“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” – John Stuart Mill
HuffingTonPost: A new poll of more than 2,000 self-identified Republican voters illustrates the incredible paranoia enveloping the party and the intense pressure drawing lawmakers further and further away from political moderation.
The numbers speak for themselves — a large portion of GOP voters think that President Obama is racist, socialist or a non-US citizen — though, when considering them, it is important to note that a disproportionate percentage of respondents are from GOP strongholds in the South (42 percent) as opposed to the Northeast (11 percent). Also note that this is a poll of self-identified Republicans, which means that independent Tea Party types are not included.
BOOK REVIEW: A VETERAN JOURNALIST’S ACIDICALLY FUNNY, RIGHTEOUSLY ANGRY LAMENT ABOUT THE GLORIFICATION OF IGNORANCE IN THE UNITED STATES.
Book Description: The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have Won.
In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle… But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.
With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.
With Idiot America, Pierce’s thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.
A Q&A with Charles P. Pierce
Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece–and of the book–would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”
Question: You visited the Creation Museum while writing Idiot America. Describe your experience there. What was your first thought when you saw a dinosaur with a saddle on its back?
Charles P. Pierce: My first thought was that it was hilarious. My second thought was that I was the only person in the place who thought it was, which made me both angry and a little melancholy. Outside of the fact that its “science” is a god-awful parodic stew of paleontology, geology, and epistemology, all of them wholly detached from the actual intellectual method of each of them. The most disappointing thing is that the completed museum is so dreadfully grim and earnest and boring. It even makes dragon myths servant to its fringe biblical interpretations. Who wants to live in a world where dragons are boring?
Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?
Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion–often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense–has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.
Question: You delve into Ignatius Donnelly’s life story. In 1880, he published the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in an attempt to prove that the lost city existed. Yet, you characterize Donnelly as a lovable crank, and don’t take issue with him as you do with modern eccentrics, like Rush Limbaugh. What’s the difference between a harmless crank and a crank in Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: Cranks are noble because cranks are independent. Cranks do not care if their ideas succeed–they’d like them to do so–but cranks stand apart. Their value comes when, occasionally, their lonely dissents from the commonplace affect the culture, at which point either the culture moves to adopt them and their ideas come to influence the culture. The American crank is not someone with 600 radio stations spewing bilious canards to an audience of “dittoheads.” The concept of a “dittohead” is anathema to the American crank. He is a freethinker addressing an audience of them, whether that audience is made up of one person or a thousand. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.
Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don’t notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
Question: Is there a voice or leader of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The leaders of Idiot America are those people who abandoned their obligations to the above. There are lots of people making an awful lot of money selling their ideas and their wares to Idiot America. Idiot America is an act of collective will, a product of lassitude and sloth.
Question: What is the difference between stupidity and glorifying ignorance?
Charles P. Pierce: Stupidity is as stupidity does, to quote a uniquely stupid movie. It has been with us always and always will be. But we moved into an era in which stupidity was celebrated if it managed to sell itself well, if it succeeded, if it made people money. That is “glorifying ignorance.” We moved into an era in which the reflexive instincts of the Gut were celebrated at the expense of reasoned, informed opinion. To this day, we have a political party–the Republicans–who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
Question: While writing Idiot America, what story or incident made you the most incensed?
Charles P. Pierce: Without Question, it was talking to the people at Woodside Hospice, who shared with me what it was like to be inside the whirlwind stirred up by people who used the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo as a political and social volleyball to advance their own unpopular and reckless agenda. There are people–Sean Hannity comes to mind–who, if there is a just god in heaven, should be locked in a room for 20 minutes with Annie Santa Maria, the indomitable woman who works with the patients at the hospice. Only one of them would come out, and it wouldn’t be him.
Question: With the election of President Obama, is Idiot America coming to an end? Or, will there always be a place for idiocy in America?
Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
Question: Are there any positive signs that we are moving away from Idiot America? If you could create a twelve step program to America back on track, what would be your first suggestion?
Charles P. Pierce: Remember that perception is not reality, that opinion, no matter how widely held, is not fact. An old and wise friend of mine said that the only question that any American citizen is required to answer is “Do you govern or are you governed?” It has to be answered in the former, and that answer has to be continuous. We have to get back to that.
From Publishers Weekly:
Journalist Pierce delivers a rapier-sharp rant on how the America of Franklin and Edison, Fulton and Ford has devolved into America the Uninformed, where citizens hostile to science are exchanging fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and glutting themselves on reality TV and conspiracy theories. Pierce makes no apologies for his liberal bias, and some conservatives–notably evolution opponents and Rush Limbaugh–endure a good deal of bashing. Pierce writes that in the U.S., Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it. He supports his thesis with references to James Madison and other founding fathers, who may have foreseen and rued the emergence of cranks who would threaten the Enlightenment-based nation they were shaping. Although the book is not likely to win any converts from the right wing Pierce so energetically decries, it is an engaging catalogue of those unscientifically verified truths that enthrall and impassion millions of Americans.
Columnist – John Sammon How would you like to be the kind of person who appeals to the worst in people, most of them small angry white men? How would you like to make oodles of money spreading malice and falsehood under the guise of righteousness, and contribute to the Balkanizing of America?
You too can work for Fox News and become a reactionary zealot, using television and radio. Here are some simple rules that if you follow, you can reach the top…..of the dung heap.
1. First of all, you have to be white. You can’t be a black or a Mexican and become a right wing radio TV zealot for Fox News. You must be white, the whiter the better. So white, you practically glow in the dark.
2. Next, you need to be chubby. You need to have the kind of face that looks like chipmunks are storing acorns in your cheeks. In a medium that stresses slimness, beauty and glamour, you need to be pudgy. Don’t ask why. Just over-eat.
3.You must never serve in the military. In the history of Fox, no right wing zealot commentator has ever served in the military. You don’t need to, after all, you’ll be accusing everybody else of treachery and subversion, while at the same time promoting war, the ultimate perversity. Time in the military is time wasted, a sucker game, not for you, making it harder for you to work your way up from that obscure radio station to the big time as a professional broadcast fanatic on Fox News. Instead, stay in college and get started broadcasting over the college radio, spewing lies about the alleged perverted sexual practices of fellow students. This will develop in you a thick hide and a disregard for the suffering of others and the truth, necessary attributes to be a right wing zealot commentator at Fox.
4. Next, learn to ignore history, while twisting the little you actually know. I didn’t say study history. Just twist it to suit your ends. This is simple to practice in your college dorm room. Simply stand in front of a mirror, and verbally rehearse disagreeing. Have someone say to you, “the sun came up yesterday.” Now say, “No it didn’t.” Now say, repeat after me, “black is white, square is round, up is down.” Look if not forceful, then mean. This will scare some people in your future audience and convince them you know what you’re talking about.
5. Develop a prospectus, a list of lightning rod issues where it’s legitimately one argument against the other, but that you can exploit to whip up fear and hatred, like abortion, or gun control. Write out and memorize mindless statements that condemn the opponents of your position by idiotic inaccurate historical comparisons that seem profound, but really aren’t, such as, “Hitler believed in gun control, and so does Obama, so Obama is Hitler.” The more of these moronic parables you can commit to memory, the better.
6. Never agree to appear on any TV or radio show that is not your own and with someone you know to be intelligent, glib and in opposition to your views. Never, but never.
7. Practice looking smug. Fat white cheeks, and smug. Look in the mirror. Are you smug? Remember, as smug as you think you are, you’re not that smug on camera. You have to be really smug. Practice it over and again.
8. Even though you feel like it, never use the N word to refer to African Americans. Instead, call them the safer “socialist, communist, Al-Qaeda-lover, traitor, subversive, liberal, Bush-Cheney-hater.” Constantly be on the lookout for new smear labels. This deflects from the issue at hand and keeps the focus on you and your personality.
9. Once you become a success, if you reach a saturation audience rating, in other words, a lot of angry 22-year-old white men named Billy Bob Ray Floyd are listening to you, ask Rupert Murdoch for a raise.
10. These are but a few of the principles I outline in my new CD kit and booklet, You Too Can be An Asshole. Only $79.95 while supplies last.
Republicans have called President Obama almost every name in the book, and NONE has stuck! What will they do when they finally realize that the Name-Calling, Racist Smears and Fear-Mongering is all for nothing.
One comment in the Huffington Post stood out. It reads as follows: “Of all the footage from all the cities on all the media, I witnessed not a single black or latino person in whole crowd.Isn’t that odd.If they are actually protesting the things they claim to be, doesn’t it stand to reason at least SOME of them should be minorities?”
I didn’t see any either, despite watching eight hours of cable and broadcast news across several networks, including Fox News. No surprise — the GOP is overwhelmingly white and male. A shrinking congregation of BIGOTS, RACISTS and NEO-NAZIS.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson takes note: “That was and still is the GOP’s bread and butter constituency. They vote, are outspoken on issues, bully and badger party moderates and dissenters, and when fully aroused can inflame millions of voters around the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts. GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked on these voters for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance. The strategy was simple; say and do as little as possible about civil rights, talk God, country and patriotism, use racially tinged code words and furiously court white males. The strategy worked like a political charm for four decades.”
Comically, some of these Tea-Baggers re-enacted the civil war, in yesterday’s proceedings — a war the confederate south lost to the north. Others roamed around chanting “Confederate Freedom Tunes” and waving a multitude of placards conveying violent smears, racist and awkward messages.
Among the messages: “The Audacity of the Dope,” “O Crap” and Obama as an acronym for “One Big Awful Mistake America.” Some messages were ugly (“Napolitano — Obama’s Gestapo Queen,” “Hang ‘Em High Traitors,” and a sign held by a young girl saying “Victim of Child Tax Abuse“). Others were funny (“Don’t Talk to Me! I Forgot My Teleprompter“). Certain ones had sinister overtones (“Tax Slavery Sucks,” and “Obama bin Lyin“). Then there was the guy holding a Cabbage Patch doll by its hair with the message: “My kid’s growth stunted by your stimulus.” “Hey Big Brother: Show us Your Real Birth Certificate,” said one sign in the rain-soaked crowd. “Blackbeard Obama, King of the Tax Pirates,” said another.
They cannot stomach the fact that a black man is occupying the white house. That’s what is itching them most. Obama’s win triggered a crescendo of lunatic racism.
Lone Star, Lone State? — The Governor of Texas threatened to secede: “Texas is a unique place,” he said. “When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that. “My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention,” he said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”
