Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Read Online Free PDF Page A

reviews.
    “A stupendous speculator in cosmogony,” gushed the
London Daily News.
“One of the most remarkable men of this age,” agreed the
St. Louis Critic.
And, doubling down on both of them, the
New York Star
called Donnelly “the most unique figure in our national history.”

CHAPTER TWO
The War on Expertise

    T his 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 people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its 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’d liberated from centuries of religious internment. The historian Charles Freeman points out that “Christian thought … often gave irrationality the status of a universal ‘truth’ to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of the natural laws.”
    In America, the founders were trying to get away from allthat, to raise a nation of educated people. But they were not trying to do so by establishing an orthodoxy of their own to replace the one at which they were chipping away. They believed they were creating a culture within which the mind could roam to its wildest limits because the government they had devised included sufficient safeguards to keep the experiment from running amok. In 1830, in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, James Madison admitted: “We have, it is true, occasional fevers; but they are of the transient kind, flying off through the surface, without preying on the vitals. A Government like ours has so many safety valves … that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions can not be exempt.” The founders devised the best country ever in which to go completely around the bend. It’s just that making a living at it used to be harder work.

    SLOWLY , but with gathering momentum, the realization is dawning on people that we have lived through an unprecedented decade of richly empowered hooey. At its beginning, Al Gore was vice president of the United States. He was earnest to the point of being screamingly dull. He was interested in things like global climate change and the potential of a mysterious little military project called Arpanet which, he believed, could be the source of the greatest revolution in communications—and, thus, in the dissemination of knowledge—since Gutenberg set his first line of type. Gore had the rhetorical gifts of a tack hammer. In 2000, he ran for president. He lost because of some jiggery-pokery in Florida and because of a Supreme Court decision that was so transparently dodgy that its own authors did everything except deliver it in a plain brown envelope. But he was beaten, ultimately, by nonsense.
    He was accused of saying things he didn’t say, most especially about that curious little initiative that subsequently blossomed into the Internet. He told jokes that people pretended to take seriously. His very earnestness became a liability. His depth of knowledge was a millstone. (On one memorable occasion, a pundit named Margaret Carlson told the radio host Don Imus—and that would have been a meeting of the minds, if they hadn’t been two short—that she much preferred picking at Gore’s fanciful scabs to following him into the thickets of public policy, where a gal might trip and break her glasses.) By comparison, George W. Bush was light and breezy and apparently forgot during one debate that Social Security was a federal program. In fact, his lack of depth, and his unfamiliarity