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

with the complexities of the issues, to say nothing of the complexities of the simple declarative sentence, worked remarkably to his advantage. As Jimmy Cagney’s George M. Cohan said of himself, Bush was an ordinary guy who knew what ordinary guys liked. That was enough.
    This was not unprecedented. Adlai Stevenson’s archness and intellectualism failed twice against the genial Kansas charm of Dwight Eisenhower, but at least the latter had overseen the largest amphibious invasion in human history and the triumphant destruction of European fascism. Bush had no similar accomplishments, nor did he accrue any during his eventful first term in office. Nevertheless, four years later, at the end of August 2004, a Zogby poll discovered the critical fact that 57 percent of the undecided voters in that year’s election would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry.
    The question was odd enough on its face, but a nation to which it would matter was odder still. Be honest. Consider all the people with whom you’ve tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? How many of them can you envision in the Oval Office? Running aCabinet meeting? Greeting the president of Ghana? Not only was this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it wasn’t even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.
    By the end of the second term, and by the writing of this book, the hangover was pounding. The nation was rubbing its temples, shading its eyes, and wondering why its tongue seemed to be made of burlap. Al Gore had moved along, putting his tedious knowledge of global climate change into a film that won him an Academy Award, a Grammy, and, ultimately, a share of the Nobel Peace Prize. He also wrote a book called
The Assault on Reason.
“Faith in the power of reason,” he wrote, “… was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.”
    The national hangover seems to be moving into that moment when the light feels less like daggers in your eyes, and regret and guilt start flooding in to replace the hammers that have ceased to pound inside the head. This is that moment in the hangover in which you discover that your keys are in your hat, the cat is in the sink, and you attempted late the previous night to make stew out of a pot holder. Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have been knocked over and spilled on everything. We have rummaged ourselves into disorder. And we have misplaced nothing so much as we have misplaced the concept of the American crank, with dire consequences for us all.
    The American crank is one of the great by-products of the American experiment. The country was founded on untested, radical ideas. (The historian Gordon Wood argues that it was in the provinces, in America and in Scotland, that the ideas of the Enlightenment grew most lushly.) The country’s culture was no different from its politics. It ran wild, in a thousand differentdirections. More than anything else, the American crank is simply American, first, last, and always.
    The American crank stood alone, a pioneer gazing at the frontier of his own mind the way the actual pioneers looked out over the prairie. American cranks fled conventional thinking for the same reasons that people fled the crowded cities of the East. They homesteaded their own internal stakes. They couldn’t have found the mainstream with two maps and a divining rod and, truth be told, they didn’t care to look for it anyway.
    For example, largely because of the play and film
Inherit the Wind
, William Jennings Bryan has come down to us as a simple crank, but there never has been anything simple about the American crank. In his biography of Bryan, Michael Kazin describes the endless woodshedding that Bryan did in and around Nebraska,