Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Idiot America is a book filled with little that will surprise anyone who has been watching the devolution of U.S. politics, debate and public thought over the last forty (or more) years.
Pierce uses a series of events–the war in Iraq, the Terry Schiavo life-support battle, efforts to give “intelligent design” (creationism) equal footing in public schools–and couples them with observations and actions regarding the necessity of intelligent government and an informed, educated populace from the founders of America to paint a bleak picture of the current state for what passes for discussion (he argues there is little to no actual debate) in the current U.S. landscape. It is a relentlessly bleak picture, punctuated by the occasional triumph that shines like a diamond in a bin of coal.
Pierce presents his premise as such: intellect and expertise have somehow become regarded as undesirable qualities, things to be mistrusted or rejected outright. It is more important to have a president you’re comfortable having a beer with than one who can make nuance, evidence-based decisions on matters of foreign and domestic policy. The soundbite is better than the essay, hair is more important than the brain that resides beneath it.
Pierce argues that the gut (or Gut, as he calls it) has come to dominate thinking, with emotion displacing rationality and logic, where cranks who once had an audience no larger than the people passing by listening to them exhort their conspiracy theories on a street corner now have the wide reach of cable television and the instant access of the Internet to project their lunacy. At times caustically funny and by turns surprisingly lyrical, painting scenes with the care of a novelist, Pierce offers example after example of how idiocy has become ascendant.
As I read the book I found myself alternating between a sense of frustration and outright anger. The length to which people–who should be intelligent adults–fully and completely reject intelligent thought for ridiculous, easily-debunked hokum, is at times astonishing. If some fabrication is repeated often enough, Pierce says, it takes on the patina of truth. If enough people believe and believe fervently enough, it becomes indisputable fact. Actual facts no longer have any effect on these believers. People simply stop listening. There is no debate, there is no reaching out, there are only sides yelling at each other over who is right.
This is a depressing but important book. As I said at the beginning, there are no real surprises here, but Pierce catalogs the problems and hammers his points home. Given the circus that is the current group running for the Republican nomination for president, and given the wholesale manufacture of fiction in the guise of endless reality TV shows, it’s hard to believe that the situation is improving, but perhaps we can draw some hope that it can hardly get worse.
