Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 5

"I think 'mad' is an overstatement," he says. "I wanted to make a point. I think there were times during the trial that I felt a great deal of pa.s.sion about the case and I wanted to reflect that in the opinion."

He did not believe that the pro-ID people had dealt with his court in good faith, and he did not believe their hired lawyers had the best interests of the town in mind. Over the summer of 2005, while the trial was proceeding, the citizens of Dover seemed to come to the same conclusion. In November, they voted out the entire school board but for the one member not up for reelection. An anti-ID majority rode a huge turnout to victory. Politically, if Jones ruled against intelligent design, the fight was over. This new board was not going to finance the appeal all the way through the federal court system.

By this time, Jones was bunkered with his staff, writing his decision in the case. One of his clerks, Adele Nyberg, pulled together the post-trial submissions from both sides and began to sketch out a rough draft from a preliminary outline Jones had prepared. Nyberg wrote some of the opinion and Jones wrote some of it. They swapped ideas back and forth. It was a long, grueling process.

"You just close the door and work on it," Jones recalls. "I can't tell you the number of drafts we went through." He kidded Nyberg that she should look at the drafting of the opinion as the vegetable she least liked to eat. "I kept finding edits and corrections I wanted to make," he says. "At the end, I couldn't look at the thing."

Every draft had one thing in common, though: Jones was angry, and it showed. He took one version home to show his wife, who told him it was too strident. He toned it down, a little. On December 20, 2005, he released the opinion to the world, and into the media maw that had gaped outside his office for going on two months.

If the earlier drafts were tougher, they must have been tied around a brick. The opinion ran 139 pages, and Jones determined that teaching ID was unconst.i.tutional on the third page. Then he got going. His language was blunt and devastating. He found ID ludicrous as science and preposterous as law. He saw the attempts to foist it on high school students as the worst kind of bunco scheme, dealing harshly with the notion of "teaching the controversy"-a "canard," he wrote, designed merely as the next form of camouflage by which creationism hoped to insinuate itself into the public schools. ID, Jones concluded, was "a mere re-labelling of creationism." He saved his most memorable scorn for a pa.s.sage in which he described the damage the fight over ID had done to the people of Dover.

"This case came to us as a result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board," Jones wrote, "aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a const.i.tutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconst.i.tutional policy.

"The breathtaking inanity of the board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

That "breathtaking inanity" rang the loudest. (In fact, the phrase had survived from the earlier draft that Jones had revised at the suggestion of his wife.) For a federal judge, language like this was the equivalent of throwing a pie in someone's face. Commentators on both sides of the issue seized on the line. The opinion was released at 10:30 in the morning. By 10:45, people were yelling about it on CNN.

"I have these twenty-something clerks," Jones recalls, "and they kept looking at me and looking at the TV like, 'What in the h.e.l.l have we done?' I was very satisfied that I'd got the decision out before the end of the year, so there's a sense of, Well, you cleared the deck. You did the heavy lifting." Channel surfing at home that night, Jones came upon Bill O'Reilly's nightly show on the Fox News Channel. O'Reilly and his guest, a former judge named Andrew Napolitano, chewed on Jones for a solid ten minutes. By the end of it, O'Reilly was calling him a "fascist." Subsequently, the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson called him "absurd." The next day, the death threats started rolling in.

"They turned them in to the U.S. marshals, and the marshals said, immediately, that they were going to put me under twenty-four-hour protection," Jones says. The marshals set up a command post at his house. One of them went out with Jones's wife when she walked their dog. "I figured if I ever got a threat, it would be because I sentenced a crack dealer," Jones said.

Gradually, the furor died down. In January, however, the ultraconservative activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote a syndicated column in which she pointed out how vital evangelical voters had been to the election of George W. Bush, and Bush had appointed Jones, and Jones had stabbed the evangelical community in the back. However, the notion that he owed his allegiance to some political team got Jones angry enough to speak out. "I thought, 'Enough,'" he says. "I started to talk about exactly how judges decide cases. I wanted to pivot off that and talk about my experiences, and the experiences of other judges, with cases like this.

"In my view, the punditry-and to some extent, the mainstream press is responsible, too-has been responsible for dumbing down people about how our political system works and, in particular, in my case, how the judicial branch works.

"These are purely political creatures who don't understand what Article Three of the Const.i.tution says. If you poll the United States today, you find that over forty percent, sometimes over fifty percent, of the people in the United States believe in creationism and not evolution. And they think that creationism should be taught alongside, or even supplant, evolution in the public schools. So they don't understand why this federal judge in Pennsylvania, in my case, won't get with the program and bend to the popular will.

"Well, that's not the way the Framers designed the judiciary. We are supposed to be a bulwark against the popular will at a given time and responsible to the Const.i.tution and to the law. But, boy, that's lost. People should get that."

Six months later, browsing in a bookstore, Jones came upon G.o.dless G.o.dless, the most recent work by the right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter, whose gifts as an evolutionary biologist had been fairly well disguised heretofore. Coulter parroted much of the ID evidence that had been left in tatters during the trial; compared Jones to Joseph Wilson, the former amba.s.sador whose criticism of the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War drew the ire of the Bush administration; and concluded that all you needed to know about Jones's intellect was that Tom Ridge had been his mentor. All of which made even less sense than the case for ID. "An 'activist judge.' That term is so misused," Jones says. "It's misused to the extent it's become useless. You know what it means? It means a judge that you disagree with. It doesn't mean anything else besides that. If I don't agree with a judge's decision, then he's an activist judge. It's ludicrous."

Like so much of the blasted landscape of Idiot America, the Dover trial was a war on expertise, and Judge Jones was the last expert standing. Pastor Mummert had laid out the shape of the battlefield early on, when he described Dover as besieged by its intelligent and educated elements. The people to be most distrusted were those who actually knew what they were talking about. This is how people get elected while claiming not to be politicians. This is how, through the new ma.s.s media technologies best exemplified by the successful know-nothingism of talk radio, everyone is an expert, if they can move units or budge the needle. Everyone is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a political sage. Why should anyone pay Sean Hannity, an NYU dropout, a dime to talk about stem-cell research?

Why not ask the guy who fixes your car?

Why not the guy on the next bar stool?

Why not you?

Of course, if everyone is an expert, then n.o.body is. The worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

It used to be that parents wanted their kids to be smarter than they were. It used to be that, when we had outbursts of primitive enthusiasms, as in the Scopes trial, we treated them as understandable interruptions in the relentless march of the American mind. It used to be that people sc.r.a.pped and clawed their way up so that they could send their kids to Ivy League schools. Now so many of those children have emerged from the Ivy League as newly minted conservative friends of the soil, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with ersatz proletarian outrage and railing on behalf of the rubes in places like Dover against the kind of expertise produced in-wait for it-the Ivy League.

The founders wanted a nation of educated people: this, they believed, was essential to self-government. Some of the most heated arguments among them involved who would make up the educated elite. High Federalists like John Adams thought the elite should be exclusive and uncomfortably Anglophiliac in its attachment to the upper cla.s.ses. The old democrats-most notably, Jefferson and Madison-suspected that the educated elite might just be everyone, although neither of these two plantation masters was completely convinced. What none of the founders believed was that the elite should be everyone and no one at the same time.

Three intermingled schools of idiocy are produced by this kind of society. All have proud histories as American phenomena, but all have been cheapened by their insistence on material success in their most unalloyed forms. (For example, intelligent design would have been perfectly unremarkable as a fringe religious theory. It became intolerable when it insisted on its commercial validity as actual science.) Political idiocy is best represented on the AM radio dial and on those evening cable television news programs, the booking philosophies of which seem to differ little from those once employed by soup kitchens on the Bowery. How much more interesting would Ann Coulter be if, instead of sprawling on the cover of Time Time, she was fighting to be heard in front of small, fervent audiences in rural Missouri? Coulter fumed for weeks after she was dismissed as a columnist by USA Today. USA Today. If your biggest public gripe is that you got canned from that blob of mayonnaise, you have no right to stand in the company of Ignatius Donnelly. The Prince of Cranks was an American, dammit, and not an idiot. He never would've taken the job with If your biggest public gripe is that you got canned from that blob of mayonnaise, you have no right to stand in the company of Ignatius Donnelly. The Prince of Cranks was an American, dammit, and not an idiot. He never would've taken the job with USA Today USA Today in the first place. The man had his pride. in the first place. The man had his pride.

Commercial idiocy is the mechanism through which political idiocy (among other things) thrives, the mechanism through which the authentic revolution fostered by WLAC was diluted and h.o.m.ogenized into profitable syndicated outrage. Religious idiocy, formidable on its own, also functions as a baptismal font for political and commercial idiocy. Gussy up your extremist politics, or your bunco museum in which dinosaurs wear saddles, with the Gospels, and you can paint anyone who suggests that your goods are ridiculous a member of the intelligent, educated segment of the population, come to discomfit the faith-based folks.

Thus, it is considered impolite to point out, as Judge Jones did, that millions of Americans are paying millions of dollars to be willingly taken in by obvious hooey, such as books in which the loving Savior comes back to earth for his glorious premillennial encore as someone sprung full-blown from the mind of Stan Lee; or that the fringe interpretation of Scripture on which the books are based dates back only as far as the Taft administration.

American secular eccentrics once stood as proudly outside the world as any insular religious community did, rendering to G.o.d what is his, and rendering to Caesar not at all. Which made it all the more disappointing that the fight over intelligent design in Dover ever made it to the courthouse at all. And even more disappointing that it didn't end there. In the spring of 2008, a movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was released. Yet another defense of ID, this was a vanity project by Ben Stein, an economist who'd also been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, a freelance pundit, a movie extra, a game-show host, and the spokesman for a popular brand of eye drops. Now that he had come to pitch intelligent design, Stein's career arc could safely be said to have gone from hogwash to eyewash and all the way back again. was released. Yet another defense of ID, this was a vanity project by Ben Stein, an economist who'd also been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, a freelance pundit, a movie extra, a game-show host, and the spokesman for a popular brand of eye drops. Now that he had come to pitch intelligent design, Stein's career arc could safely be said to have gone from hogwash to eyewash and all the way back again.

The movie had two themes. It contended that scientists who believed in ID were being crushed by the academic establishment. (Stein's examples were fairly threadbare. It's easier to believe in ID than it is to believe that G.o.dless secularists have taken things over at places like Baylor and Iowa State.) However, the movie's second basic theme is startling and disturbing. Stein argues, seriously, that Darwinism led to the depredations of the n.a.z.is. In a moment that seemed drawn from early Monty Python, Stein visits the place where the n.a.z.is perfected their methods of genocide and then visits Darwin's house. The sequence ends with Stein staring balefully at a statue of Darwin. In an interview with a Christian radio network, Stein said: "When I saw that man ... talking about how great science was, I was thinking to myself that the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do, they were telling them to go to the showers and get ga.s.sed.... That was horrifying beyond words.... That's where science leads you.

"Love of G.o.d and compa.s.sion and empathy leads you to a truly glorious place and science leads you to killing people."

Science leads you to killing people.

Crazy history had been mustered to the defense of lunatic science. In the years since the end of World War II, none of Stein's relatives apparently ever rode a subway, or took a flu shot, or watched men walk on the moon. However, in an increasingly vicarious public discourse, if Jonah Goldberg can make money calling Woodrow Wilson a fascist, it was relatively simple for Ben Stein to drop the gangplank of H.M.S. Beagle Beagle at the gates of Auschwitz. This line-that science leads somewhat inevitably to inhumanity-was adopted sub rosa by conservative politicians who wanted to keep ID alive as a political weapon regardless of its transparent worthlessness as actual science. Stein did nothing less than confirm every word in Judge Jones's decision. He brought ID back to its creationist roots. He demonstrated that it is always and primarily a moral and religious concept. at the gates of Auschwitz. This line-that science leads somewhat inevitably to inhumanity-was adopted sub rosa by conservative politicians who wanted to keep ID alive as a political weapon regardless of its transparent worthlessness as actual science. Stein did nothing less than confirm every word in Judge Jones's decision. He brought ID back to its creationist roots. He demonstrated that it is always and primarily a moral and religious concept.

After all, creationism and its sp.a.w.n are hardly the only profitable alternative notions of how life on earth came to be. Ignatius Donnelly had his own ideas on the subject. The writer and historian Peter Bowler points out that both Immanuel Velikovsky and, later, Erich von Daniken proposed outre notions about life's origins so popular that they persist to this day. (The History Channel regularly runs programs based on von Daniken's ideas about the prehistoric influence of extraterrestrials on the development of human life. It should be noted here that, yes, sooner or later, these theories do bring you around to the Masons again.) Velikovsky and von Daniken shared as deep a distrust of conventional scientific expertise as exists among the creationists. However, their distrust was based on their eccentric interpretation of prehistory, and it was always purely secular.

But there is no ongoing fight in local school boards to "teach the controversy" about how s.p.a.ce aliens built the pyramids. "Something more is at work here," writes Bowler, "and that something must be explained in terms of religious fundamentalism's offer of an alternative, not just to science, but to the whole direction of modern life.... Creationism works because so many people see their commitment to the Bible as both a source of salvation and a way of preserving traditional American values. This is why the biblical literalism of ... creationism has become a dominant force in American society without undermining support for science as a practical activity linked to technology and medicine." That's how Ben Stein can make a buck or two selling eye care products without inevitably becoming Dr. Mengele. It's how he can rely on the scientific breakthrough of radio to make his case that all science leads to the gas chamber.

Not long after the Dover trial, Pastor Mummert spoke about what he'd said at its outset. He spoke softly and gently, but he did not back down an inch. "It seems to me," he said, "that it's the educated segment of society that reads the books and gets the new ideas, and that's the basis of the culture wars that we have going on now.

"I'm not anti-science, you know. I have one son who's a civil engineer."

Pastor Mummert came to preach in the southern part of Pennsylvania, where the Mennonites and the Amish came and settled, and where the people of the Ephrata Community slept on planks with blocks of wood for pillows. There, among the swelling hillsides and deep swales s.h.i.+vering with corn, these people came to escape in their own ways the perils of a sinful world. And they found a country that would welcome them, that had written its tolerance for their eccentricity into its founding doc.u.ments, that was the best country ever devised to be a little off the beam. It might look askance at them, or turn them rather tastelessly into tourist attractions, but it would allow them the blessed freedom of their insularity. The Amish were not faith-based people. They were far too serious for that. They rendered to G.o.d and to Caesar in the proper measure. They kept things in the right places.

IN Derby Line in Vermont, they put their public library on the ground floor of the old opera house, cleanly melding public information and public entertainment. Curiously, though, down the middle of the library runs the border between the United States and Canada, indicated by a black line running across the library floor. (The line was drawn in the 1970s, after a fire, in order to demarcate the respective responsibilities of American and Canadian insurance companies.) If you want to borrow a book, you go to the stacks in Stanstead, Quebec, to find it, and then back to Derby Line, Vermont, to check it out. Derby Line in Vermont, they put their public library on the ground floor of the old opera house, cleanly melding public information and public entertainment. Curiously, though, down the middle of the library runs the border between the United States and Canada, indicated by a black line running across the library floor. (The line was drawn in the 1970s, after a fire, in order to demarcate the respective responsibilities of American and Canadian insurance companies.) If you want to borrow a book, you go to the stacks in Stanstead, Quebec, to find it, and then back to Derby Line, Vermont, to check it out.

For decades, it was a point of civic pride for the people in both towns that they lived right atop one of the friendliest stretches of one of the friendliest borders in the world. People wandered down the tiny, shady backstreets of the place, pa.s.sing back and forth between the two countries without ever really noticing. By 2007, though, the Gut had come to rule in the United States. Borders were now dangerous places, shadowy and perilously permeable at any moment by international terrorists or illegal immigrant gardeners, or both. "They're proud of their history," an official of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the New York Times. New York Times. "But because of what happened on September 11, 2001, we cannot do nothing. We have to react when there's a threat." The border authorities in both countries moved quickly to restrict access along the side streets in Stanstead and Derby Line. As part of the plan, it was proposed that anyone parking a car outside the library on the Canadian side might well have to pa.s.s through a port of entry before walking up the front steps, which are on the American side. "But because of what happened on September 11, 2001, we cannot do nothing. We have to react when there's a threat." The border authorities in both countries moved quickly to restrict access along the side streets in Stanstead and Derby Line. As part of the plan, it was proposed that anyone parking a car outside the library on the Canadian side might well have to pa.s.s through a port of entry before walking up the front steps, which are on the American side.

Of course, all of this brought the media, which fit Derby Line and Stanstead into the ongoing market-tested, focus-group national narrative of terror, adorned with ominous logos, laden with dark brooding music, and pitched for six years by relentless anchorpeople wearing their looks of geopolitical concern and their flag pins. "It was okay," says Mary Roy, a librarian in Derby Line, of the town's sudden celebrity. "But it was sort of like, 'Can't you guys get together and get it once, because you're all asking the same questions?'

"That one night we were on the seven o'clock news, NBC there, Brian Williams and, probably at seven fifteen, we got a telephone call from a gentleman calling from Pennsylvania, totally irate that the government was going to not be strong on [border security in the library], and what could he do. Wasn't there a blog, or a citizen's advocacy group he could join. This was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard."

It has not been an easy decade for libraries. A national network of libraries had been operated for decades by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the Bush administration closed it, destroying a number of doc.u.ments in the process. The USA Patriot Act, pa.s.sed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks by a terrified and docile Congress, allowed the FBI virtually untrammeled power to rummage through the records of library patrons. Some librarians resisted by destroying their records before the Feds could get to them. One librarian in Ma.s.sachusetts threw two FBI agents out of the library and told them to come back with a warrant. John Ashcroft, who was then the U.S. attorney general, pooh-poohed the privacy concerns of the librarians, claiming that the Feds never used their new powers, but neglecting to mention that the same law that allowed the FBI to come snooping in the libraries also forbade the librarians from disclosing their visits. Libraries are well-ordered places, and there were too many people profiting too greatly from a disordered age for libraries to go unscathed.

Libraries are still good places to visit while you consider what's gone wrong in the country. They're one of the few places left that are free and open and, at the same time, reliably well-ordered. Fiction is on one set of shelves. Nonfiction is on another. Books on theology lean on one another. n.o.body puts them on the shelf with the scientific volumes. Aquinas and Mendel are in different places. Ignatius Donnelly's work does not abut that of Percival Lowell or Edwin Hubble. And, if libraries sometimes seem to be evolving into Internet cafes, still, once you step away from the computers, a library is a good and steady place, where the knowledge you're looking for is in the same place it's always been.

Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are defined by those people's fervency. Fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell. The best sellers are on one shelf, cheek by jowl, whether what's contained in them is true or not. People wander blindly, following the Gut into dark corners and aisles that lead nowhere, confusing possibilities with threats, jumping at shadows, stumbling around. They trip over piles of fiction left strewn around the floor of the nonfiction aisles. They fall down. They land on other people, and those other people can get hurt.

Part III *

CONSEQUENCES

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Woman Dies on Beech Street

In The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times, Earl Shorris argues that fundamentalist Protestantism-and, indeed, American religion in general-has been changed, well, fundamentally by embroiling itself in the pursuit of secular political power. "It has changed from a congregation or a conference into a faction," Shorris writes.

Defenders of republican government all the way back to Aristotle have mistrusted factions. Mr. Madison went out of his way to wave red flags, most vigorously in Federalist Federalist 10, in which he cautions that "the latent causes of faction are [thus] sown in every man, and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circ.u.mstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points ... have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for the common good." 10, in which he cautions that "the latent causes of faction are [thus] sown in every man, and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circ.u.mstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points ... have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for the common good."

It is not an accident that Mr. Madison listed religion first among the sources of dangerous faction. He looked on religious activity in the political sphere the way most people would look on a cobra in the sock drawer. While listing the faults of the government established by the Articles of Confederation, he went out of his way to note the failure of that government to restrain-or, at the very least, to manage-the "enthusiasms" of the people. "When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm," he wrote, "its force like that of other pa.s.sions is increased by the sympathy of a mult.i.tude."

THE neighborhood's not stylish enough for strip malls. It's an exhausted stretch of low-slung buildings of weatherbeaten cinder block and scraggly lots carpeted in dust and fire ants, a noisy, greasy place where they fix things that are made out of iron. Deep in the line of machine shops, something large and heavy and metallic hits the cement floor with a mighty clang, and someone curses almost as loudly, and the sounds ring through the heat of the high afternoon. Until they get to the fence along the property, and there the clamor seems to dissipate within the boughs of the pine trees just inside the fence, as though it's been swallowed up in a cool and private atmosphere through which discordant sounds cannot travel, through which not even the heat seems to be able to pa.s.s. neighborhood's not stylish enough for strip malls. It's an exhausted stretch of low-slung buildings of weatherbeaten cinder block and scraggly lots carpeted in dust and fire ants, a noisy, greasy place where they fix things that are made out of iron. Deep in the line of machine shops, something large and heavy and metallic hits the cement floor with a mighty clang, and someone curses almost as loudly, and the sounds ring through the heat of the high afternoon. Until they get to the fence along the property, and there the clamor seems to dissipate within the boughs of the pine trees just inside the fence, as though it's been swallowed up in a cool and private atmosphere through which discordant sounds cannot travel, through which not even the heat seems to be able to pa.s.s.

There's a brook running through the place. You hear it before you see it. There are silk prayer flags hanging in the pine trees, rippling and flowing on the breezes that stir the wind chimes into song. Gentle sounds merge into a kind of stillness. Even the birds seem muted here. There are stone paths to walk on, and stone benches to sit on. People walk the stone paths, lost in thought or abandoned to memory, noticing or not noticing the brook, watching or not watching the prayer ribbons, hearing or not hearing the wind chimes. They talk in low voices. They pray quiet prayers. They nod to other people who have come to walk the paths, and exchange a word, if they've come to know each other. Inside the low brick buildings behind them, their relatives are gently dying. That is why people come to the Woodside Hospice. They are looking for a good death, a peaceful death, a cool and private atmosphere where they can live, fully, until they cannot live anymore, and where their loved ones can come and be with them, and can be alone for a moment, if need be.

"There is a good ending," explains Annie Santa-Maria, the director of inpatient and residence care at the hospice. She's a dark-eyed, fierce woman, the daughter of Cuban emigres. "Hospice people come to believe that there is such a thing as a good day and that there is such a thing as peaceful closure, that death is a reality," she says.

"All of us are going to die. We live in a culture that would rather give you Botox, have a bacteria rather than look old and face your death. Most of our culture doesn't accept death, but we all know we're going to die of something, so better to leave the world with a sense of completion and dignity, and have some support and compa.s.sion, and not just people diagnosing you, and shooting you up.

"After a particularly tough death, they'll come out here and take a walk. That's the staff, the other residents, the families, everybody."

The hospice grounds are designed for walking meditation, after the ancient English tradition of pilgrim prayer. The prayer flags reflect a Tibetan custom. You write a letter, or a prayer, to your loved one who has pa.s.sed, and you hang it from the tree to stir in the breeze, and the thoughts and prayers find their way to whatever afterlife there may or may not be. In the center of the garden is a small chapel with stained-gla.s.s windows that face all four points of the compa.s.s so that, depending on the time of day and the angle of the sun, the chapel is flooded with different kinds of light. It is a sacred spot, but not a sectarian one. It could be Christian or Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist, Hindu or Wiccan. There's nothing here that suggests that there is a right answer to the biggest question of all. Just that the question is worthy of contemplation. "Depending on the time of day, the light changes in the chapel," Annie says. "There's a different kind of feeling in this place."

The main building of the hospice is divided by corridors off a main lobby, and the corridors are given street names. On March 31, 2005, in a room off Beech Street, a woman died after a long illness. A service was held for her in the little chapel along the stone path. The entire staff turned out. So did the woman's husband. Her parents did not come. Hers had not been a quiet death. The clamor had gotten through the fence, and n.o.body at Woodside ever was the same again.

"Over there," Annie Santa-Maria says, as an elderly couple pa.s.s along the stone path, "that's where the guy got over the fence, and the narcotics cops-we had off-duty narcotics cops patrolling the grounds at night-and over there's where they grabbed him."

She points past the pine trees and over the fence, toward one of the wide dusty lots across the street. That's where they all had been-the crowds with their b.l.o.o.d.y signs and their empty crosses, and their useless, vain cups of water; the cops and the crazy television monks. At the end was the field where the television trucks had parked, their tall transmitters spiraling toward the sky, the electronic Golgotha at the end of a vicarious Media Dolorosa that began outside her office where, early one evening, two priests had nearly gotten into a fistfight. She'd have broken it up, she says, but there was a federal marshal standing in her way.

"Your business," Annie Santa-Maria says to a curious visiting journalist, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng, and, for a moment, the quiet in the little grove seems to have some heft behind it. "Let me tell you about your business."

IN 1961, Rafael and Lillian Santa-Maria were trying to find their way out from under Fidel Castro. Rafael was a neurosurgeon, one of the few remaining in Havana, so he was watched quite closely by government agents. He had trained in the United States, and his family had roots there going back to the antebellum South, where some of his ancestors had built a plantation that they had lost because they had insisted on giving their slaves property of their own. Rafael and Lillian slipped their children out of the country a few at a time, s.h.i.+pping them off to live with uncles and aunts who'd already emigrated. The last to leave were the two youngest, including Annie. "We were divided," she recalls. "Myself and my brother, we stayed with my dad so the government wouldn't know." 1961, Rafael and Lillian Santa-Maria were trying to find their way out from under Fidel Castro. Rafael was a neurosurgeon, one of the few remaining in Havana, so he was watched quite closely by government agents. He had trained in the United States, and his family had roots there going back to the antebellum South, where some of his ancestors had built a plantation that they had lost because they had insisted on giving their slaves property of their own. Rafael and Lillian slipped their children out of the country a few at a time, s.h.i.+pping them off to live with uncles and aunts who'd already emigrated. The last to leave were the two youngest, including Annie. "We were divided," she recalls. "Myself and my brother, we stayed with my dad so the government wouldn't know."

Finally, one day, Rafael was allowed to attend a medical conference in the United States. He was allowed to leave Cuba as long as he brought along only $200 and a single suitcase. Lillian left the door of their house open, knowing that they would never be back. The family never learned what became of the rest of their belongings.

The Santa-Marias settled in Ohio; Rafael took a job with the Veterans Administration, which developed a dire need for neurologists as the war in Vietnam ramped up. Eventually, he went into private practice. Annie felt herself drifting into health care as well. She earned a degree from Miami University in Ohio. She hated the northern winters, though, so she moved in with her sister near Tampa and got a master's degree in social work from the University of South Florida.

It was the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was beginning to reach flood tide. Much about the disease was still a mystery. AIDS put almost every hot-b.u.t.ton issue into play all at once. It attacked gay men most conspicuously. It was a plague for the Gut, engaging unreasoning fear and apocalyptic religious fervor to feed off each other. "G.o.d is not mocked," the Reverend Jerry Falwell thundered at his television congregation, intimating that the disease was G.o.d's curse on a sinful population. Political calculation and religious judgmentalism became so thoroughly mixed that there were seventy thousand cases of AIDS in the United States before then-President Ronald Reagan said the name of the disease in public. In 1989, after Reagan had left office, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, utterly fed up with theocratic sniping behind his back on this and other issues, simply quit in disgust. (At one point, Koop had been expressly forbidden from mentioning AIDS in public, an odd directive to hang on the nation's doctor.) "I am the nation's Surgeon General," Koop said after leaving his post. "I am not the nation's chaplain."

The reaction to AIDS was mindless and visceral. Annie watched as the unreasoning national hysteria broke out. Nursing homes rejected AIDS patients. Health-care providers refused to care for them, coroners refused to autopsy their bodies, and undertakers refused to bury them. This abandonment of the dead and dying gave new momentum to the hospice movement; AIDS patients had a 100 percent chance of dying from their disease. The community of the disease began to fend for itself, building a supportive infrastructure almost from scratch.

"In '81 and '82," Santa-Maria recalls, "we just knew of the gay men. It wasn't really until the mid- to late eighties where they started diagnosing Haitians and so on. So there were no services, so we were scrambling to put the services together, "I was a volunteer at first, and we started at a local church, which has a large gay population. We started the services and then we started an AIDS coalition."

One of the coalition's biggest problems was to find places that would accept AIDS patients. Woodside was one of the few places that would take in AIDS patients. Annie went to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to learn which dangers were real and which were imaginary. She came back armed with what she believed to be firm medical facts. It didn't matter. Even at Woodside, there were nurses whose husbands didn't want them working in a building with AIDS patients, let alone working with the patients themselves.

"That was the fear," she recalls. "I mean, if you're going to help people, help them. We had regular staff meetings for that."

The whole thing baffled Annie. Some of what she was hearing from the government and seeing in the media, and hearing from her friends and even from medical professionals, didn't seem to have anything to do with the reality of the disease with which she worked. Yet those things affected her work as surely as that reality did. The situation reminded her a little of the way things had worked in Cuba, where the government would tell you something that you knew from your own experience could not possibly be true, yet people seemed willing to believe that it was, and to act upon that belief, until the manufactured reality displaced the actual one. She felt she was working in parallel worlds. There was the world of the disease, and of the people who had it; and then there was another world, in which everything was a symbol and in which her patients stood for something. That second world orbited close by and caused the world of the disease always to wobble a little perilously in its...o...b..t.

Eventually, in 1994, Annie went to work full-time at Woodside. She left briefly to work at another hospice but came back in a matter of months. Right about that time, a man named John Pecarek submitted a report to a Florida court. Pecarek had been appointed guardian ad litem to look after the interests of Terri Schiavo, a woman who'd suffered cardiac arrest on February 25, 1990, and who, having never regained consciousness, had been provided food and water ever since by means of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube.

Over the next three years, relations had deteriorated between Robert and Mary Schindler, the woman's parents, and Michael Schiavo, her husband, who had been appointed his wife's guardian three months after she was first hospitalized. In two separate malpractice suits, Terri Schiavo and her family had won well over $1 million. Shortly after the second of these awards, the relations.h.i.+p between Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers had broken down entirely. In 1994, the parents had tried to have Michael removed as guardian. Pecarek's report shot down their motion. Michael Schiavo, it said, had acted "appropriately and attentatively [sic]" [sic]" toward his desperately ill wife. In 1998, he moved her into the Woodside Hospice. In May of that year, citing what he said had been the express wishes of his wife, Michael Schiavo pet.i.tioned a court to have his wife's feeding tube removed so that she could die in peace. Her parents opposed the motion. toward his desperately ill wife. In 1998, he moved her into the Woodside Hospice. In May of that year, citing what he said had been the express wishes of his wife, Michael Schiavo pet.i.tioned a court to have his wife's feeding tube removed so that she could die in peace. Her parents opposed the motion.

The case already had a life beyond the hospice. In 1990, a similar case involving a woman named Nancy Cruzan had galvanized religious conservatives, but they had lacked the media savvy and technological ability to create the political momentum to seriously exploit it. The Schiavo case was different. The right had the means to make its case, and many people were more than willing to listen.

"Unlike in 1990," wrote Damon Linker in The Theocons The Theocons, his memoir of his career inside the religious right, "opponents of the right-to-die now had talk radio and cable news-not to mention a sympathetic president and Congress-on their side to counter the indifference of the mainstream media to their cause."

In 2001, Annie Santa-Maria had been appointed director of inpatient and residence care at the hospice. She walked into the job with her eyes open. One of her duties was to mediate disputes among family concerning a patient that was dying. People argued about money, about the disposition of the body. She felt something familiar in the Schiavo case. Over the intervening year, something was stirring that she remembered from her experience during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Something was being fas.h.i.+oned out of this case. That other world was close by again, and her world was beginning to wobble in its regular orbit.

"When Terri came, we thought, 'Well, okay, it's going to be a couple of weeks, then we'll get her admitted, and then the judge will a.s.sign the date of when actually to remove the tube,'" Annie tells me. "We thought it was just going to be a matter of a few weeks, of getting it on the court docket-that's what Mr. Schiavo expected, and that's certainly what we expected. Well, their attorneys kept throwing out allegations, and that one gets dismissed, so, 'Well, let's file another one.' We had no idea that this was going to be years.

"What's stunning, and what was never really reinforced in the media, was that this happens every day, hundreds of times a day, in each county in every state of this land. People remove a ventilator. People remove a feeding tube. But in this case, people had something new every few months. There was a new allegation. There was a legal proceeding for something wrong with her care that they kept bringing. They had to bring evidence, and then that evidence was dismissed because there really was no evidence, and then it was 'Okay, let's start with the next one.' And they went through many attorneys to do this, to either accuse Michael of being abusive or accuse us of not doing our jobs. They tried every which way to do that. And then when that stopped working, what they did was try the case in the public, you know? That's when the right wing got involved."

On April 24, 2001, after a Florida appellate court upheld an order by Circuit Judge George Greer, the PEG tube was removed from Terri Schiavo. People inside the hospice noticed that a few people with candles had gathered on the other side of the road. Two days later, another court, acting on a motion filed by the Schindlers, ordered that the tube be reinserted. A television truck from CNN arrived shortly thereafter. It was big and boxy and it parked in the dusty lot down across the street from the Cross Bayou Elementary School. More people gathered. More television trucks arrived. The people in the row of machine shops made some money renting s.p.a.ce to the media. What Annie Santa-Maria now calls the siege had begun.

ONE night at the height of the siege, Mike Bell was driving home from the office. It was late and he was tired. He had spent the day trying to coordinate daily life at Woodside, one of several hospices he supervised as director of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast. By the beginning of 2005, there were checkpoints several blocks away at either end of 102nd Street. You showed your ID and the police checked it against a list provided by the hospice of who was supposed to work that day. Anyone wis.h.i.+ng to visit a resident had to notify the hospice in advance so the police could be notified. night at the height of the siege, Mike Bell was driving home from the office. It was late and he was tired. He had spent the day trying to coordinate daily life at Woodside, one of several hospices he supervised as director of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast. By the beginning of 2005, there were checkpoints several blocks away at either end of 102nd Street. You showed your ID and the police checked it against a list provided by the hospice of who was supposed to work that day. Anyone wis.h.i.+ng to visit a resident had to notify the hospice in advance so the police could be notified.

"You had to clear that last checkpoint, right before the property, to be cleared," Bell explains. There already had been several attempts-one by someone posing as a produce deliveryman-to smuggle a camera into Terri Schiavo's room. "Once you got inside, it stayed pretty sheltered."

Even past the checkpoints, the hospice workers at Woodside now were running a gauntlet made up of camera crews, radio hosts, ambitious pundits, print reporters, angry monks, people waving crosses, and Jesse Jackson. A group of students from Ohio State came to Tampa over spring break, not to party, but to protest. A man sent his twelve-year-old up the driveway with a cup of water to give Terri. Given her condition, it would have drowned her. It turned out the father was a convicted pedophile from another state and had failed to register with the Florida authorities when he'd arrived to protest outside the hospice. His kid got arrested for trespa.s.sing. He didn't. There were police snipers on the roof of the elementary school. One day a hospice cook walking to work was called a n.a.z.i.

At his office, Mike Bell got a steady stream of reports. He heard about the bomb threats, and about one phone call that was traced to Texas and how the FBI had made it to the guy's door almost as soon as he'd hung up the phone. Bell also had to monitor all the cable networks to see what was going on in the world beyond 102nd Street, because he knew that, as soon as something happened in a courtroom, or someone got up in a legislature and made a speech, the impact around the checkpoints would be nearly immediate, as though everyone involved in this case were suddenly standing on the same great fault line.

"What was amazing," says Bell, "was the ch.o.r.eography of it. We would just be learning of the next development and, here we are, the care providers, and we would get a fax or an e-mail, or a phone call and, within two seconds, there would be someone out front from Channel 8 or Channel 10, telling us that there's a new group and this is what their signs say, and it was just a mobilization.

"The thing we kept saying was that we respect your rights to your strongly held beliefs, but we ask that you also try and respect the fact that there are seventy-one other people on a very personal and private journey inside this place, not to mention these other people, coming and going, just doing their job, volunteering, the cook in the kitchen, and they have nothing to do with these decisions."

There was no relief for Bell. His wife's best friend lived next door to Michael Schiavo. Sometimes, when the friend's children were coming home from school, they had to get off the bus up the block so as to avoid the storm of picketers on the sidewalk, calling the besieged husband a murderer. Bell's wife told him that her friend had organized an escape route for Schiavo in case the crowd tried to take his house. Her friend had removed a panel from the fence that separated their properties. If he needed to, Schiavo could slip through the fence, sneak into the neighbor's garage, and escape in a car that had been secreted there for the purpose.

One night, exhausted from another day of the siege, another day of being called a n.a.z.i and an angel of death, Mike Bell drove home in his car, the one whose Florida license plate read "Hospice-Every Day's a Gift." The main roads were clogged with traffic, so he took his usual alternate route, zigzagging along back roads through residential neighborhoods.

"It was one of those days where, in the e-mail, we were all being condemned to h.e.l.l, and I'm driving home, and this car is just a little too close, and it just seemed to be doing it the whole way. For some reason, at a traffic light, it just very vividly in my mind went, 'I have a hospice license plate.' And it was crazy, I thought, 'They used to bomb abortion clinics, you know, and if they think we have a side in this, and they're out to get us because we're the angels of death-' And it just struck me, and I didn't like it, and I didn't stay in that place. But I was very aware that everywhere I went [my car] said, 'Hospice,' and that I couldn't, even for a minute, turn that off."

It galled them all-Mike Bell and Louise Cleary, who ran the hospice's media relations, and especially Annie Santa-Maria-to see their work being fas.h.i.+oned simultaneously into a weapon of political advantage and an engine of media frenzy. It had become plain that the least important factor in all of this was the health and well-being of Terri Schiavo. There were political and religious agendas. There was apparently a bottomless national desire for a televised freak show. There were advantages to be gained, and money to be made, in the fas.h.i.+oning of "hospice" into the kind of buzzword that is central to the vocabulary of a lunatic national dialogue. In such a dialogue, there is no debate, because debate admits at least the possibility of eventual synthesis between the opposing positions. The manufacture of a buzzword requires the reckless unleas.h.i.+ng of a noisy public frenzy that does not so much defeat the opposition as simply exhaust it. There is no more debate present at those times than exists between a rock and a window.

n.o.body knew better than did the people inside the hospice the delicate and painful questions that revolve around end-of-life issues. They knew the debate. They'd seen the debate in the eyes of the people who came every day to say good-bye, the people who came up to them now and wondered what would happen to their loved ones, what with hospice being compared daily on national television to Auschwitz. Those people wept with the concern that Woodside would be closed. The real debate was in all the families, grouped in knots in the hallways, talking in low voices, sometimes fiercely, about the decisions that had to be made. The debate was in the people taking long walks out back along the stone paths, in a deep and silent place within them where the murmur of the brook and the music of the wind chimes did not reach. The quiet moments were the real debate, when the room grew still and breathless. Bringing peace to those moments was what hospice was about.

They knew the debate and they knew that what was going on around them in the glare of the lights was not the debate. Instead, it was something that reduced the debate to the counterfeit currency of a performance argument. They knew-oh, G.o.d, how they knew-that a lot of the people across the street wouldn't last long doing the kind of work they did every day inside the hospice.

Yet those people were believed. The louder they yelled, the wilder their claims, and the more brutal their rhetoric, the more the outside world seemed to believe them. The people inside the hospice knew the truth, but truth was different now. Truth also was anything anyone was willing to say on television. Truth also depended on how fervently you performed for the cameras, how loudly you were willing to pray, how many droplets of blood you painted on your sign, and how big your papier-mache spoon was. Enough people believed and were willing to act fervently on behalf of those beliefs, so those beliefs must be as true as any others. The Great Premises of Idiot America were all in play.

Events began to run in a pattern. A court would rule in favor of Michael Schiavo. The Schindlers would appeal. There would be a delay. The appeal would be denied. The Schindlers would file another motion. Another court would rule. The Schindlers would appeal. Some legislature would get involved. The crowd across the street would grow. The TV lights would grow brighter. At every juncture, there would be new characters introduced into the ongoing drama. A judge to be vilified. A bold legislator with wet eyes and a golden tongue, channeling the thoughts of a woman whose brain was dissolving. The tube would be removed. The tube would be replaced. Someone inside the hospice would have to do it.

On October 21, 2003, at the encouragement of Governor Jeb Bush, the Florida state legislature pa.s.sed "Terri's Law," a measure specifically giving Bush the unilateral power to replace Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, which had been removed, for the second time during the endless litigation, six days earlier. The law was nakedly, almost hilariously, unconst.i.tutional, in part because it directly contradicted a law the legislature had pa.s.sed during a less frenzied time several years earlier.

It seemed to Annie Santa-Maria that she had become hostage to a situation detached from any familiar reality. She knew the issues involved in the actual debate, knew them backward and forward. h.e.l.l, she'd helped develop the procedures going all the way back to her volunteer days with AIDS patients. But, now, in this one case, it seemed that her life and her work were following a script written by someone else. This was the way she remembered living in Cuba.

"I was watching this"-Annie laughs-"and I'm thinking, 'Surely, they're not going to pa.s.s this. They're going to overturn the self-determination act they pa.s.sed years ago.' And they did. They created a law that was so narrow, that was just for this case, that it was unconst.i.tutional. And when that didn't work, they went to the Florida Supreme Court, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.