by Charles P. Pierce, as originally published in Esquire Magazine, 11/1/05
There is some undeniable art - you might even say design - in the way
southern
At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild
Concrete plant, there is an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the
middle of it. Happy, smiling people are trickling in through the gate this fine
morning, one minivan at a time. They park in whatever shade they can find,
which is not much. It's hot as hell this morning. They are almost uniformly
white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars come from
Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They have
come from
Which is wearing a saddle. It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy Western saddle.
This is very much a show dinosaur. The dinosaurs are the first things you
see when you enter the
"Dinosaurs," Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his
visitors, "always get the kids interested." AIG is dedicated to the
proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in
every word. Which means, in this interpretation and among other things, that
dinosaurs coexisted with man (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in
Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two
brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to
say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels
and all the rest. (Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a
three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from inking under the weight of
dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs on the
"We," Ham exclaims to the assembled, "are taking the
dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!" And everybody cheers. Ham then
goes on to celebrate the great victory won in Oklahoma, where, in the first
week of June, Tulsa park officials announced a decision (later reversed) to put
up a display at the city zoo based on Genesis so as to eliminate the
"discrimination" long inflicted upon sensitive Christians by a statue
of the Hindu god Ganesh that decorated the elephant
exhibit. This is a serious crowd. They gather in the auditorium and they listen
intently, and they take copious notes as Ham draws a straight line from Adam's
fall to our godless public schools, from
Ultimately, the heart of the museum will be a long walkway down which
patrons will be able to journey through the entire creation story. This, too,
is still in the earliest stages of construction. Today, for example, one young
artist is working on a scale model of the moment when Adam names all the
creatures. Adam is in the delicate process of naming the saber-toothed tiger
while, behind him, already named, a woolly mammoth seems to be on the verge of
taking a nap. Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if
unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is reclining peacefully;
eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a pool under a waterfall.
As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is
completely naked. He also has no penis. This would seem to be a departure from
Scripture inconsistent with the biblical literalism of the rest of the museum.
If you're willing to stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to
include baby brachiosaurs on Noah's
These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked
into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates,
either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and
why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be
educated, if it wasn't so that we would all one day feel confident enough to
look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont
and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit
crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away
from sharp objects and his own money. Dinosaurs with saddles?
Dinosaurs on Noah's
Welcome to your new
Welcome to Idiot
LET'S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last
year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be
transmitted through tears. An
The Congress of the
And, finally, in August, the cover of Time -- for almost a century the dyspeptic voice of the American establishment -- clears its throat, hems and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"
Fights over creationism -- and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be considered -- roil up school districts across the country.
The president of the
And there it is. Idiot
In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.
It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine.
It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.
After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.
Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he wrote, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical."
The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot
How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of
the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence:
"They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the
bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front
pages and putting
A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently
ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean
geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a
It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.
On the front page. Of The New York Times.
Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live , in which Larry asked the following question: "All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?"
And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?
This is how Idiot
This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should its people hold nutty ideas but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. The right to do so is there in our founding documents.
After all, the Founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country
out of new ideas -- or out of old ones that they excavated from centuries of
religious internment. Historian Charles Freeman points out that in
In
THEY CALL IT THE INFINITE CORRIDOR, which is the kind of joke you tell when your day job is to throw science as far ahead as you can and hope that the rest of us can move fast enough to catch up. It is a series of connecting hallways that run north through the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The hallways are lined with cramped offices, their doors mottled thickly with old tape and yellowing handbills. The Infinite Corridor is not a straight line. It has branches and tributaries. It has backwaters and eddies. You can get lost there.
One of the offices belongs to Professor Kip Hodges, a young and energetic
North Carolinian who studies how mountain ranges develop and grow. Suffice it
to say that Hodges's data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old earth
of the creationists, whereupon dinosaurs and naked folks doth
gambol together. Hodges is recently returned from
"Scientists are always portrayed in the literature as being above the fray intellectually," Hodges says. "I guess to a certain extent that's our fault, because scientists don't do a good enough job communicating with people who are nonscientists -- that it's not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another."
Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier
generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics
and religion.
"My earliest memory," Hodges recalls, "is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering -- particularly science, at that time -- people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it's like there's no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.
"It's more than a general dumbing down of
The country was founded by people who were fundamentally curious; Thomas
Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name only the most obvious examples, were inveterate tinkerers.
(Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the
It is a long way from that to the moment on February18, 2004, when sixty-two
scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a report accusing
the incumbent Administration of manipulating science for political ends. It is
a long way from Jefferson's observatory and
The "debate," of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are required for a debate. Nevertheless, the very notion of it is a measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, has slipped through lassitude and inattention across the border into Idiot America -- where fact is merely that which enough people believe, and truth is measured only by how fervently they believe it.
If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to this standard, any scientific theory is rendered mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how there's a "debate" over the veryexistence of global warming, even though the preponderance of fact among those who actually have studied the phenomenon renders the "debate" quite silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving SUVs. The debate is less about climatology than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank and voting in tax incentives for oil companies.
The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease.
"Even in the developing world, where I spend lots of time doing my
work," Hodges says, "if you tell them that you're from MIT and you
tell them that you do science, it's a big deal. If I go to
Hence, Bush was not talking about science -- not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based attempt to gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified -- or, most important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there is no great effort abroad in the land to include that conspiracy theory in sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn't talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh's theological monopoly over the elephant paddock.
"The reason the creationists have been so effective is that they have put a premium on communication skills," explains Hodges. "It matters to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it's important to them, and they are hugely effective at it."
It is the ultimate standard of Idiot
If even scientific discussion is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. Again, the Founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates best exemplified by cable television. Instead, the discussion of everything ends up in the bar. (It wasn't always this way. Theodore Roosevelt is reckoned to be the manliest of our manly-man presidents. He also was a lifelong science dweeb, cataloging songbirds, of all things. Of course, he shot them first, so maybe that makes all the difference.)
It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot
"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors. "There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to them, 'This is what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it is,' " Olbermann says. "And that's what they get -- two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, 'Damn right, it's those liberals' fault.' Or, 'It's those -- what's the word for it? -- college graduates' fault.' "
The reply, of course, is that Fox regularly buries Olbermann and the rest of the MSNBC lineup in breaking off a segment of a smidgen of a piece of the television audience. Truth is what moves the needle.
Fact is what sells. Idiot
Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in
federal court. Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very
easy to fall out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal, and
all the hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter nights was for
nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling
with both fists, but if your books still sell, you can continue to scold the
nation about its sins. You can be Bill O'Reilly, calling up subordinates to
proposition them both luridly and comically -- loofahs?
falafels? -- and if more
people tune in to watch you than tune in to watch some other blowhard, you can
keep your job lecturing
Just don't be boring. And keep the ratings up. Idiot
Everyone is an expert, so nobody is. For example, Sean Hannity's
knowledge of, say, stem-cell research is measured precisely by his ratings
book. His views on the subject are more well known
than those of the people doing the actual research. The credibility of Senator
Rick Santorum of
"For some parents," he writes, "the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home." He goes on later to compare a woman's right to choose an abortion unfavorably with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, he's welcome in the mainstream, at least until either he's defeated for reelection or his book doesn't sell.
"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with
success and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann says. We're all in the bar now, where everybody's
an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal
worth. No voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of
course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody
will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some noisy asshole picks
a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of Idiot
ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American government knew
more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a shadowy terrorist network
called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He had watched it strike -- in
Instead, in the ensuing days a lot of people around him -- people who didn't
know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat -- wanted to talk about
"In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the traditional diplomats couldn't do the negotiating because that negotiating involved science and engineering," Clarke recalls. "Interagency decision papers were models of analysis, where assumptions were laid out and tested. "That's the world I grew up in. [The approach] still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, Wait a minute. That isn't analysis. It's the important issues where we really need analysis.
"In the area of terrorism, there is a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11] -- they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions -- was that we didn't have time for emotion that day."
Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle, humming engine of its success -- against John Kerry, surely, but most vividly against poor, cerebral Al Gore -- was a celebration of instinct over intellect, a triumph of the Gut. No campaigns in history employed the saloon question with such devastating success or saw so clearly the path through the deliberate inexpertise of the national debate. No politician in recent times has played to the Gut so deftly. So it ought not shock anyone when the government suddenly found itself at odds with empirical science. It ought not shock anyone in the manner in which it would go to war.
Remember the beginning, when it was purely the Gut -- a bone-deep call for
righteous revenge for which
"Part of the problem was that people didn't want the analytic process because they'd be shown up," Richard Clarke says. "Their assumptions would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it all out.
"They ignored the experts on the
One of those experts was David Phillips, a senior advisor on what was called the Future of Iraq program for the State Department. Phillips was ignored. His program was ignored. Earlier, Phillips had helped reconstruct the Balkans after the region spent a decade tearing itself apart with genocidal lunacy. Phillips knew what he knew. He just didn't believe what they believed.
"You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven, policy," he says today. "You start with the presumption that you already know the conclusion prior to asking the question. When information surfaces that contradicts your firmly entrenched views, you dismantle the institution that brought you the information."
There was going to be candy and flowers, remember? The war was going to pay for itself. Believe.
"We went in blindfolded, and we believed our own propaganda,"
Phillips says. "We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9
billion in the short term, and Iraqi oil would pay for the rest. Now we're deep
in the hole, and people are asking questions about how we got there. "It's
delusional, allowing delusion to be the basis of policy making. Once you've
told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that's
repeated. You can't fix a policy if you don't admit it's broken." Two
thousand American lives later, remember the beginning. One commentator quite
plainly made the case that every few years or so, the
And Idiot
Goddamn right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the back room will have.
AUGUST 19, 2005, was a beautiful day in Idiot
That faith is not fact, nor should it be, and that faith is not science, nor should it be, seems to have eluded Doctor Senator Frist. It doesn't matter. He was talking to the people who believe that faith is both those things, because Bill Frist wants to be president of the United States, and because he believes those people will vote for him specifically because he talks this rot, and Idiot America will take it as an actor merely reciting his lines and let it go at that. Nonsense is a no-lose proposition.
On the same day, across town, a top aide to former secretary of state Colin
Powell told CNN that Powell's pivotal presentation to the United Nations in
which he described
That it has proven to be an even lower point for almost two thousand American families, and God alone knows how many Iraqis, seems to have eluded this fellow. It doesn't matter.
Neither Frist with his pandering nor this
apparatchik with the tender conscience -- nor Colin Powell, for all that --
will pay a substantial price for any of it because the two stories lasted one
day, and, after all, it was a beautiful day in Idiot
Idiot
And that's why August became a seminal month in Idiot
First, he compared the violence surrounding the writing of an impromptu
theocratic constitution in
And the president went on television and said that nobody could have anticipated the collapse of the unfortunate city's levees. In God's sweet name, engineers anticipated it. Politicians anticipated it. The poor bastards in the Ninth Ward certainly anticipated it. Hell, four generations of folksingers anticipated it.
And the people who hated him went crazy and the people who loved him defended him. But where were the people who heard this incredible, staggeringly stupid bafflegab, uttered with conscious forethought, and realized that whatever they thought of the man, the president had gotten behind a series of podiums and done everything but drop his drawers and dance the hootchie-koo?
They were out there, lost in Idiot
Nonsense is a no-lose proposition. For Idiot