Notes from and about Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles Pierce. (2009)

What Pierce has done in this book is to confirm that everything Neil Postman predicted over 20 years ago about our society has come true. In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business,
1985, Postman saw how entertainment values were taking over our society and warping everything in the process. He predicted that the transition from the written word to visual images would change how we think and what is important to us.
For most of our history, public discourse was rooted in the printed or spoken word which inclined us to use rational argument and put content in context. Decoding the written word and comprehending it encourages sequential thought, arrangement of facts in a meaningful order and conclusions based on factual information or well-argued opinions. Now we live in what Postman calls a “peek-a-boo” world where an image pops into view for a moment and leaves a visceral impression without explanation or context to provide meaning.
TV is made for entertainment. We watch several minutes of news about murder and mayhem, then a commercial about enjoying a beer and then “tune in tomorrow” as if nothing that was reported mattered.
Postman wrote his observations in 1985. Imagine what he’d say today about the lack of public outrage over an unnecessary and costly war and the shredding of our international agreements banning torture. All that has been done to us and in our name during the last 20 years has been easier than the perpetrators ever imagined because we’ve ceded our right to think critically.
As Postman noted, we don’t need a “Ministry of Truth” to banish inconvenient facts and distort our history because most Americans don’t WANT to know the facts.

Enter Charles Pierce with Idiot America. (IA) Pierce reminds us that we’ve always had cranks and snake oil salesmen in America, and we need people like that to expand the national imagination and force us to see new possibilities. But cranks and pitchmen used to be a tiny fringe element and easily incorporated into our culture. They were amusing and harmless.

Now the irrational fringe has become mainstream. “America has always been a great place to be crazy. But it’s never been this easy to make a living at it.” (p. 127) The rise of IA is a war on expertise, a breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is good. Now everyone has the right to be an “expert” on any topic, and real experts are ridiculed. Al Gore was beaten in 2000 by nonsense (and some clever stagecraft in Florida.) He was accused of things he never did or said, like inventing the internet, but it didn’t matter. Enough people said those things in an entertaining enough way that they became “true” by virtue of repetition. “His depth of knowledge was a millstone.” (p. 29)

John Kerry, likewise, was too educated, too smart and that was enough to smear him even before the “swiftboating” began. Idiot America wants to be entertained. For God’s sake, don’t be boring ! Anyone who speaks to the GUT instead of the BRAIN becomes an expert to be reckoned with. “The GUT is a roiling depository of dark and ancient fears. It knows what it knows because it knows how it feels.” (p. 34)

Aside: Have you noticed how all TV interviews start with “How does it feel to be……?” And how all newspaper articles start with a personal story instead of who, what, where, when and how?

Pierce’s three great premises are 1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units. 2) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough. 3) FACT is that which enough people believe, and TRUTH is determined by how fervently they believe it. Pierce spends several pages using “intelligent design” as a good example of this. Another good example is the “NAFTA superhighway” that never was. But enough people believed there was actually a road under construction, so they got Lou Dobbs to lead the charge to shut it down. They shut down something that never existed and probably weren’t the least bit embarrassed about it.

The modern conservative movement (1964 to present) rode this trend toward irrational populism and were successful in selling everything from supply-side economics (“quack doctrine”) to pseudo-religious arguments as social policy. In 2007, 68% of Republicans said they “don’t believe in” evolution as if a scientific theory is something you can tuck into the fantasy part of your brain. (Aside: these are the same people who don’t “believe in” the human contribution to climate change.)

Pierce mentions how the end of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980’s has influenced the tenor of public discourse, but he doesn’t blame that one act of Congress for the headlong rush to idiocy in the media. More than being the end of a legal requirement to present differing points of view, the end of the Fairness Doctrine also gave broadcasters an excuse for not being fair at all. In today’s market, message success depends on whether the message moves ratings/units. Once a lot of people pay attention to the message and start repeating it, it becomes “the truth.”

Pierce says that talk radio was the driving force in changing America from a debating society to a shouting match. Listeners to right wing radio are not bothered by cognitive dissonance. They hear what they want to hear and are not bothered by unpleasant facts or situations. (E.g., a black city kid gets high on meth and goes to jail. Rush Limbaugh buys his narcotics from a street dealer and it’s “Poor guy. He’s so brave to come to work with all that back pain.” Talk format will eventually move to FM stations as people use other devices for listening to music.

Michael Savage is an extreme example of a popular right-wing talk radio attack dog. He’s all negative, all the time. He rants about his fear of a government takeover of the air waves. But he needn’t worry. Americans have already ceded their right to hear rational arguments and educational information.

James Madison knew that to invite religion into government was “to invite discord and to establish the tyranny of the righteous.” (p. 135) The Dover, PA, case about intelligent design serves as a warning to our generation as much as the Scopes Trial did to our grandparents in the 1920’s. Having failed to push “creationism” as science into the American education system, some folks got together and established the Discovery Institute in Seattle to find a new tactic. What they’ve done is created a “controversy” where there is none and then pressed for the “controversy” to be taught alongside evolution in biology classes. To do this would, of course, be giving intelligent design or creationism or whatever you want to call it equal billing in class. Equal billing connotes equal value.

While Judge Jones was hearing the Dover case, he had to hire bodyguards to protect him and his family. He’s written extensively about that experience, and his findings in that case run to 191 pages because he wanted to save any other judge from having to listen to days and weeks of nonsense surrounded by irrational people who had been deprived of their rationality by right wing radio. As with most “fights” over ideology, it wasn’t really about intelligent design at all. It was a fight over the schools, morals, income, class anxiety and who would control political power. A local pastor summed up how his side came to lose that fight. “We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture.” (p. 145)
And that says it all.

According to Judge Jones, an “activist judge” is one with whom you disagree. (Aside: this is why we’re hearing squeals of anxiety from white male conservatives over the appointment of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. They see the future and they’re pissed.)

It is no accident that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded the University of Virginia. They knew the dangers of giving people the freedom to govern themselves. They understood human nature all too well. They knew that fear and anxiety control much of our lives and that there are always opportunists who jump at a chance to profit. “It is not an accident that Mr. Madison listed religion first among sources of dangerous faction. He looked on religious activity the way most people would look on a cobra in the sock drawer.” (p. 166)

The Terri Schiavo case is illustrative here. People can literally go crazy when they are fed crazy information loudly and often enough. People can actually lose contact with reality and go into a kind of emotional trance. Charles Pierce interviewed the people who were nursing Terri Schiavo and trying to take care of their other patients while mobs outside made their job close to impossible. A nearby school had to move its students to a different location because of the crazy people protesting outside the care center. The Congress of the United States took time to try to intervene in the case, and Sen. Bill Frist ended his political career when he “diagnosed” Ms. Schiavo’s condition via a video tape. This is the madness that comes from giving up our powers of reason.

Global warming is another one of these crazy topics. There is really no debate except about whether we should feel guilty about driving our SUV’s. In 1995, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said that there is a “discernable human influence on global climate.” Republicans in Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, convened a series of hearings attacking the report. Frank Luntz, a right wing word shark, in 2002 challenged the science of global warming by damning the scientists. He encouraged people to repeat the mantra that scientists are among those “elite” folks who can’t be trusted. In essence, he set up an “us vs. them” scenario where scientists became the “them.” The Bush administration actually edited scientific reports to suit their own political goals. E.g., in 2006, Dr. Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, had one of his reports edited by a White House operative so as to downplay the human influence on climate change. Dr. James Hansen of NASA tried to speak on NPR but the interview was canceled after managers at NPR were told there would be grave consequences if Hansen was given air time. (NPR, like PBS, is dependent on government funding.)

Why did so many Americans believe the false information we were sold about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction? Why did we choose to believe Bush instead of the people who were actually in Iraq looking for WMD’s? Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all the rest sold us a bill of goods knowing that Saddam Hussein was a great emotional target for Americans seeking revenge after 9/11. The “reality based community” of intelligence officers, Middle East experts and others were “left behind” in the rush to war – a rush for revenge – the GUT was in control of our decision-making instead of the BRAIN.

In the period leading up to the November 2008 election, why on earth was someone like Rick Warren allowed to vet presidential candidates? That alone shows how far down the road to irrationality we’ve traveled. “While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there.” (p. 264) “The Republican Party and the brand of movement conservatism that had fueled its rise had become the party of undigested charlatans.” (p. 265)

Sarah Palin’s nomination was an act of faith in Idiot America. The more that people were presented with her shortcomings, the more she was adored by Idiots. In the New Hampshire Republican presidential debate, the candidates were asked if they “believed” in evolution. Tancredo, Brownback and Huckabee said no and the hall broke out into cheers.

There has been much discussion about why Americans have become so blasé about torture and all the horrific things that the Bush administration did. What many of us didn’t know is that there was a TV show running during the early years of the first Bush term called “24.” It’s star, Jack Bauer, was presented with a scenario where some enemy of American was about to attack our country and bad guys were tortured to get the information needed to prevent the attack. Just a TV show? Evidently not if you look at the polls showing how many Americans still think it’s okay to torture “bad guys” and to keep prisoners locked up indefinitely without evidence of their guilt. Some say we’ve lost our moral compass, but we’ll never find it without a map to guide us. Can we ever go back to being a society made up mostly of rational people who try to make decisions in the best interest of the majority of citizens? Are we willing to read and study the issues? Not according to what’s happened in our recent elections.

My 20-year-old granddaughter is coming to visit me for my 70th birthday next month. She’s majoring in linguistics and sees the changes in our language as a good thing. Maybe she’s right, but I can’t see the changes in how we think and make decisions as being in any way helpful if we are to govern ourselves rationally. Walter Cronkite died yesterday. In one of his last interviews, he talked about how the news business had become less about intelligently informing the people and more about entertaining them. He advised us to take heed and change our ways if our democracy is to survive. The “most trusted man in America” was absolutely right.

Tune in tomorrow.