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

including an almost inhuman campaign schedule in his first run for Congress. He wasn’t moving the country. The country was moving toward him, long before he electrified the Democratic National Convention in 1896 with the “Cross of Gold” speech that made him famous. “Bryan was using his talent … to signal the arrival of a new era,” writes Kazin. The establishment politicians of the time had a name for Bryan and the people who rallied to his call; they called them the “money cranks.”
    American cranks did not seek out respectable opinion. It had to come to them. It adapted to the contours of their landscape, or they simply left it alone. If it did so, that was fine, and if in doing so it put some money into their pockets, well, so much the better. Very often, it was the cranks who provided the conflict by which the consensus changed. They did so by working diligently on the margins until, subtly, without most of the country noticing, those margins moved. As the margins moved, the cranks either found their place within the new boundaries they’d helped todevise, or moved even further out, and began their work anew. That was their essential value. That was what made them purely American cranks. The country was designed to be an ongoing and evolving experiment. The American crank sensed this more deeply than did most of the rest of the country.
    The American crank was not necessarily a nerd or a geek, although some cranks certainly are. The American crank was not necessarily an iconoclast, a demagogue, or a charlatan. That’s merely what some cranks do for a living. At bottom, the American crank’s greatest contribution to the country is to provide it with its living imagination. All of our cranks did that—the sidewalk preachers and the sellers of patent medicines, always in the market for suckers and a quick getaway; populist politicians and old men singing the blues on a sharecropper’s porch as the sun fell hotly on the Delta and on Huck Finn’s raft.
    American cranks always did their best work in the realm of the national imagination. They were creatures of it, and they helped create a great deal of it. They wandered out to its far borders and they mapped its frontiers. They took risks in creating their vision of the country, and the biggest risk they took was that everything they believed might be the sheerest moonshine. They acknowledged that risk. They lived with it. They did not insist on the approbation of the people living in the comfortable center of the country. They did not yearn, first and foremost, for the book deal, or for the prizes, or to be the chairman of the department. Without this nagging, glorious sense of how far they’ve strayed from the mainstream, American cranks simply become noisy people who are wrong. To win, untested, the approval of the great masses, whether that’s indicated by book sales or by, say, conventional political success, is to make American cranks into something they never should be—ordinary. The value of the crank is in the effort that it takes eitherto refute what the crank is saying, or to assimilate it into the mainstream. In either case, political and cultural imaginations expand. Intellectual horizons broaden.
    The crank is devalued when his ideas are accepted untested and unchallenged into the mainstream simply because they succeed as product. The more successful the crank is in this latter regard, the less valuable he is to America. There is nothing more worthless to the cultural imagination than a persistently wrong idea that succeeds despite itself.
    The failure of Idiot America is a failure of imagination or, more specifically, it is a failure to recognize the utility of the imagination. Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. It neither encourages them nor engages them. Rather, its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift easily into the mainstream, whereupon the cranks lose all of their charm and the country