Idiot America:How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free is a treatise on the dumbing down of the nation, though Pierce does not describe it that way. He instead says we have mixed up our fact with fiction, our notions of truth with popularity, and our value of progress with our value for profit. To illustrate this, Pierce asks us to imagine a library where “fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell…people wander blindly…into dark corners and aisles that lead nowhere…they trip…fall down…they land on other people, and those other people get hurt.”
Included in this passage are representations of the two strongest elements of the book: the author’s colorful use of illustrative examples and his spot on description of our problem. Pierce excoriates his opponents with almost artistic language.
“Consider the highest level of US government, gathering in the White House, in order t set American law back to a point ten minutes before the Magna Carta was signed, and tossing around ideas they had heard on 24. And people are worried that this country pays too much attention to American Idol? That’s just a reality show, which is more show than reality, because somebody has to write it. That meeting in the White House is what happens when you’ve already made reality a show.”
The best parts of Idiot America are the political bits. Here his criticism seems the most spot on. The chapter on the 2005 Dover trial was especially relevant, as it showcased as good a modern battle between the idiot and the educated as can be found in the history pages of this decade.
There are two main problems to Idiot America. One is the book’s limited scope. It exists almost solely as a complaint by a liberal on how bad things have become – almost like a long form of some well crafted screed on a liberal blog. Pierce makes literally no effort to describe things in such a way as to appeal to anyone other than those who already agree with his main premises: for example, he calls Glenn Beck a lunatic and then states he feels “no need” to justify that statement or “cite three sources” to back it up.
A related issue is the fact that Pierce provides no real solutions to the dilemma – other than vague references that Americans need to “refocus” or references to how James Madison thought our citizenry needed to be educated and informed in order for Democracy to work. These words ring hollow when contrasted against similar sounding statements Pierce himself ascribes to his opponents: they carry signs exhorting their fellow Americans to “wake up,” and they make claims that the founding fathers supported their view on the issues.
The second problem is Pierce’s unwritten premise, which is shared by many other agitators, some of whom are quite conservative. This premise is that America used to be a grand old place, until recently when we started doing X and everything started going to hell. And as soon as we stop doing X, things will get better again.
In Pierce’s case, X is that we started valuing the wrong things as a culture, though X doesn’t matter so much. His description of why the problem occurred, as is the case with so many other authors, is far less passionately articulated as who is to blame.
The Idiot America charge that things have relatively recently gone to hell is further undermined by Pierce's own words. He bemoans the Bush administration’s power grabs, but he mentions John Adam’s Alien and Sedition acts – power grabs that make Bush’s pale by comparison. He talks about the divisiveness of Glen Beck, then links it to the armed militia movement to the 1990s, then further links that to Gettysburg and secession rhetoric by Texas Governor Rick Perry – all while failing to notice the irony that references to Gettysburg must cause the reader to remember that an actual civil war occurred in the 19th century, well before we became Idiot America, at least according to Pierce.
Pierce also brings up both the Scopes Trial of 1922 and the Dover trial in 2005 without noting the immense progress marked by those divergent rulings. In 1922, a court upheld a ban on teaching evolution. In 2005, a court upheld a ban on even encouraging students to read a disguised creationist textbook outside the classroom. And this ruling remarkably came from a George W. Bush appointed conservative justice.
It would appear that American system has made a lot of progress on the issue of evolution, but Pierce will have none of that, content with remarking that the fact that evolution is a controversial issue proves his case. For good measure, he talks up some opinion polls showing the popularity of creationism among the general public and Republican Presidential candidates – but fails to note that the candidate that won the Republican nomination in 2008 was John McCain, who was the first asked the evolution question during the debates and said that he did in fact believe in it. Contrast this with William Jennings Bryan, who dominated a major political party for practically a generation and was the counsel for the anti-Evolutionists at the Scopes trial.
In short, there is evidence that things have been bad for a while and that things are actually getting better, not worse. This suggests that our salvation from idiocy lies in our future, not in our past, which conflicts with the rose tinted glasses view Pierce would prefer us to have when viewing America in the 18th and 19th centuries.
These problems aside, Idiot America is an entertaining and informative read that illuminates one of the biggest – if not the biggest – problems of our modern time. Recommended.
Source: Charles Pierce, Idiot America, Anchor Books 2009
Jared Plotkin - I recently graduated from UC Irvine and I am trying to make a career out of freelance writing. I enjoy writing about a wide variety of ...
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