Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (21 page)

After all, creationism and its spawn are hardly the only profitable alternative notions of how life on earth came to be. Ignatius Donnelly had his own ideas on the subject. The writer and historian Peter Bowler points out that both Immanuel Velikovsky and, later, Erich von Däniken proposed outré notions about life’s origins so popular that they persist to this day. (The History Channel regularly runs programs based on von Däniken’s ideas about the prehistoric influence of extraterrestrials on the development of human life. It should be noted here that,
yes, sooner or later, these theories do bring you around to the Masons again.) Velikovsky and von Däniken shared as deep a distrust of conventional scientific expertise as exists among the creationists. However, their distrust was based on their eccentric interpretation of prehistory, and it was always purely secular.

But there is no ongoing fight in local school boards to “teach the controversy” about how space aliens built the pyramids. “Something more is at work here,” writes Bowler, “and that something must be explained in terms of religious fundamentalism’s offer of an alternative, not just to science, but to the whole direction of modern life…. Creationism works because so many people see their commitment to the Bible as both a source of salvation and a way of preserving traditional American values. This is why the biblical literalism of … creationism has become a dominant force in American society without undermining support for science as a practical activity linked to technology and medicine.” That’s how Ben Stein can make a buck or two selling eye care products without inevitably becoming Dr. Mengele. It’s how he can rely on the scientific breakthrough of radio to make his case that all science leads to the gas chamber.

Not long after the Dover trial, Pastor Mummert spoke about what he’d said at its outset. He spoke softly and gently, but he did not back down an inch. “It seems to me,” he said, “that it’s the educated segment of society that reads the books and gets the new ideas, and that’s the basis of the culture wars that we have going on now.

“I’m not anti-science, you know. I have one son who’s a civil engineer.”

Pastor Mummert came to preach in the southern part of Pennsylvania, where the Mennonites and the Amish came and settled, and where the people of the Ephrata Community slept
on planks with blocks of wood for pillows. There, among the swelling hillsides and deep swales shivering with corn, these people came to escape in their own ways the perils of a sinful world. And they found a country that would welcome them, that had written its tolerance for their eccentricity into its founding documents, that was the best country ever devised to be a little off the beam. It might look askance at them, or turn them rather tastelessly into tourist attractions, but it would allow them the blessed freedom of their insularity. The Amish were not faith-based people. They were far too serious for that. They rendered to God and to Caesar in the proper measure. They kept things in the right places.

IN
Derby Line in Vermont, they put their public library on the ground floor of the old opera house, cleanly melding public information and public entertainment. Curiously, though, down the middle of the library runs the border between the United States and Canada, indicated by a black line running across the library floor. (The line was drawn in the 1970s, after a fire, in order to demarcate the respective responsibilities of American and Canadian insurance companies.) If you want to borrow a book, you go to the stacks in Stanstead, Quebec, to find it, and then back to Derby Line, Vermont, to check it out.

For decades, it was a point of civic pride for the people in both towns that they lived right atop one of the friendliest stretches of one of the friendliest borders in the world. People wandered down the tiny, shady backstreets of the place, passing back and forth between the two countries without ever really noticing. By 2007, though, the Gut had come to rule in the United States. Borders were now dangerous places, shadowy and perilously
permeable at any moment by international terrorists or illegal immigrant gardeners, or both. “They’re proud of their history,” an official of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the
New York Times.
“But because of what happened on September 11, 2001, we cannot do nothing. We have to react when there’s a threat.” The border authorities in both countries moved quickly to restrict access along the side streets in Stanstead and Derby Line. As part of the plan, it was proposed that anyone parking a car outside the library on the Canadian side might well have to pass through a port of entry before walking up the front steps, which are on the American side.

Of course, all of this brought the media, which fit Derby Line and Stanstead into the ongoing market-tested, focus-group national narrative of terror, adorned with ominous logos, laden with dark brooding music, and pitched for six years by relentless anchorpeople wearing their looks of geopolitical concern and their flag pins. “It was okay,” says Mary Roy, a librarian in Derby Line, of the town’s sudden celebrity. “But it was sort of like, ‘Can’t you guys get together and get it once, because you’re all asking the same questions?’

“That one night we were on the seven o’clock news, NBC there, Brian Williams and, probably at seven fifteen, we got a telephone call from a gentleman calling from Pennsylvania, totally irate that the government was going to not be strong on [border security in the library], and what could he do. Wasn’t there a blog, or a citizen’s advocacy group he could join. This was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.”

It has not been an easy decade for libraries. A national network of libraries had been operated for decades by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the Bush administration closed it, destroying a number of documents in the process. The USA Patriot Act, passed in the immediate aftermath of the September
11 attacks by a terrified and docile Congress, allowed the FBI virtually untrammeled power to rummage through the records of library patrons. Some librarians resisted by destroying their records before the Feds could get to them. One librarian in Massachusetts threw two FBI agents out of the library and told them to come back with a warrant. John Ashcroft, who was then the U.S. attorney general, pooh-poohed the privacy concerns of the librarians, claiming that the Feds never used their new powers, but neglecting to mention that the same law that allowed the FBI to come snooping in the libraries also forbade the librarians from disclosing their visits. Libraries are well-ordered places, and there were too many people profiting too greatly from a disordered age for libraries to go unscathed.

Libraries are still good places to visit while you consider what’s gone wrong in the country. They’re one of the few places left that are free and open and, at the same time, reliably well-ordered. Fiction is on one set of shelves. Nonfiction is on another. Books on theology lean on one another. Nobody puts them on the shelf with the scientific volumes. Aquinas and Mendel are in different places. Ignatius Donnelly’s work does not abut that of Percival Lowell or Edwin Hubble. And, if libraries sometimes seem to be evolving into Internet cafes, still, once you step away from the computers, a library is a good and steady place, where the knowledge you’re looking for is in the same place it’s always been.

Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are defined by those people’s fervency. Fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell. The best sellers are on one shelf, cheek by jowl, whether what’s contained in them is true or not. People wander blindly, following the Gut into dark corners and aisles that
lead nowhere, confusing possibilities with threats, jumping at shadows, stumbling around. They trip over piles of fiction left strewn around the floor of the nonfiction aisles. They fall down. They land on other people, and those other people can get hurt.

I
n
The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times
, Earl Shorris argues that fundamentalist Protestantism—and, indeed, American religion in general—has been changed, well, fundamentally by embroiling itself in the pursuit of secular political power. “It has changed from a congregation or a conference into a faction,” Shorris writes.

Defenders of republican government all the way back to Aristotle have mistrusted factions. Mr. Madison went out of his way to wave red flags, most vigorously in
Federalist
10, in which he cautions that “the latent causes of faction are [thus] sown in every man, and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points … have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for the common good.”

It is not an accident that Mr. Madison listed religion first among the sources of dangerous faction. He looked on religious activity in the political sphere the way most people would look on a cobra in the sock drawer. While listing the faults of the government established by the Articles of Confederation, he went out of his way to note the failure of that government to restrain—or, at the very least, to manage—the “enthusiasms” of the people. “When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm,” he wrote, “its force like that of other passions is increased by the sympathy of a multitude.”

THE
neighborhood’s not stylish enough for strip malls. It’s an exhausted stretch of low-slung buildings of weatherbeaten cinder block and scraggly lots carpeted in dust and fire ants, a noisy, greasy place where they fix things that are made out of iron. Deep in the line of machine shops, something large and heavy and metallic hits the cement floor with a mighty clang, and someone curses almost as loudly, and the sounds ring through the heat of the high afternoon. Until they get to the fence along the property, and there the clamor seems to dissipate within the boughs of the pine trees just inside the fence, as though it’s been swallowed up in a cool and private atmosphere through which discordant sounds cannot travel, through which not even the heat seems to be able to pass.

There’s a brook running through the place. You hear it before you see it. There are silk prayer flags hanging in the pine trees, rippling and flowing on the breezes that stir the wind chimes into song. Gentle sounds merge into a kind of stillness. Even the birds seem muted here. There are stone paths to walk on, and stone benches to sit on. People walk the stone paths, lost in
thought or abandoned to memory, noticing or not noticing the brook, watching or not watching the prayer ribbons, hearing or not hearing the wind chimes. They talk in low voices. They pray quiet prayers. They nod to other people who have come to walk the paths, and exchange a word, if they’ve come to know each other. Inside the low brick buildings behind them, their relatives are gently dying. That is why people come to the Woodside Hospice. They are looking for a good death, a peaceful death, a cool and private atmosphere where they can live, fully, until they cannot live anymore, and where their loved ones can come and be with them, and can be alone for a moment, if need be.

“There is a good ending,” explains Annie Santa-Maria, the director of inpatient and residence care at the hospice. She’s a dark-eyed, fierce woman, the daughter of Cuban émigrés. “Hospice people come to believe that there is such a thing as a good day and that there is such a thing as peaceful closure, that death is a reality,” she says.

“All of us are going to die. We live in a culture that would rather give you Botox, have a bacteria rather than look old and face your death. Most of our culture doesn’t accept death, but we all know we’re going to die of something, so better to leave the world with a sense of completion and dignity, and have some support and compassion, and not just people diagnosing you, and shooting you up.