Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 9

To win the primaries, you had to placate the party's indissoluble base. (This is what ate poor Mitt Romney alive. He went from being a rather bloodless corporate drone to being a rip-roaring culture warrior and ended up looking like a very big fool.) Having done that, you then had to tiptoe away from those same people without alienating them completely. The more successful you were at this delicate fandango, the more preposterous you had to become, especially if, like John McCain, you'd tried to avoid the cranks for most of your public career.

Once McCain got the nomination, he was denied his first choices for vice presidential candidates because neither of them pa.s.sed muster with the base he had so debased himself to woo. He ended up with Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, whose hilarious lack of qualifications for the job was interpreted at the Republican nominating convention as the highest qualification of all. She said so herself.

Palin's nomination was an act of faith in Idiot America almost unsurpa.s.sed in political history. Her speech to the Republican National Convention was one prolonged sneer. In what was perhaps the most singularly silly thing ever said of a national candidate of a major party, Republican surrogates up to and including McCain himself argued that Palin's foreign policy bona fides were established because Alaska is so close to Russia. By McCain's own standard, then, Sarah Palin could have run for vice president as an astronaut because she comes from the planet closest to the moon.

She then gave a series of interviews that slid precipitously from the merely disastrous to the utterly catastrophic, including one session with CBS anchor Katie Couric in which Palin, lost amid her talking points, simply abandoned verbs entirely. In another segment of the Couric interviews, Palin brought McCain along for help, and she looked like a middle-schooler who'd been asked to bring her father to a meeting in the vice princ.i.p.al's office.

If the country took its obligations to self-government at all seriously, the presence of Sarah Palin on a national ticket would have been an insult on a par with the elevation of Caligula's horse. However, the more people pointed out Palin's obvious shortcomings, the more the people who loved her loved her even more. She was taken seriously not merely because she had been selected to run, but also because of the fervor she had stirred among people in whose view her primary virtue as a candidate was the fact that she made the right people crazy. Their faith in Idiot America and its Three Great Premises was inviolate. Because the precincts of Idiot America were the only places where his party had a viable const.i.tuency, John McCain became the first presidential candidate in American history to run as a parody of himself.

You could see it all coming that rainy night in New Hamps.h.i.+re, when all the Republican candidates were alive and viable. They were faith-based and fully cognizant of the fact that they were not running for office so much as they were auditioning for a role, trying for a chance to do their duty on behalf of people who were invested as vicariously in their citizens.h.i.+p as baseball fans are in their teams, or as the viewers of American Idol American Idol are in their favorite singer. So that was how it happened that, at one point in the debate, the contenders were asked whether they believed in evolution. are in their favorite singer. So that was how it happened that, at one point in the debate, the contenders were asked whether they believed in evolution.

And, in response, three of the Republican contenders for president of the United States, in what was supposed to be one of the crucial elections in the country's history, said that, no, they didn't believe in evolution. And the people in the hall cheered.

It was a remarkable moment in that it seemed so unremarkable. There was no doubt that the three of them-Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee-were sincere. However, since admitting that you don't believe in evolution is pretty much tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold, it should immediately have disqualified the lot of them. In fact, it should have given people pause about the entire Republican party that a third of its presidential field was willing to admit that their view of the life sciences had stalled in the 1840s. Instead, it was a matter of hitting the right marks, and delivering right on cue the applause lines that the audience expected.

Within both the political and popular culture, as the two became virtually indistinguishable, the presidency itself had changed, and not entirely for the better. Gone were the embattled, vulnerable presidents, like Fredric March in Seven Days in May Seven Days in May, who fretted out a military coup that sought to batter down the doors of the White House with Burt Lancaster's be-medaled pectorals. No modern president could be as humble as Raymond Ma.s.sey's Abe Lincoln, riding that slow, sad train out of Illinois, martyrdom already clear in his eyes.

Even the gooey liberal pieties of The West Wing The West Wing made way for this kind of thing. The show abandoned its original mission, which was to somehow make speechwriters into television stars. (Hey, that's CNN's job!) It gradually found itself drawn into orbit around the character of President Jed Bartlet, who originally was supposed to be a presence standing somewhere out of frame. The show became as much a cult of personality as any genuine White House ever has. One more scene of the staffers in the Bartlet White House intoning that they "served at the pleasure of the President of the United States," and Gordon Liddy might have sprung, giggling horribly, from behind the drapes on the Oval Office set. Even our fictions ceased to portray the president as a const.i.tutional officer who held his job only at the informed sufferance of the voters. made way for this kind of thing. The show abandoned its original mission, which was to somehow make speechwriters into television stars. (Hey, that's CNN's job!) It gradually found itself drawn into orbit around the character of President Jed Bartlet, who originally was supposed to be a presence standing somewhere out of frame. The show became as much a cult of personality as any genuine White House ever has. One more scene of the staffers in the Bartlet White House intoning that they "served at the pleasure of the President of the United States," and Gordon Liddy might have sprung, giggling horribly, from behind the drapes on the Oval Office set. Even our fictions ceased to portray the president as a const.i.tutional officer who held his job only at the informed sufferance of the voters.

That's how Andrew Card, George W. Bush's chief of staff, could get up in front of a group of delegates from Maine during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and tell them that the president looked upon the people of the United States-his nominal employers, after all-the way all of "us" looked at our children, sleeping in the night, and n.o.body mentioned to Card that there isn't a single sentence proceeding logically from what he said that doesn't include the word "Fatherland."

The important thing about running for president was to make sure that people were willing to cast you as president in their minds. Be smart, but not so smart that he makes regular people feel stupid. Handsome, but not aloof. Tough always, but a good man to toss a few back with after the bad guys were dispatched. The presidency had conformed itself to the Great Premises of Idiot America. Anything could be true, as long as you said it loudly enough, you appeared to believe it, and enough people believed it fervently enough.

Expertise, always, was beside the point, and the consequence had been both hilarious and dire: a disordered nation that applied the rules of successful fiction to the reality around it, and that no longer could distinguish very well the truth of something from its popularity. This election, which was said to be one that could reorder the country in many important ways, did not begin promisingly.

The byplay concerning evolution in New Hamps.h.i.+re had been preceded by an even more remarkable conversation in South Carolina on the subject of torture. Surely, there have been few more compelling issues in any election than the question whether the president of the United States may, on his own, and in contravention of both domestic and international law, order the torture of people in the custody of the United States, and in the name of the people of the United States. That the president could do so had been the policy of the U.S. government for nearly five years by the time that the ten Republicans gathered in Charleston for their first ensemble debate. A question concerning the efficacy of torture-couched in a melodramatic, post-apocalyptic hypothetical by the moderator, Brit Hume-was posed to the various candidates.

Speaking from his experience, which was both unique and not inconsiderable, John McCain argued that, in addition to being basically immoral, torture doesn't work. He was quickly shouted down by Giuliani, who was once tortured by the thought that his second wife wouldn't move out of the mayor's mansion in favor of his current girlfriend, and by Romney, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people in Ma.s.sachusetts were allowed to marry each other, and who announced his desire to "double Guantanamo."

This was not a serious discussion of the reality of torture, any more than the discussion about evolution had anything to do with actual science. It was an exercise in niche marketing. Evolution and torture were not being discussed in the context of what they were but, rather, in the context of what they meant as a sales pitch to a carefully defined group of consumers. They were a demonstration of a product, as when those guys at the home shows show you how the juicers work. Suddenly, the Republicans all seemed to be running for Sheriff of Nottingham. But it took Tom Tancredo to drag the whole thing over the vast borders of Idiot America.

"We are talking about this in such a theoretical fas.h.i.+on," Tancredo fumed, ignoring the fact that the whole colloquy was based on a hypothetical. "I'm looking for Jack Bauer."

The audience exploded. The 2008 presidential election was not beginning well. It did not get appreciably better.

THE bomb is always ticking. bomb is always ticking.

In 2001, Fox television launched 24 24, an impeccably crafted thriller in which a federal agent named Jack Bauer races against the clock-each episode is one "hour" in a day-to thwart a ma.s.sive terrorist attack somewhere in the United States. The show has the velocity of a rifle bullet. Storylines ricochet off each other with dizzying, split-screened abandon. Its craftsmans.h.i.+p, at least through its first four seasons, was beyond reproach, and no television show in the history of the medium so completely captured the Zeitgeist. Besides reflecting considerable theatrical craftsmans.h.i.+p, however, 24 24 was something unique in the history of the country. It was the first attempt at successfully ma.s.s marketing torture p.o.r.n. was something unique in the history of the country. It was the first attempt at successfully ma.s.s marketing torture p.o.r.n.

Over and over again, to get the information he needs, Bauer cuts up his suspects with knives. He suffocates them. He electrocutes them. He beats them to a pulp. According to a survey by the nonpartisan Parents Television Council, there were sixty-seven scenes of torture in the first five seasons of 24. 24. Some of the torture was performed by the show's bad guys, and these scenes mainly served only further to justify what Jack Bauer found himself doing later. The torture always works. The country is always saved. Some of the torture was performed by the show's bad guys, and these scenes mainly served only further to justify what Jack Bauer found himself doing later. The torture always works. The country is always saved.

In a nation thirsting for revenge, vicarious or otherwise, operating from those parts of the Gut most resistant to reason, 24 24 provided a br.i.m.m.i.n.g reservoir of vengeance. The show sold. The show was a hit. It was not a reality show. Instead, it was a show that made its own reality out of the desires of its audience. The co-creator of provided a br.i.m.m.i.n.g reservoir of vengeance. The show sold. The show was a hit. It was not a reality show. Instead, it was a show that made its own reality out of the desires of its audience. The co-creator of 24 24, a self-described "right-wing nut-job" and former carpet salesman named Joel Surnow, explained to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker The New Yorker that the show landed right where he aimed it. "There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done," Surnow told Mayer. "America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He's a patriot." that the show landed right where he aimed it. "There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done," Surnow told Mayer. "America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He's a patriot."

For all its whiz-bang action and pinballing plotlines, 24 24 is as resolutely and deliberately free of actual expertise in interrogative techniques as is as resolutely and deliberately free of actual expertise in interrogative techniques as F Troop F Troop was of actual conditions on the American frontier. There are actual experts in interrogation, and most of them agree that the "ticking bomb" scenario is largely fantastical and, anyway, even in that situation, torture probably won't yield the information you need to foil the plot. Significantly, Mayer reported, when a team of experienced Army and FBI interrogators flew to California to meet with the people behind was of actual conditions on the American frontier. There are actual experts in interrogation, and most of them agree that the "ticking bomb" scenario is largely fantastical and, anyway, even in that situation, torture probably won't yield the information you need to foil the plot. Significantly, Mayer reported, when a team of experienced Army and FBI interrogators flew to California to meet with the people behind 24 24, and to explain their concern that the show was mainstreaming torture in a dangerous way, Surnow blew off the meeting to take a call from Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News Channel.

According to Mayer, an Army general named Patrick Finnegan told the people behind 24 24 that the show was complicating his job teaching the laws of war to his students at West Point. "The kids see it," Finnegan later told Mayer, "and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about that the show was complicating his job teaching the laws of war to his students at West Point. "The kids see it," Finnegan later told Mayer, "and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?' 24?' " "

Finnegan's students are not alone in this. The show's reach has extended into some extraordinary places. Surnow was the guest of honor at a dinner party thrown at Rush Limbaugh's house by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The Heritage Foundation, the de facto headquarters of respectable conservative opinion in Was.h.i.+ngton, threw a laudatory panel discussion on the show that included, among other people, Michael Chertoff, then the secretary of Homeland Security. On that same trip, Surnow and some other people from the show got to have lunch at the White House with Karl Rove and with the wife and daughter of d.i.c.k Cheney.

The show was cited in a book by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer whose memos justified much of the actual torture that was being carried out by the United States. The talk show crowd inferred support for torture from the show's ratings. In 2007, attending a panel on the subject in Canada, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that torture can be justified: "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles.... He saved thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that the criminal law is against him, is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so."

And perhaps the apotheosis of the show came when it was revealed by an international lawyer named Philippe Sands that, during high-level administration meetings regarding the treatment of detainees, "People had already seen the first [season].... Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantanamo. He gave people lots of ideas."

"I am quite pleased to report," says Colonel Steve Kleinman, an Air Force intelligence officer, "that I have never seen that show."

Kleinman has spent his career in what is called human intelligence, and specifically, in the interrogative techniques best suited for getting actionable information out of people reluctant to give it up. "I was reading Jane Mayer's piece this morning and she's got Chertoff, who's described as a big fan, and all these other people, and I'm thinking, 'Wait a second. That's the way we're conducting ourselves? Our senior people are being informed by Hollywood, by a guy who was a former carpet salesman? They're just making it up as they go.'

"I guess we are informed by the ma.s.s media and this very silly show, where interrogation is a very visible means of revenge. So we have this person and, if we have to shake him up to get information, well, that's just part of the process, and I say, 'Wait a second. Interrogation is not punishment. Interrogation is not supposed to be some form of retribution. Interrogation is a very sophisticated and very critical intelligence platform, and it's a methodology that needs to be employed with some foresight, with care, and with diligence. It's not to wreak revenge. What your gut tells you to do, what your gut says the other person is thinking, is almost always wrong.'"

IN February 2008, February 2008, Forbes.com noted that reality programming might have topped out. The genre's initial shock value had worn off, and attempts by the networks to push the boundaries of the form further were greeted with at best apathy and, at worst, public revulsion, as was the case with CBS's noted that reality programming might have topped out. The genre's initial shock value had worn off, and attempts by the networks to push the boundaries of the form further were greeted with at best apathy and, at worst, public revulsion, as was the case with CBS's Kid Nation Kid Nation, an extraordinarily bad idea that went even more wrong in the execution. Children left on their own to go feral on camera in New Mexico turned out to be nothing anyone wanted to see, and there weren't enough William Golding fans left in America to save the project. At the end, the network reality shows that maintained their large audiences were mainly those most clearly descended not only from Queen for a Day Queen for a Day, but also from the old Hollywood Palace Hollywood Palace-most notably, American Idol American Idol and and Dancing with the Stars. Dancing with the Stars. Thus did reality shows bring the variety show back to prime time. Thus did reality shows bring the variety show back to prime time.

Around the same time, the producers of 24 24 gave an interview to gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal in which they explained that their show was in trouble because torture didn't seem to be as popular as it had been a few years earlier. News reports about the Bush administration's predilection for Jack Bauer solutions to real-world problems had soured the audience on Jack Bauer solutions to Jack Bauer's problems. (The in which they explained that their show was in trouble because torture didn't seem to be as popular as it had been a few years earlier. News reports about the Bush administration's predilection for Jack Bauer solutions to real-world problems had soured the audience on Jack Bauer solutions to Jack Bauer's problems. (The WSJ WSJ piece tracked the slide in piece tracked the slide in 24 24's ratings as almost perfectly paralleling the decline in George W. Bush's approval ratings.) Actors declined to appear. Jane Mayer's piece in The New Yorker The New Yorker made the show's producers sound like braying jacka.s.ses and thumbscrew salesmen. "The fear and wish-fulfillment the show represented after 9/11 ended up boomeranging against us," lamented the show's head writer. The problem with torture, it seemed, was not that it had proven to be ineffective and immoral and illegal under any conceivable circ.u.mstance, but that it couldn't hold an audience anymore. The producers took the show off the air for some extended retooling. made the show's producers sound like braying jacka.s.ses and thumbscrew salesmen. "The fear and wish-fulfillment the show represented after 9/11 ended up boomeranging against us," lamented the show's head writer. The problem with torture, it seemed, was not that it had proven to be ineffective and immoral and illegal under any conceivable circ.u.mstance, but that it couldn't hold an audience anymore. The producers took the show off the air for some extended retooling.

But torture remained, a shadowy issue on the edges of the presidential campaign, which was just hitting its stride as the reality shows came back and 24 24 went into the shop. Jane Mayer's went into the shop. Jane Mayer's The Dark Side The Dark Side, a book about how, slowly but quite willfully, the United States had established forms of torture as a national policy, sold well, but the issue was strangely absent from the political news of the moment; most of that that concerned the election of the next president, for whom torture was going to be a fait accompli whether he wanted it to be or not. concerned the election of the next president, for whom torture was going to be a fait accompli whether he wanted it to be or not.

Writing in Salon.com, Rosa Brooks noticed that torture was becoming the new abortion, a litmus test among conservative Republicans to measure a candidate's fealty to a unilateral and aggressive approach to a war on terror, and among Democrats a measure of a candidate's commitment to const.i.tutional guarantees. In her acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin got a big hand when she said, "Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and [Barack Obama's] worried that someone hasn't read them their rights." So, of course, torture is an issue like all the other issues, a way of measuring one's commitment to the team in which people vicariously invest themselves.

Torture turned out to be no more or less important, as the campaign went on, than John Edwards's hair, Hillary Clinton's laugh, or John McCain's age, and far less important than the crazy things that emanated from the pulpit of Barack Obama's church. In April 2008, the blogger Glenn Greenwald put "torture" through a Nexis search along with the name of John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who drafted the memos that gave the administration cover for what it was doing. Greenwald came up with 102 entries over one two-week period as the story of Yoo's opinions was first breaking. In that same period of time, Greenwald's search rang up more than three thousand entries containing both Obama's name and that of his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright. There were more than a thousand stories about Obama's public inept.i.tude as a bowler.

"Torture" was now just another political product, a brand name, a trademark issue among dozens of others involved in an extended national transaction that was not going the way it was supposed to go but, rather, the way it always did-according to the Great Premises of Idiot America, where anything can be true if enough people believe in it.

THE problem is not that America has dumbed itself down, as many people believe. (Reality shows are often cited as Exhibit A for the prosecution here.) It's that America's gotten all of itself out of order, selling off what ought never to be rendered a product, exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself. Real people get ground up in these transactions. Sell religious fervor as science, and Annie Santa-Maria's checking the rearview mirror as she drives home in the dark. Sell corporate spin as science, and the people of s.h.i.+shmaref watch their homes get eaten by the sea. Sell propaganda as fact, and hundreds of thousands of people die. For real. None of these people lived in Idiot America. They were shanghaied there. problem is not that America has dumbed itself down, as many people believe. (Reality shows are often cited as Exhibit A for the prosecution here.) It's that America's gotten all of itself out of order, selling off what ought never to be rendered a product, exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself. Real people get ground up in these transactions. Sell religious fervor as science, and Annie Santa-Maria's checking the rearview mirror as she drives home in the dark. Sell corporate spin as science, and the people of s.h.i.+shmaref watch their homes get eaten by the sea. Sell propaganda as fact, and hundreds of thousands of people die. For real. None of these people lived in Idiot America. They were shanghaied there.

In 2007, a man named Scott Weise was in a bar in Decatur, Illinois, watching his beloved Chicago Bears play the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. Perhaps well lubricated, perhaps not, Weise made a bet with the a.s.sembled fans in the bar that, if the Bears lost, he would change his name to Peyton Manning, the name of Indianapolis's star quarterback. Weise even signed a pledge to that effect, which his fellow patrons duly witnessed.

The Bears were pretty awful that day, and Indianapolis won from here to there. Manning was voted the game's Most Outstanding Player. Weise stood by his pledge. However, a judge subsequently ruled that Weise couldn't legally change his name to "Peyton Manning" because to do so would be to violate the quarterback's privacy.

"I had told the judge that I was not doing this because I wanted to change my name, but I was doing it because I was honoring a bet," Weise told the local newspaper. "I think she understood that."

There are people who will believe that a man named Scott Weise represents Idiot America. But they would be wrong. He was merely a crank, making a crank's wager and accepting the consequence when he lost. And when the court ruled against him, he accepted the ruling because he didn't really want to be "Peyton Manning" anyway. It was an honorable transaction all the way around. There was nothing out of order about it. By comparison, though, consider Antonin Scalia, a.s.sociate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, citing a fictional terror fighter as a justification for reversing literal centuries of American policy and jurisprudence, and citing that fictional character, furthermore, on a panel that had gathered to discuss international law. Consider the highest level of the U.S. government, gathering in the White House in order to set American law back to a point ten minutes before Magna Carta was signed, and tossing around ideas they'd heard on the same television show. And people are worried that this country pays too much attention to American Idol? American Idol? That's just a reality show, which is more show than reality, because somebody has to write it. That meeting in the White House is what happens when you've already made reality a show. That's just a reality show, which is more show than reality, because somebody has to write it. That meeting in the White House is what happens when you've already made reality a show.

Idiot America is always a matter of context, because it is within the wrong context that things get out of order. Idiot America is a creation of the mind in which things are bought and sold under the wrong names and, because some of those things sell well, every transaction is treated as though it had a basis in reality. Put things back in order and it becomes plain. Scott Weise is an American crank who did something any American crank would be proud of. Antonin Scalia, and the people at that White House meeting, are representatives of Idiot America. The sad irony is that they think everyone else lives there.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr. Madison's Library

The flat heat of early summer floats, s.h.i.+mmering, just above the asphalt of the parking lots. The Creation Museum has been open for just over a year now, and the parking lots are respectably crowded for a Monday in June. The cars are from Mississippi, and from Wisconsin, and from Minnesota. There's a minivan from West Virginia with a vanity license plate: "JESUSROX." heat of early summer floats, s.h.i.+mmering, just above the asphalt of the parking lots. The Creation Museum has been open for just over a year now, and the parking lots are respectably crowded for a Monday in June. The cars are from Mississippi, and from Wisconsin, and from Minnesota. There's a minivan from West Virginia with a vanity license plate: "JESUSROX."

They really have done it well. The hilltop in Hebron contains not only the museum itself, but a petting zoo, a picnic area, and a nature walk around the perimeter of a small lagoon alive with perch and echoing with the low sound of croaking bullfrogs. Like any other museum, the kids are entertained for a while by all the bells and whistles, but by the time everyone gets to the picnic area, everyone's pretty hot and sweaty and praying, not for guidance, but for Coca-Cola.

Inside, of course, the museum is cool and shady, dark in many places and in many different ways. It shrewdly mimics other museums with its exhibits and interactive diversions for the younger crowd. The walls are filled with small signs explaining what the visitor is looking at. Of the respectable collection of fossils, none, the visitor is told, can be older than four thousand years. The museum has animatronic people and animatronic dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are almost everywhere you look; walk in the front door, and the neck of a huge herbivore looms over you, chewing away on plastic gra.s.s. In fact, dinosaurs are a lot more visibly present in the place than anything else. There's more Jura.s.sic than Jesus here.

The Creation Museum is also a richly appointed monument to complete barking idiocy, from start almost all the way to the finish.

Anyone who'd visited while it was under construction came away thinking to themselves, "Well, a lot of what they say is basically to flush the rubes to raise money." But, no, they actually believe it. The planetarium show is fairly conventional, although the narrator occasionally reminds people who might be overly awed by Alpha Centauri that "all these worlds are marred by the Curse," which is to say that Adam's sin dropped the hammer on some Venusians who never did anything to anyone.

The museum is organized as a scientific walk through Genesis. Poor Adam likely is still d.i.c.kless, but in his two appearances he's lounging in the Garden with shrubbery in front of his naughty bits, and standing hip-deep in a pond with water lilies around his waist, so a firsthand examination is impractical. Eve still has the long hair, arranged conveniently so as not to scandalize the faithful.

"Hey, come on down here," yells a young boy who has gotten ahead of the story. "Eve's pregnant!"

Walking through the exhibits is an airless, joyless exercise. Among other things, you learn that there were no poisonous creatures, nor any carnivores of any kind, until Adam and Eve committed their sin. Then, it seems, velociraptors developed a taste for hadrosaur tartare, and we were off. Things get a little dicey when an exhibit tries to explain why it was all right for Cain to have married his sister. (The answers seem to be, in order: (1) there weren't many women around; (2) everybody was doing it; and (3) who are you to be asking these questions, you infidel b.a.s.t.a.r.d?) Out of that room, past a grumpy robot Methuselah, and you come to a huge exhibit depicting the construction of the Ark.

Noah and his sons are milling about, moving their arms and heads like mechanical Santas and talking about the upcoming disaster. Now, it would be unkind to point out that there probably weren't many Jewish people involved in the construction of the Creation Museum. So let's just say that the people who built it can possibly be excused for believing that every Jew since Abraham has sounded like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler on the Roof. Noah himself seems to favor Topol from the movie, rather than Zero Mostel's broader performance in the original stage musical. Noah himself seems to favor Topol from the movie, rather than Zero Mostel's broader performance in the original stage musical.

The flood is central to the museum's "science." The exhibit contends, quite seriously, that Noah took two of everything, including two of every species of dinosaur, and that he was able to load up the latter because he took baby dinosaurs rather than the full-grown kind. The flood is vital not only to the museum's paleontology, but to its geology and topography as well. As the tour goes drearily on, you wander half-awake through the h.e.l.l in a Handbasket sections depicting the modern world. (Poor Darwin comes in for a real hiding here.) But what's startling you is their theory that, if dinosaurs got on the Ark, then they must have gotten off it as well. Which means that they survived into human memory.

That compelling notion-catnip for kids, no matter what age they are-illuminates the museum's collection of fossils. As wretchedly Stalinist as the explanatory cards are-one refers to "the false idea" that birds are descended from dinosaurs, reflexively couching scientific disagreement in the clumsy language of doctrinal dispute-the fossils are quite good, and the room is bright and alive with the sounds of children released from those parts of the museum that warn them that evolution is the gateway to sin, death, graffiti, and eternal d.a.m.nation. The place almost seems like fun.

At the end, over by the snack bar and just short of the gift shop, there is the Dragon's Theater, where a film explains that, not only did dinosaurs survive the flood, they may well have lasted long enough to account for the multiplicity of dragon legends that exist in all the cultures of the world. Absent its obvious religious filigree, this notion is a blessed piece of pure American crankhood amid the religious eccentricity of the museum. The impulse behind it is the same that compels secular cryptozoologists to go haring off to the Congo to look for Mokele-mbembe, or all those film crews haunting the Himalayas trying to capture the Yeti for the History Channel. People seeing dinosaurs in dragons are no different from people going off their heads looking for the Templar gold.

This little film places into stark relief what is truly depressing about the place-its conventionality, its unseemly l.u.s.t for credibility in the wider world. In Dealey Plaza, for example, there are dozens of independent crackpots who will gladly take a couple of bucks to explain to you who shot John Kennedy, and from where, and who was behind them. They work their territories by themselves and for themselves, and none of them is demanding that the country's historians take their theories seriously. (The Sixth Floor Museum inside the Texas School Book Depository is resolutely agnostic on the big questions.) Counternarratives are designed to subvert conventional ideas, but there is nothing at all subversive about the Creation Museum. The ideas in it are not interesting. They're just wrong. It's a place without imagination, a place where we break our dragons like plow horses and ride them.

The dinosaur with the saddle (still English) is tucked into the end of the tour now; but you can almost miss it as you come around the corner. The kids spot it, though. They climb up and smile and wave for the camera. Something is there that's trying to break out, but it never really does, G.o.d knows.

OUT where the broad lawn meets the road, workmen are digging a series of holes in the ground, looking for the place where the carriages once turned around, stopping briefly to disembark the ladies and gentlemen who had come to have dinner with the little old fellow who ran the place. The carriages would come up the twisting, narrow paths from the main road, rattling between the long white rail fences until they came to a spot somewhere right along here, right at the edge of the lawn. A house slave would greet them there, and bring them up to the main house for dinner. where the broad lawn meets the road, workmen are digging a series of holes in the ground, looking for the place where the carriages once turned around, stopping briefly to disembark the ladies and gentlemen who had come to have dinner with the little old fellow who ran the place. The carriages would come up the twisting, narrow paths from the main road, rattling between the long white rail fences until they came to a spot somewhere right along here, right at the edge of the lawn. A house slave would greet them there, and bring them up to the main house for dinner.

On a hot day at the end of August, the high whine of power tools cuts through the low hum of the bees and drowns out the birdsong in the shrubbery. On their knees, two workers cut the earth away in a series of precise squares, down just far enough until they find some more of the old brick. They are gradually pulling the history from the earth, one square at a time.

James Madison was nine when his father built the plantation that would come to be called Montpelier, tucked into a green valley below the Blue Ridge Mountains in Orange County in Virginia, now two hours by car southeast of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Madison lived there the rest of his life, and he died there, on June 28, 1836. He and Dolley had no children-Dolley's son from her first marriage, Payne Todd, was a profligate drunk who ran up $20,000 in debts that Madison paid off secretly, in order to spare his wife the heartbreak-so, in 1844, Dolley sold the estate. Eventually, in 1901, it pa.s.sed into the hands of some members of the DuPont family. In all, the DuPonts added thirty-three rooms. They built a racetrack on the grounds. They also did up the exterior of the main house in flaming pink stucco. The DuPonts built on, added to, and refurbished the place until the original Montpelier disappeared like Troy vanis.h.i.+ng beneath a strip mall.

In 1983, the last remaining DuPont owner bequeathed the place to the National Trust, and the effort then began to free Montpelier from the encrustations of Gilded Age plutocracy. The process is nearing completion on this breathless summer afternoon, as the old turnaround out front is unearthed. The garish pink stucco is surrendering at last to the original red brick. The mortar being used is mixed the same way that it was in the eighteenth century, and a fireplace is being rebuilt of red sandstone from the same quarry as the original. A piece of Madison's personal correspondence was found as part of a rat's nest inside one of the walls. In June 2007, a reunion was held on the grounds for the descendants of the plantation's slaves.

Madison was never a superstar, not even among his contemporaries. His home never became a shrine, not the way Was.h.i.+ngton's Mount Vernon did, or Jefferson's Monticello. The ride out from Was.h.i.+ngton takes you through three major battlefields of the Civil War. It seems as though you are driving backward in time through the inevitable b.l.o.o.d.y consequences of the compromises born in the hallways of Montpelier. Madison is an imperfect guide, as all the founders were.

But he felt something in his heart in this place. (And he did have a heart, the shy little fellow. He never would have won Dolley without it.) He studied and he thought, and he ground away at his books, but it wasn't all intellect with him. Not all the time. He knew the Gut, as well. He knew it well enough to keep it where it belonged.

Madison ama.s.sed more than four thousand books in his life, and the people working at Montpelier are not altogether sure where he kept them. Some people believe the library was on the first floor, in the wing of the house where once lived Madison's aged mother, Nelly. A better candidate is a room on the second floor, at the front of the house. It has broad, wide windows, and it looks out on the sweeping lawns and off toward the Blue Ridge beyond. It is a place to plan, but it's also a place to dream.

"You know what's nice about Madison in contrast to Jefferson," says Will Harris, who runs the Center for the Study of the Const.i.tution on the grounds of Montpelier. "Jefferson has this debate with himself with his heart and his head. Madison doesn't split the two up. He can be very angry, and he can be very motivated, in the sense of emotion and sentiment. But what that does, it engages his intellect. So when his emotions are running strong, his intellect is running strong. He wouldn't say, 'Well, my heart tells me this but my mind tells me this.' He puts the two together. And, in some ways, it's a more progressive understanding of the relations.h.i.+p."

In this room, with the mountains going purple in the gathering twilight, you can see all the way to the country where Ignatius Donnelly felt free to look to Atlantis, the country where a thousand cranks could prosper proudly. But also to a country in balance between the mind and the heart, as Madison was when he walked these halls in blissful retirement. A country where the disciplined intellect and the renegade soul could work together to create a freedom not merely from political tyranny, but also from the tyrannies of religion and unreason, the despotism of commercial success and brute popularity. A country where, paradoxically, the more respectable you become, the less credible you ought to be.

Whatever room the restorers finally decide is the one where the old fellow kept all his books, it turns out we are all Mr. Madison's library. He and his colleagues, who were not made of marble, gave us the chance to learn as much as we could learn about as much as there was to learn, and to put that knowledge to work in as many directions as the human mind can concoct.

But we were supposed to keep things where they belonged, so their essential value would be enhanced and not diluted. Religion would remain transcendent, and not alloyed cheaply with politics. The entrepreneurial spirit used to sell goods would be different in kind from the one used to sell ideas. Our cranks, flouris.h.i.+ng out there in the dying light, would somehow bring us around to a truth even they couldn't see.

We need our cranks more than ever, but we need them in their proper places. We've chained our imagination because we've decided it should function as truth. We've shackled it with the language of political power and the vocabulary of salesmans.h.i.+p. We tame its wilder places by demanding for them conventional respectability, submitting its renegade notions to the ba.n.a.l administrations of school boards and courthouses. We build museums in which we break our dragons to the saddle.

That's why that room on the second floor of the mansion has to have been the library, because you can see the mountains from there. It's a room meant for looking forward, for casting your imagination outward into the outland places of the world. The nation had a government of laws, but it was a country of imagination. From that window, where you can see the mountains in the dying light of the afternoon and feel their presence as a challenge in the night, you can imagine the wild places beyond the mountains, in the vast country into which John Richbourg once had enough faith to beam his music. You can imagine the wild places in yourself. You can imagine the great things crazy notions can accomplish, if we can only keep them out of the hands of the professionals.

He designed a government, Mr. Madison did, but he dreamed himself a country. It's time for us to get ourselves in order, to set out and find that place again. Or else we will stay where we are, like that statue of Adam, before they covered his nether parts with water lilies so you wouldn't notice what was missing, lounging around, brainless and d.i.c.kless, in an Eden that looks less and less like paradise.

Acknowledgments

This book started as a magazine article-in the November 2005 edition of started as a magazine article-in the November 2005 edition of Esquire Esquire-and the article started as a three-line pitch that read, "Dinosaurs with saddles." So the first toast goes rightfully to David Granger and to Mark Warren, who saw everything there was to see in those three words, and who saw the length and breadth of the story even before I did. There is no possible way to explain how much their faith in this idea meant to me, so I won't really try except to wish upon every writer in the world the chance to work with people like them.

The best way to thank all of the people who found themselves dragooned into this project is chronologically through the text, so the first ones are Ken Ham and the staff at the Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky. Then comes Ralph Ketchum, who sat on his porch with me as a morning thunderstorm broke over Lake George and talked about James Madison, the great subject of his life. The conversation was too short in that it ended at all.

Ed Root shared his experience with the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, and Kit Hodges explained why scientists don't explain themselves very well. My local Masons-and perhaps, shhh!, Templars-were gracious hosts, most notably Larry Be thune. Sean Wilentz was generous enough to spend an hour on the phone talking about anti-Masons. Thanks also to Jack Horrigan, my local UFO host.

Michael Harrison and the staff of the New Media Conference in New York gave me the run of the place, and I thank Steve Gill, Tom Peace, and Patrick Blankens.h.i.+p at WLAC in Nashville for doing the same. Thanks also to radio guys Cenk Uygur, John Parikhal, and Holland Cooke, as well as Sgt. Todd Bowers. Andrew Cline took time to explain in detail his laws of modern punditry. Also thanks to Keith Olbermann for chatting over breakfast in the days before he became an authentic TV star, thereby confounding one of the central tenets of this book-and, as a wise man once said, that's if you're scoring at home, or even if you're not.

Judge John Jones gave me the better part of a day, and was not in any way ba.n.a.l, but especially not breathtakingly so. Thanks also to Liz O'Donnell in Judge Jones's office. And thanks to Pastor Ray Mummert for his patience and his honesty.

It's not possible to measure the admiration I feel for the people at the Woodside Hospice. Their graciousness in talking about the worst few weeks of their lives was nothing short of a gift. This starts, of course, with Annie Santa-Maria, a very formidable and brave soul, but includes no less Mike Bell and Louise Cleary. Thanks also to Captain Mike Haworth and the Pinellas Park Police Department, and to Marcia Stone and the staff of the Cross Bayou Elementary School, as well as to Elizabeth Kirkman, who's still a Point of Light.

Thanks to everyone in s.h.i.+shmaref, especially the folks at the Fire and Rescue-c.u.m-journalists' hostel, but also to John Stenik, Luci Eningowuk, Tom Lee, Patti Miller, and all the Weyiounnas-Tony, John, and Emily. Special thanks to Emily for noticing that I'd won at bingo, or else there might have been one more ironic twist to Idiot America. Thanks also to James Speth and Elizabeth Blackburn for their insights into politicized science.

There are a number of people who were willing to talk about their roles in what happened as the United States went to war in Iraq. All of them were painfully honest about it. Thanks, then, to Richard Clarke, Paul Pillar, Carl Ford, David Phillips, Anthony Zinni, and Eric Rosenbach. Louise Richardson-and her book, What Terrorists Want What Terrorists Want-was essential in understanding the roads not taken. Steve Kleinman's clear-eyed a.s.sessment of torture was just as essential in understanding the roads that were. And finally, my profound grat.i.tude to Andrew Bacevich, who found time to talk during what must have been a period of nearly insupportable sorrow. People like him need a nation worthy of them.

I advise everyone to visit the ongoing restoration of Mr. Madison's place, Montpelier, down in the hills of Orange County in Virginia. Thanks especially to my tour guide, Elizabeth Loring, and to Will Harris at the Center for the Study of the Const.i.tution. And, finally, thanks to Gary Hart, for a long conversation that informs almost every part of this book.

Three libraries were vital to portions of the book. My grat.i.tude to Greg Garrison and the staff of the John Davis Williams Library at the University of Mississippi, the staff of the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, and to the staff of the Oral Histories Project at Columbia University. Special thanks to Matt Kane (Columbia '07) for expert emergency aid.

I bounced the idea of this book off a number of people and I am grateful for the way they bounced it back. Thanks, then, to Bob Bateman and also to the two Doc Erics-Alterman and Rauchway-for their help and support.

As always, I had a wonderful pit crew for this trip around the track. Mulberry Studios in Cambridge again provided the transcriptions, and I thank again the Benincasa family of Watertown, Ma.s.sachusetts, for their submarine sandwiches and for the use of the hall. David Black is my agent and my friend and, most of all, a conjurer of the first rank. Almost on the fly, he made a book out of a lot of amorphous notions. Everyone else at the giddily pinwheeling empire that is the David Black Literary Agency knows that I love them madly.

For about seven months, I was absolutely unable to explain what I wanted this book to be about. This did not faze Bill Thomas at Doubleday, who knew what it was supposed to be about and patiently waited for me to figure the d.a.m.n thing out. My debt to his patience and deft way with the editing blade is huge and ongoing. (He got promoted while working on this project. I have not yet asked for a kickback.) Thanks also to Melissa Danaczko for her forbearance with my utter inept.i.tude at the task of sending electronic mail, and for her odd idea of what Pierce Brosnan should look like. Thanks also to the folks at my day job at the Boston Globe Magazine Boston Globe Magazine, especially editor Doug Most, for his understanding of why I one morning happened to be calling from arctic Alaska.

There is no explaining my family, and no measuring the debt I owe to them, especially to my wife, Margaret Doris, who is the strongest and bravest person I know, and who lived this project through a year in which she needed all of her strength and courage. Abraham, Brendan, and Molly know what I'm talking about, because there is so much of her in them. I am so d.a.m.ned blessed.Charles P. Pierce Autumn 2008 2008

Notes on Sources

The author is grateful to the authors and journalists whose work is cited directly herein. Some of these works also served as resources for this book's spirit as well as its text. The ur-text was probably Richard Hofstadter's is grateful to the authors and journalists whose work is cited directly herein. Some of these works also served as resources for this book's spirit as well as its text. The ur-text was probably Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which produced several invaluable offspring. These include: The a.s.sault on Reason The a.s.sault on Reason by Al Gore, by Al Gore, The Age of American Unreason The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, and by Susan Jacoby, and The Closing of the Western Mind The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman. The pa.s.sages about James Madison and his work would not have been possible without Ralph Ketchum's magisterial biography of the man, the Library of America's collection of Madison's writings, and Madison's by Charles Freeman. The pa.s.sages about James Madison and his work would not have been possible without Ralph Ketchum's magisterial biography of the man, the Library of America's collection of Madison's writings, and Madison's Advice to My Country Advice to My Country, which was edited by David Mattern. I was able to make Ignatius Donnelly Madison's curious doppelganger partly through a biographical piece in Minnesota Minnesota magazine written by my friend and NPR quizmaster, Peter Sagal. magazine written by my friend and NPR quizmaster, Peter Sagal.