Charles P. Pierce - Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

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How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

CHARLES P. PIERC E

ANCHOR BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

NEW YORK

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2010

Copyright 2009, 2010 by Charles P. Pierce

All rights reserved. Published in the United Sd.tes by Anchor Books , a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2009.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows: Pierce, Charles. P. Idiot America : how stupidity became a virtue in the Land of the Free I by Charles P. Pierce. -rst ed. p. em. r. United States-Politics and government-1989-Philosophy. 2. Stupidity-Political aspects-United States. I. Title. ]K275.P378 2009 . 973 93-dC22 2008046604

Anchor ISBN: 978-o-7679-2615-7

Author photograph Brendan Doris-Pierc e Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch

www.anchorbooks.co m

Printed in the United States of America IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

To the memorv of John Doris, Ph.D., lifelong teacher, lifelong student

Where can a heretic, Where can a heretic, Where can a heretic call home?

-CHRIS WHITLEY

Contents

PART I

THE AMERICAN WAY OF IDIOCY

PART II

TRUTH

CHAPTER FIVE Radio Nowhere

CHAPTER SIX God and Judge Jones

PART Ill

CONSEQUENCES

cHAPTER SEVEN A Woman Dies on Beech Street

cHAPTER EIGHT How We Look at the Sea 194 CHAPTER NINE The Principles of Automatic Pilot

PART IV

MR. MADISON'S LIBRARY

CHAPTER TEN Torture in New Hampshire 257 cHAPTER ELEVEN Mr. Madison's Library

Afterword to the Anchor Books Edition 287 Acknowledgments 301 Notes on Sources

INTRODUCTION

Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005)

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Is some art-you might even say design-in the way T southern Ohio rolls itself into the hills of northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath il cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron, a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture. At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there was an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling people trickled in through the gate on a fine summer's morning, one minivan at a time. They parked in whatever shade they could find, which was not much. They were almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars came from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and frotn as far away as New Brunswick, in the Cana

dian Maritimes. There were elderly couples in shorts, suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle Resistant and Stain Released. All of them wandered off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that seemed to be the most finished part of