddenly found itself at
odds with empirical science. It ought not shock anyone in the manner in
which it would go to war. Remember the beginning, when it was purely the
Gut -- a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not
sufficient response. In Iraq, there would be towering stacks of chemical
bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic
poisons. There would be candy and flowers greeting our troops. The war would
take six months, a year, tops. Mission Accomplished. Major combat operations
are over.
"Part of the problem was that people didn't want the analytic process
because they'd be shown up," Richard Clarke says. "Their assumptions would
be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was
failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain
security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it
all out.
"They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts who
said it was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go in
anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the
postconflict."
One of those experts was David Phillips, a senior advisor on what was called
the Future of Iraq program for the State Department. Phillips was ignored.
His program was ignored. Earlier, Phillips had helped reconstruct the
Balkans after the region spent a decade tearing itself apart with genocidal
lunacy. Phillips knew what he knew. He just didn't believe what they
believed.
"You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven,
policy," he says today. "You start with the presumption that you already
know the conclusion prior to asking the question. When information surfaces
that contradicts your firmly entrenched views, you dismantle the institution
that brought you the information."
There was going to be candy and flowers, remember? The war was going to pay
for itself. Believe.
"We went in blindfolded, and we believed our own propaganda," Phillips says.
"We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9 billion in the short
term, and Iraqi oil would pay for the rest. Now we're deep in the hole, and
people are asking questions about how we got there.
"It's delusional, allowing delusion to be the basis of policy making. Once
you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies
that's repeated. You can't fix a policy if you don't admit it's broken."
Two thousand American lives later, remember the beginning. One commentator
quite plainly made the case that every few years or so, the United States
should "throw a small nation up against the wall" to prove that it means
business. And Idiot America, which is all of us, cheered.
***** right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the back room
will have.
August 19, 2005, was a beautiful day in Idiot America.
In Washington, William Frist, a Harvard-trained physician and the majority
leader of the United States Senate, endorsed the teaching of intelligent
design in the country's public schools. "I think today a pluralistic
society," Frist explained, "should have access to a broad range of fact, of
science, including faith."
That faith is not fact, nor should it be, and that faith is not science, nor
should it be, seems to have eluded Doctor Senator Frist. It doesn't matter.
He was talking to the people who believe that faith is both those things,
because Bill Frist wants to be president of the United States, and because
he believes those people will vote for him specifically because he talks
this rot, and Idiot America will take it as an actor merely reciting his
lines and let it go at that. Nonsense is a no-lose proposition.
On the same day, across town, a top aide to former secretary of state Colin
Powell told CNN that Powell's pivotal presentation to the United Nations in
which he described Iraq's vast array of deadly weapons was a farrago of
stovepiped intelligence, wishful thinking, and utter *****.
"It was the lowest point in my life," the aide said.
That it has proven to be an even lower point for almost two thousand
American families, and God alone knows how many Iraqis, seems to have eluded
this fellow. It doesn't matter. Neither Frist with his pandering nor this
apparatchik with the tender conscience -- nor Colin Powell, for all that --
will pay a substantial price for any of it because the two stories lasted
one day, and, after all, it was a beautiful day in Idiot America.
Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions
made and not made. It's the development of a collective Gut at the expense
of a collective mind. It's what results when politicians make ridiculous
statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at
the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a
daily basis, because the polls say they're popular anyway. It's what results
when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing
people.
And that's why August became a seminal month in Idiot America.
In its final week, a great American city drowned and then turned irrevocably
into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in real time and on television, and with
complete impunity, the president of the United States wandered the landscape
and talked like a blithering nitwit.
First, he compared the violence surrounding the writing of an impromptu
theocratic constitution in Baghdad to the events surrounding the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Undaunted, he later
compared the war he'd launched in Iraq to World War II. And then he compared
himself to Franklin Roosevelt. One more public appearance and we might have
learned that Custer was killed by Hezbollah.
Finally, we saw the apotheosis of the end of expertise, when New Orleans was
virtually obliterated as a functional habitat for human beings, and the
country discovered that the primary responsibility for dealing with the
calamity lay with a man who'd been dismissed as an incompetent from his
previous job as the director of a luxury-show-horse organization.
And the president went on television and said that nobody could have
anticipated the collapse of the unfortunate city's levees. In God's sweet
name, engineers anticipated it. Politicians anticipated it. The poor
bastards in the Ninth Ward certainly anticipated it. Hell, four generations
of folksingers anticipated it.
And the people who hated him went crazy and the people who loved him
defended him. But where were the people who heard this incredible,
staggeringly stupid bafflegab, uttered with conscious forethought, and
realized that whatever they thought of the man, the president had gotten
behind a series of podiums and done everything but drop his drawers and
dance the hootchie-koo? They were out there, lost in Idiot America, where it
was still a beautiful day.
Idiot America took it as a bad actor merely bungling his lines. Nonsense is
a no-lose proposition. For Idiot America is a place where people choose to
live. It is a place that is built consciously and deliberately, one choice
at a time, made or (most often) unmade. A place where we're all like that
statue of Adam now, reclining in a peaceful garden of our own creation,
brainless and dickless, and falling down on the job of naming the monsters
for what they are, dozing away in an Eden that, every day, looks less and
less like paradise.
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