Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (7 page)

THERE
is still hope for any country that remains as easy to love as this one, in no small part because this is still the best country
ever in which to be a public crank. The United States is an easy country to love because you can take it on faith that, at some point in every waking hour of the day, there is among your fellow citizens a vast exaltation of opinions that test the outer boundaries of the Crazoid.

Americans can awaken on a fine and sparkling spring morning happy in the knowledge that hundreds—nay, thousands—of their fellow citizens believe that space aliens landed in New Mexico, that Lyndon Johnson had John Kennedy killed from ambush, that the Knights Templar meet for coffee twice a month in the basement of the United Nations building, and that the Bavarian Illuminati control everything from the price of oil to the outcome of the fourth race at Louisiana Downs. Let us be clear. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy.

“A silly reason from a wise man,” Mr. Madison once wrote to his friend Richard Rush, “is never the true one.”

We will have to sort ourselves out again here in America. We will have to put things back on the right shelves. We will have to remember where our cranks belong in our national life, so that they can resume their proper roles as lonely guardians of the frontiers of the national imagination, prodding and pushing, getting us to think about things in new ways, but also knowing that their place is of necessity a lonely and humble one. There is nothing wrong with a country that has people who put saddles on their dinosaurs. It’s a wonderful show and we should watch them and applaud. We have no obligation to climb aboard and ride.

I
n 1789
, President Madison told Congress: “Gentlemen will recollect that some of the most important discoveries, both in arts and sciences, have come forward under very unpromising and suspicious appearances.” Once tested and found wanting, a new idea should be mined for whatever merits it might have, and the rest abandoned. All he hoped was that the people in that society could educate themselves sufficiently to distinguish between the good ideas and the transparently crazy ones, and engage with one another well enough to use the best parts of the latter to improve the former. They needed us to celebrate our cranks by keeping them in their proper place, from where they can help the rest of us live our lives. Madison is an imperfect guide, but he is as good a guide as any other.

THE
success of
Atlantis
flabbergasted Donnelly, but it also deeply reinforced the feeling he’d always had, and which had been exacerbated
by his political setbacks and the financial collapse of his Nininger project, that he was a genius for whom the world was not yet ready, and against whom the dunces had entered into confederacy. “We have fallen upon an age when the bedbugs are treated like gentlemen and the gentlemen like bedbugs,” he wrote in his diary one day in 1882. “My book has helped me very much because my prestige before it was below zero…. A succession of political defeats and an empty pocket would destroy the prestige of Julius Caesar or Benjamin Disraeli.”

The book’s success also encouraged Donnelly to move even further out in his scientific speculations. That same year, he followed up
Atlantis
with
Ragnarok: Age of Fire and Gravel.
Finished in a mere two months,
Ragnarok
is even more densely argued than
Atlantis.
“Reader,” Donnelly begins, “let us reason together,” and he then leads said reader hopelessly into the weeds.

Ragnarok
postulates that the earth’s land masses were formed by what Donnelly called the Drift, and that the Drift was caused, not by the movement of glacial ice sheets, as conventional science would have it, but by an ancient collision with a passing comet. Mankind existed in a kind of golden age before the Drift and then, when the comet arrived, fell back into a darkness out of which it continues to struggle. (The comet turns out to have been the same one that did in Atlantis.) In support of his theory, Donnelly again called on ancient legends. He noted that prehistoric societies from the Aztecs to the Druids all included in their mythology the story of a cataclysmic event that involved the darkening of the sky.

Donnelly concluded that a collision with a comet was the source of all of these stories, and that the sky turned black due to the dust and gravel thrown into the atmosphere by the impact. (“Ragnarok” was the Scandinavian myth of “the twilight of the gods.” Donnelly wrote that hundreds of scholars
had mistranslated the word from the Icelandic, and that it actually meant “rain of dust.”) He notes that both Milton and Shakespeare used comets as harbingers of doom, drawing on an ancient, visceral terror of them. “They are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous,” Donnelly writes, “something let loose, like a tiger in the heavens, athwart a peaceful and harmonious world.” That this was a curious string of adjectives for anyone like Ignatius Donnelly to sling at an innocent comet apparently eluded the author.

Ragnarok
is such almost perfect pseudoscience that Donnelly can be said to have helped invent the form. It so gleams with the author’s erudition that you don’t notice at first that none of it makes any sense. In addition, Donnelly was a master cherry picker. He seized on data that support one conclusion only to discard the same data when it seems to undermine another. For example, some people theorized that the continents were formed by the actions of the waves. Other people attributed their formation to the forces of the continental ice shelves. Donnelly dismisses the first theory using evidence developed in favor of the latter. He then dismisses the ice-shelf hypothesis by saying the whole notion is impossible. This leaves him with his comet theory, which he admits is complex, but then, Donnelly argues, so are all the others, so why shouldn’t his be as true as they are, especially with the Druids on his side. “I believe I am right,” Donnelly wrote in his diary, “and, if not right, plausible.”

Ragnarok
bombed. Notwithstanding the success they’d had with
Atlantis
, Harpers refused to publish it. Scribners passed, too. The reviews were scathing. The reception convinced Donnelly that his genius was as threatening to the scientific community as his political ideas had been in the Congress.

The sheer preposterousness of
Ragnarok
seems to have overwhelmed
even Donnelly. At the end, it seemed to dawn on him that he’d written not a work of science but an allegorical narrative of the fall of man. “And from such a world,” he writes in the book’s final sentence, “God will fend off the comets with his great right arm and angels will exult over heaven.” It’s as though Donnelly went to bed one night as Darwin and awoke the next morning as Milton.

There are echoes of
Ragnarok
in the modern “scientific” case for intelligent design, and there’s not a great distance between the codes that Donnelly found in Shakespeare’s plays and the impulse that today sends people prowling the Louvre looking for the clues that a popular novel has told them are encoded in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. When Dan Brown got to the end of his treasure hunt, Ignatius Donnelly was there, waiting for him. It’s wrong to believe that our abiding appetite for counterhistory simply makes us a nation of suckers who will fall for anything. Sometimes, that appetite makes us a harder people to fool. It’s meant to operate parallel with the actual country and to influence it, but subtly, the way a planet, say, might influence the orbit of a comet. It’s meant to subvert, but not to rule.

IN
2003, the state of Texas determined that it would build itself something called the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC). This was a transportation megasystem involving highways, railbeds, and freight corridors that would stretch over four thousand miles and price out at nearly $200 billion. According to a report by Christopher Hayes in
The Nation
, the TTC would pave over almost a half a million acres of the state. The first leg would be a massive toll road, built and operated by a Spanish company.

From the start, there was a great deal of resistance to the plan. Local landowners hated it because of the amount of Texas that would disappear beneath it. The process was insufficiently transparent, which was hardly a surprise, given that Texas has operated largely as an oligarchy since they sank the first oil well there. There aren’t many toll roads in Texas, and the ones that exist are not popular, especially not among the long-distance commuters of the state’s several sprawling metroplexes. What ensued was a classic political knife fight, with local opposition arrayed against powerful special interests and at one point, as Hayes reported, Republican governor Rick Perry arrayed against his own state party’s platform, which opposed the TTC. The battle engaged many of the issues of the day regarding the globalized economy, but it was not particularly remarkable.

And then the road took an even wilder turn, disappearing into the mists where Ignatius Donnelly once looked for cosmic gravel.

Through the magic of modern mass communication, most particularly through the Internet, the TTC has been transmogrified into an ominous behemoth called the NAFTA Superhighway, which will run up the gut of the North American continent, four hundred yards wide. It will be more than just a massive conveyor belt bringing cheap goods from cheap labor to every market from El Paso to Saskatoon. It also will represent the spine of the forthcoming North American Union, which will supplant forever the sovereignty of the United States of America in favor of some corporate megastate called Mexicanica or something.

If it actually existed, we all would have to agree, this would be some kind of road.

In fact, the NAFTA Superhighway is a phantasm, concocted out of very real fears of economic dislocation resulting from the
global economy, and cobbled together from the TTC proposal and a business coalition called North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition, or NASCO, which was formed to study improvements in the country’s transportation infrastructure as it related to international trade. At one unfortunate point, the coalition put together a map of how it hoped trade one day would flow across America’s existing highway system. That was all it took. The map became a blueprint for the highway that would devour America, starting with that toll road in Texas.

Suddenly, letters to the editor began popping up. Political candidates got questions about where they stood on a project that didn’t exist. The legislatures of eighteen states passed resolutions condemning the NAFTA Superhighway, and a bill to that effect in the U.S. House of Representatives somehow garnered twenty-seven cosponsors. Jerome Corsi, one of the masterminds behind the fanciful attacks on Senator John Kerry’s military service during the 2004 presidential campaign, found that it was possible to sail his Swift Boat up the NAFTA Superhighway, and has written extensively about the dire consequences of the nonexistent road. CNN’s Lou Dobbs dedicated a portion of his nightly show on the topic, calling the road “as straightforward an attack on national sovereignty as there could be outside of a war.” There is no evidence that anyone at CNN ever pointed out to Dobbs that covering the “issue” of the NAFTA Superhighway made approximately as much sense as dedicating a segment to the threat posed to American jobs by cheap labor from the moons of Neptune.

However, as Hayes pointed out in his definitive study of the phenomenon in
The Nation
, there were advantages in attacking a road that didn’t exist, and these advantages crossed ideological and party lines. No less a labor lion than James Hoffa, Jr., excoriated the Bush administration for its plans to build the
road. And in Kansas, a Democrat named Nancy Boyda defeated incumbent Republican congressman Jim Ryun at least in part because she staunchly opposed the highway that nobody is planning to build. The issue, Boyda told Hayes, “really touched a nerve.” Which was all that mattered, it appears.

There were real-world consequences. As Hayes reported, a proposal to turn Kansas City into an all-purpose “smart port” was sucked into the furor when it was learned that a Mexican customs inspector might be stationed there to oversee goods headed to that country. And, more to the point, the conspiracy theory, lively and attractive on so many levels, subsumed the genuine questions regarding the consequences of North American free trade, including legitimate matters of national sovereignty. “The biggest problem with the conspiracy theorists,” an international trade specialist told Hayes, “is that they’re having an effect on the entire debate.”