Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 1

Idiot America_ How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

by Charles P. Pierce.

INTRODUCTION

Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005)There is some art-you might even say design-in the way southern Ohio rolls itself into the hills of northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron, a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture. some art-you might even say design-in the way southern Ohio rolls itself into the hills of northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron, a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there was an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling people trickled in through the gate on a fine summer's morning, one minivan at a time. They parked in whatever shade they could find, which was not much. They were almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars came from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and from as far away as New Brunswick, in the Canadian Maritimes. There were elderly couples in shorts, suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle Resistant and Stain Released. All of them wandered off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that seemed to be the most finished part of the complex.Outside, several of them stopped to be interviewed by a video crew. They had come from Indiana, one woman said, two impatient toddlers pulling at her arms, because they had been homeschooling their children and they'd given them this adventure as a field trip. The whole group then bustled into the lobby of the building, where they were greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids ran past it and around the corner, where stood another, smaller dinosaur.Which was wearing a saddle.It was an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur that performed in dressage compet.i.tions and stakes races. Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would have worn a st.u.r.dy western saddle. This, obviously, was very much a show dinosaur.The dinosaurs were the first things you saw when you entered the Creation Museum, the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham, who is the founder of Answers in Genesis, the worldwide organization for which the museum is meant to be the headquarters. The people here on this day were on a special tour. They'd paid $149 to become "charter members" of the museum."Dinosaurs," Ham said, laughing, as he posed for pictures with his honored guests, "always get the kids interested."AiG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation, and among other things, that dinosaurs co-existed with humans (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and his sons' wives, to say nothing of the green ally-gators and the long-necked geese and the humpty-backed camels and all the rest.(Faced with the obvious question of how Noah kept his 300-by-30-by-50-cubit Ark from sinking under the weight of the dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were young ones, who thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)"We," announced Ham, "are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!" And everybody cheered.This was a serious crowd. They gathered in the museum's auditorium and took copious notes while Ham described the great victory won not long before in Oklahoma, where city officials had announced a decision-which they would later reverse, alas-to put up a display based on Genesis at the city's zoo so as to eliminate the discrimination long inflicted upon sensitive Christians by the statue of the Hindu G.o.d Ganesh that decorated the elephant exhibit. They listened intently as Ham went on, drawing a straight line from Adam's fall to our G.o.dless public schools, from Charles Darwin to gay marriage. He talked about the great triumph of running Ganesh out of the elephant paddock and they all cheered again.The heart of the museum would take the form of a long walkway down which patrons would be able to journey through the entire creation story. The walkway was in only the earliest stages of construction. On this day, for example, one young artist was working on a scale model of a planned exhibit depicting the day on which Adam named all the creatures of the earth. Adam was depicted in the middle of the delicate act of naming the saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a woolly mammoth seemed on the verge of taking a nap.Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam, this one full-sized, was reclining peacefully, waiting to be installed. Eventually, he was meant to be placed in a pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicted a prelapsarian Adam, he was completely naked. He also had no p.e.n.i.s.This seemed to be a departure from Scripture. If you were willing to stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to include baby Triceratops Triceratops on Noah's Ark, as Ham did in his lecture, then surely, since he was being depicted before his fall, Adam should have been out there waving unashamedly in the paradisiacal breezes. For that matter, what was Eve doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her midsection, as though in a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film? on Noah's Ark, as Ham did in his lecture, then surely, since he was being depicted before his fall, Adam should have been out there waving unashamedly in the paradisiacal breezes. For that matter, what was Eve doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her midsection, as though in a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film?After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their lives, "the man and the woman were both naked, and they were not ashamed." If Adam could sit there courageously unenc.u.mbered while naming the saber-toothed tiger, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what Scripture says is rightfully his, then why can't Charles Darwin and the acc.u.mulated science of the previous hundred and fifty-odd years take away the rest of it?These were impolite questions. n.o.body asked them here by the cool pond tucked into the gentle hillside. Increasingly, amazingly, n.o.body asked them outside the gates, either. It was impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Aqueduct and make the not unreasonable point that it was bats.h.i.+t crazy, and that anyone who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and their own money. Instead, people go to court over this kind of thing.Dinosaurs with saddles?Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?Welcome to your new Eden.Welcome to Idiot America.

THE t.i.tle of this book very nearly was t.i.tle of this book very nearly was Blinking from the Ruins Blinking from the Ruins, and it very nearly was merely a tour of the extraordinary way America has gone marching backward into the twenty-first century. Unquestionably, part of the process was the shock of having more than three thousand of our fellow citizens killed by medievalist murderers who flew airplanes into buildings in the service of a medieval deity, and thereby prompted the United States, born of Enlightenment values, to seek for itself the medieval remedies for which the young country was born too late: Preemptive war. Secret prisons. Torture. Unbridled, unaccountable executive power. The Christian G.o.d was handed Jupiter's thunderbolts, and a president elected by chance and intrigue was dressed in Caesar's robes. People told him he sounded like Churchill when, in fact, he sounded like Churchill's gardener. All of this happened in relative silence, and silence, as Earl Shorris writes, is "the unheard speed of a great fall, or the unsounded sigh of acquiescence," that accompanies "all the moments of the descent from democracy."That is why this book is not merely about the changes in the country wrought by the atrocities of September 11, 2001. The foundations of Idiot America had been laid long before. A confrontation with medievalism intensified a distressing patience with medievalism in response, and that patience reached beyond the politics of war and peace and accelerated a momentum in the culture away from the values of the Enlightenment and toward a dangerous denial of the consequences of believing nonsense.Let us take a tour, then, of one brief period in the new century, a sliver of time three years after the towers fell. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that the human immunodeficiency virus can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay writers. The Texas House of Representatives pa.s.ses a bill banning suggestive cheerleading at high school football games. And the nation doesn't laugh at any of this, as it should, or even point out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn.James Dobson, a prominent Christian conservative spokesman, compares the Supreme Court of the United States with the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher man, says that federal judges are a greater threat to the nation than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get on the stick and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela. And the nation does not wonder, audibly, how these two poor fellows were allowed on television.The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, p.r.o.nounces a diagnosis from a distance of eight hundred miles, relying for his information on a heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives, a former exterminator, argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human embryonic stem cells by saying "An embryo is a person.... We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." n.o.body laughs at him, or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or the inventor of the baby-back rib.And finally, in August 2005, the cover of Time Time-for almost a century, the clear if dyspeptic voice of the American establishment-hems and haws and hacks like an aged headmaster gagging on his sherry and asks, quite seriously, "Does G.o.d have a place in science cla.s.s?"Fights over evolution-and its faddish camouflage, "intelligent design," a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural sources must be studied as well-roil through school boards across the country. The president of the United States announces that he believes that ID ought to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up."We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture."And there you have it.Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It is not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. That America has been with us always-the America of the medicine wagon and the tent revival, the America of the juke joint and the gambling den, the America of lunatic possibility that in its own mad way kept the original revolutionary spirit alive while an establishment began to calcify atop the place. Idiot America isn't even those people who believe that Adam sat down under a tree one day and named all the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take time and spend considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete, just as other Americans did before them.The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter teased out of the national DNA, although both of those things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects-for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power-the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then n.o.body is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en ma.s.se, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist." n.o.body buys his books. n.o.body puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but no different from all the rest of us, poor fool.How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, 2005, a newspaper account of the intelligent design movement contained this remarkable sentence:"They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.""A politically savvy challenge to evolution" makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe that they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly: none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got: he's not going to be able to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.On the front page.Of the New York Times. New York Times.Consider that the reporter, one Jodi Wilgoren, had to compose this sentence. Then she had to type it. Then, more than likely, several editors had to read it. Perhaps even a proofreader had to look it over after it had been placed on the page-the front front page-of the page-of the Times. Times. Did it occur to none of them that a "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an "agriculturally savvy" challenge to Euclidean geometry would be? Within three days, there was a panel on the topic on Did it occur to none of them that a "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an "agriculturally savvy" challenge to Euclidean geometry would be? Within three days, there was a panel on the topic on Larry King Live Larry King Live, in which Larry asked the following question:"All right, hold on, Dr. Forrest, your concept of how you can out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?"And why, dear Lord, do so many of them host television programs?

Part I

THE AMERICAN WAY OF IDIOCY

CHAPTER ONE

The Prince of Cranks

Ralph Ketchum sits on the porch of his little house tucked away on a dirt lane that runs down toward a lake, pouring soda for his guest and listening to the thrum of the rain on his roof. He has been talking to a visitor about the great subject of his academic life-James Madison, the diminutive hypochondriac from Virginia who, in 1787, overthrew the U.S. government and did so simply by being smarter than everyone else. American popular history seems at this point to have devolved into a Founding Father of the Month Club, with several huge books on Alexander Hamilton selling briskly, an almost limitless fascination with Thomas Jefferson, a steady stream of folks spelunking through George Was.h.i.+ngton's psyche, and an HBO project starring the Academy Award winner Paul Giamatti as that impossible old blatherskite John Adams. But Madison, it seems, has been abandoned by filmmakers and by the writers of lushly footnoted doorstops. He also was a mediocre president; this never translates well to the screen, where all presidents are great men. sits on the porch of his little house tucked away on a dirt lane that runs down toward a lake, pouring soda for his guest and listening to the thrum of the rain on his roof. He has been talking to a visitor about the great subject of his academic life-James Madison, the diminutive hypochondriac from Virginia who, in 1787, overthrew the U.S. government and did so simply by being smarter than everyone else. American popular history seems at this point to have devolved into a Founding Father of the Month Club, with several huge books on Alexander Hamilton selling briskly, an almost limitless fascination with Thomas Jefferson, a steady stream of folks spelunking through George Was.h.i.+ngton's psyche, and an HBO project starring the Academy Award winner Paul Giamatti as that impossible old blatherskite John Adams. But Madison, it seems, has been abandoned by filmmakers and by the writers of lushly footnoted doorstops. He also was a mediocre president; this never translates well to the screen, where all presidents are great men.

"There are two things that make Jefferson superior to Madison in the historical memory," says Ketchum. "One was Jefferson's magnetism in small groups and the other was his gift for the eloquent phrase. Madison has always been a trailer in that way because, well, he writes perfectly well and, occasionally, manages some eloquence. Occasionally."

Madison was not a social lion. In large gatherings, Ketchum writes, people often found him "stiff, reserved, cold, even aloof and supercilious." He relaxed only in small settings, among people he knew, and while discussing issues of which he felt he had command. "He therefore seldom made a good first impression," writes Ketchum, "seldom overawed a legislative body at his first appearance, and seldom figured in the spicy or dramatic events of which gossip and headlines are made." Madison thought, is what he did, and thinking makes very bad television.

However, for all his shyness and lack of inherent charisma, Madison did manage to woo and win Dolley Payne Todd, the most eligible widow of the time. Ketchum points out that the Virginian came calling having decked himself out in a new beaver hat. (The introductions were made by none other than Aaron Burr, who certainly did get around. If you're keeping score, this means that Burr is responsible for the marriage of one of the authors of the Federalist Federalist and the death of another, having subsequently introduced Alexander Hamilton to a bullet in Weehawken.) "He did win Dolley." Ketchum smiles. "He had to have something going for him there." and the death of another, having subsequently introduced Alexander Hamilton to a bullet in Weehawken.) "He did win Dolley." Ketchum smiles. "He had to have something going for him there."

Ketchum's fascination with Madison began in graduate school at the University of Chicago. His mentor, the historian Stuart Brown, encouraged Ketchum to do his doctoral dissertation on Madison's political philosophy. Ketchum finished the dissertation in 1956. He also spent four years working as an editor of Madison's papers at the University of Chicago. He began work on his ma.s.sive biography of Madison in the mid-1960s and didn't finish the book until 1971.

"Partly," Ketchum says, "the hook was through my mentor, Stuart Brown, and I think I absorbed his enthusiasm, which was for the founding period in general. He said that he thought Madison had been neglected-my wife calls him 'the Charlie Brown of the Founding Fathers'-and that he was more important, so that set me to work on him."

Madison was always the guy under the hood, tinkering with the invention he'd helped to devise in Philadelphia, when he improved the Articles of Confederation out of existence. "You can see that in the correspondence between them"-Jefferson and Madison. "Madison was always toning Jefferson down a little bit. Henry Clay said that Jefferson had more genius but that Madison had better judgment-that Jefferson was more brilliant, but that Madison was more profound."

We are at a dead level time in the dreary summer of 2007. A war of dubious origins and uncertain goals is dragging on despite the fact that a full 70 percent of the people in the country don't want it to do so. Politics is beginning to gather itself into an election season in which the price of a candidate's haircuts will be as important for a time as his position on the war. The country is entertained, but not engaged. It is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge. There have been seven years of empty debate, of deliberate inexpertise, of abandoned rigor, of lazy, pulpy tolerance for risible ideas simply because they sell, or because enough people believe in them devoutly enough to raise a clamor that can be heard over the deadening drone that suffuses everything else. The drift is as palpable as the rain in the trees, and it comes from willful and deliberate neglect. Madison believed in self-government in all things, not merely in our politics. He did not believe in drift. "A popular government," he famously wrote, "without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a tragedy or a Farce, or perhaps both." The great flaw, of course, is that, even given the means to acquire information, the people of the country may decline. Drift is willed into being.

"I think we are nowhere near the citizens he would want us to be," Ketchum muses. "It was kind of an idealism in Madison's view that we can do better than that, but it depends, fundamentally, on improving the quality of the parts, the citizens. I think he would be very discouraged."

Madison is an imperfect guide, as all of them are, even the ones that have television movies made about them. When they launched the country, they really had no idea where all they were doing might lead. They launched more than a political experiment. They set free a spirit by which every idea, no matter how howlingly mad, can be heard. There is more than a little evidence that they meant this spirit to go far beyond the political inst.i.tutions of a free government. They saw Americans-white male ones, anyway-as a different kind of people from any that had come before. They believed that they had created a s.p.a.ce of the mind as vast as the new continent onto which fate, ambition, greed, and religious persecution had dropped them, and just as wild. They managed to set freedom itself free.

Madison himself dropped a hint in Federalist Federalist 14. "Is it not the glory of the people of America," he wrote, "that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?" 14. "Is it not the glory of the people of America," he wrote, "that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?"

Granted, he was at the time arguing against the notion that a republic could not flourish if it got too big or its population got too large. But you also can see in his question the seedbed of a culture that inevitably would lead, not only to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, but to William Faulkner, Jackson Pollock, and Little Richard. A culture that moves and evolves and absorbs the new. Experiment, the founders told us. There's plenty of room here for new ideas, and no idea is too crazy to be tested.

EARLY on the sparkling morning, the golf carts, newly washed, sit gleaming in a row along one side of the parking lot. There's a faint and distant click, the sound of the day's first drives being launched down the s.h.i.+ning fairways. Inside the clubhouse of the small public course along Route 61 just outside Minneapolis, two elderly gentlemen are just sitting down for breakfast when someone comes in and asks them if they know how to get to the old lost town. They think for a minute; then one of them rises and points out the window, past the dripping golf carts and off down Route 61, where the winding road runs toward the Mississippi River. on the sparkling morning, the golf carts, newly washed, sit gleaming in a row along one side of the parking lot. There's a faint and distant click, the sound of the day's first drives being launched down the s.h.i.+ning fairways. Inside the clubhouse of the small public course along Route 61 just outside Minneapolis, two elderly gentlemen are just sitting down for breakfast when someone comes in and asks them if they know how to get to the old lost town. They think for a minute; then one of them rises and points out the window, past the dripping golf carts and off down Route 61, where the winding road runs toward the Mississippi River.

"As I recall," he says, "when my grandfather took me out there when I was a kid, it was down that way, right on the river-bank. It's all grown over now, though, I think."

A dream lies buried in the lush growth that has sprung up on the banks of the great river. In 1856, a dreamer built a city here; the city failed, but the crank went on. He went into politics. He went off to Congress. He came home and he farmed on what was left of the land from his city, and he read. Oh, Lord, how he read. He read so much that he rediscovered Atlantis. He read so much that he discovered how the earth was formed of the cosmic deposits left by comets. He read so much that he found a code in Shakespeare's plays proving that their author was Francis Bacon. His endless, grinding research was thorough, careful, and absolutely, utterly wrong. "It is so oftentimes in this world," he lamented to his diary in 1881, "that it is not the philosophy that is at fault, but the facts." They called him the Prince of Cranks.

Ignatius Donnelly was born in Philadelphia, the son of a doctor and a p.a.w.nbroker. He received a proper formal education, and after high school found a job as a clerk in the law office of Benjamin Brewster. But the law bored him. He felt a stirring in his literary soul; in 1850, his poem "The Mourner's Vision" was published. It's a heartfelt, if substantially overcooked, appeal to his countrymen to resist the repressive measures through which the European governments had squashed the revolutions of 1848. Donnelly wrote: O! Austria the vile and France the weak,My curse be on ye like an autumn storm.Dragging out teardrops on the pale year's cheek,adding fresh baseness to the twisting worm;My curse be on ye like a mother's, warm,Red reeking with my dripping sin and shame;May all my grief back turned to ye, deformYour very broken image, and a name,Be left ye which h.e.l.l's friends shall hiss and curse the same.

As one historian gently put it, the poem "was not critically acclaimed."

Donnelly also involved himself in Philadelphia's various fraternal and professional organizations, as well as in its tumultuous Democratic politics. By 1855, he'd developed a sufficient reputation for oratory that he was chosen to deliver the Fourth of July address at the local county Democratic convention in Independence Square.

However, for the first-but far from the last-time in his life, Donnelly's political gyroscope now came peculiarly unstuck. Within a year of giving the address, he'd pulled out of a race for the Pennsylvania state legislature and endorsed his putative opponent, a Whig. The next year, he again declared himself a Democrat and threw himself into James Buchanan's presidential campaign. Buchanan got elected; not long afterward, Donnelly announced that he was a Republican.

By now, too, he was chafing at the limits of being merely one Philadelphia lawyer in a city of thousands of them, many of whom had the built-in advantages of money and social connections that gave them a permanent head start. He'd married Katherine McCaffrey, a young school princ.i.p.al with a beautiful singing voice, in 1855. He wanted to be rich and famous. Philadelphia seemed both too crowded a place to make a fortune and too large a place in which to become famous. And, besides, his mother and his wife hated each other. (They would not speak for almost fifteen years.) He was ready to move. Not long after he was married, Donnelly met a man named John Nininger, and Nininger had a proposition for him.

The country was in the middle of an immigration boom as the revolutions of the 1840s threw thousands of farmers from central Europe off their land and out of their countries. Nininger, who'd made himself rich through real estate speculation in Minnesota, had bought for a little less than $25,000 a parcel of land along a bend in the Mississippi twenty-five miles south of St. Paul. Nininger proposed that he himself handle the sale of the land, while Donnelly, with his natural eloquence and boundless enthusiasm, would pitch the project, now called Nininger, to newly arrived immigrants. Ignatius and Katherine Donnelly moved to St. Paul, and he embarked on a sales campaign that was notably vigorous even by the go-go standards of the time.

"There will be in the Fall of 1856 established in Philadelphia, New York, and other Eastern cities, a great Emigration a.s.sociation," Donnelly wrote in the original Statement of Organization for the city of Nininger. "Nininger City will be the depot in which all the interests of this huge operation will centre." Donnelly promised that Nininger would feature both a ferry dock and a railroad link, making the town the transportation hub between St. Paul and the rest of the Midwest. To Nininger, farmers from the distant St. Croix valley would send their produce for s.h.i.+pment to the wider world. Nininger would be a planned, scientific community, a thoroughly modern frontier city.

"Western towns have heretofore grown by chance," Donnelly wrote, "Nininger will be the first to prove what combination and concentrated effort can do to a.s.sist nature."

Eventually, some five hundred people took him up on it. In time, Nininger built a library and a music hall. Donnelly told Katherine that he wasn't sure what to do with himself now that he'd made his fortune. In May 1856, he waxed lyrical to the Minnesota Historical Society about the inexorable march of civilization and the role he had played in it. At which point, approximately, the roof fell in.

It was the Panic of 1857 that did it. The Minnesota land boom of the 1850s-of which Nininger was a perfect example-had been financed by money borrowed from eastern speculators by the local banks. When these loans were called in, the banks responded by calling in their own paper, and an avalanche of foreclosures buried towns like Nininger. The panic also scared the federal government out of the land-grant business, which was crucial to the development of the smaller railroads. When the Nininger and St. Peter Railroad Line failed, it not only ended Nininger's chance to be a rail hub but made plans for the Mississippi ferry untenable as well.

Donnelly did all he could to keep the dream alive. He offered to carry his neighbors' mortgages for them. He tried, vainly, to have Nininger declared the seat of Dakota County. The town became something of a joke; one columnist in St. Paul claimed he would sell his stock in the railroad for $4 even though it had cost him $5 to buy it. Gradually, the people of Nininger moved on. Ignatius Donnelly, however, stayed. In his big house, brooding over the collapse of his dream, he planned his next move. He read widely and with an astonis.h.i.+ng catholicity of interest. He decided to go back into politics.

Donnelly found himself drawn to the nascent Republicans, in no small part because of the fervor with which the new party opposed slavery. In 1857 and again in 1858, he lost elections to the territorial senate. In 1858, Minnesota was admitted to the Union, and Donnelly's career took off.

The election of 1859 was the first manifest demonstration of the burgeoning power of the Republican party. Donnelly campaigned tirelessly across the state; his gift for drama served him well. He allied himself with the powerful Minnesota Republican Alexander Ramsey, and in 1859, when Ramsey was swept into the governors.h.i.+p, Donnelly was elected lieutenant governor on the same ticket. He was twenty-eight years old. Contemporary photos show a meaty young man in the usual high collar, with a restless ambition in his eyes. He found the post of lieutenant governor constraining and, if Ramsey thought that he was escaping his rambunctious subordinate when the Minnesota legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1862, he was sadly mistaken. That same year, Ignatius Donnelly was elected to the House of Representatives from the Second District of Minnesota.

For the next four years, Donnelly's career was remarkably like that of any other Republican congressman of the time, if a bit louder and more garish. After the war, he threw himself into the issues surrounding Reconstruction, and he worked on land-use matters that were important back home. He also haunted the Library of Congress, reading as omnivorously as ever. He began to ponder questions far from the politics of the day, although he took care to get himself reelected twice. Not long after his reelection in 1866, however, his feud with Ramsey exploded and left his political career in ruins, in no small part because Ignatius Donnelly could never bring himself to shut up.

It was no secret in Minnesota that Donnelly had his eye on Ramsey's seat in the Senate. It certainly was no secret to Ramsey, who had long ago become fed up with Donnelly, and who was now enraged at his rival's scheming. One of Ramsey's most influential supporters was a lumber tyc.o.o.n from Minneapolis, William Washburne, whose brother, Elihu, was a powerful Republican congressman from Illinois. In March 1868, Donnelly wrote a letter home to one of his const.i.tuents in which he railed against Elihu Washburne's opposition to a piece of land-grant legislation.

On April 18, Congressman Washburne replied, blistering Donnelly in the St. Paul Press. St. Paul Press. He called Donnelly "an office-beggar," charged him with official corruption, and hinted ominously that he was hiding a criminal past. In response, Donnelly went completely up the wall. He called Donnelly "an office-beggar," charged him with official corruption, and hinted ominously that he was hiding a criminal past. In response, Donnelly went completely up the wall.

By modern standards, under which campaign advisers can lose their jobs for calling the other candidate a "monster," the speech is inconceivable. Donnelly spoke for an hour. He ripped into all Washburnes. He made merciless fun of Elihu Washburne's reputation for fiscal prudence and personal rect.i.tude. Three times, the Speaker of the House tried to gavel him to order. Donnelly went sailing on, finally reaching a crescendo of personal derision that made the florid sentiments of "The Mourner's Vision" read like e. e. c.u.mmings.

"If there be in our midst one low, sordid, vulgar soul ... one tongue leprous with slander; one mouth which is like unto a den of foul beasts giving forth deadly odors; if there be one character which, while blotched and spotted all over, yet raves and rants and blackguards like a prost.i.tute; if there be one bold, bad, empty, bellowing demagogue, it is the gentleman from Illinois."

The resulting campaign was a brawl. The Republican primary was shot through with violence. Ultimately, Ramsey County found itself with two conventions in the same hall, which resulted in complete chaos and one terrifying moment when the floor seemed ready to give way. Donnelly lost the statewide nomination. He ran anyway and lost. By the winter of 1880, after losing another congressional race, Donnelly lamented to his diary, "My life had been a failure and a mistake."

Donnelly went home to the big house in what had been the city of Nininger. Although he would flit from one political cause to another for the rest of his life, he spent most of his time thinking and writing, and, improbably, making himself one of the most famous men in America.

During his time in Was.h.i.+ngton, on those long afternoons when he played hooky from his job in the Congress, Donnelly had buried himself in the booming scientific literature of the age, and in the pseudoscientific literature-both fictional and purportedly not-that was its inevitable by-product. Donnelly had fallen in love with the work of Jules Verne, especially Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which had been published to great acclaim in 1870, and which features a visit by Captain Nemo and his submarine to the ruins of a lost city beneath the waves. Donnelly gathered an enormous amount of material and set himself to work to dig a legend out of the dim prehistory. From the library in his Minnesota farmhouse, with its potbellied stove and its rumpled daybed in one corner, Ignatius Donnelly set out to find Atlantis.

It was best known from its brief appearances in Timaeus Timaeus and and Critias Critias, two of Plato's dialogues. These were Donnelly's jumping-off point. He proposed that the ancient island had existed, just east of the Azores, at the point where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. He argued that Atlantis was the source of all civilization, and that its culture had established itself everywhere from Mexico to the Caspian Sea. The G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of all the ancient myths, from Zeus to Odin to Vishnu and back again, were merely the Atlantean kings and queens. He credited Atlantean culture for everything from Bronze Age weaponry in Europe, to the Mayan calendar, to the Phoenician alphabet. He wrote that the island had vanished in a sudden cataclysm, but that some Atlanteans escaped, spreading out across the world and telling the story of their fate.

The book is a carefully crafted political polemic. That Donnelly reached his conclusions before gathering his data is obvious from the start, but his brief is closely argued from an impossibly dense synthesis of dozens of sources. Using his research into underwater topography, and using secondary sources to extrapolate Plato nearly to the moon, Donnelly argues first that there is geologic evidence for an island's having once been exactly where Donnelly thought Atlantis had been. He then dips into comparative mythology, arguing that flood narratives common to many religions are derived from a dim memory of the events described by Plato. At one point, Donnelly attributes the biblical story of the Tower of Babel to the Atlanteans' attempt to keep their heads literally above water.

He uses his research into anthropology and history to posit a common source for Egyptian and pre-Columbian American culture. "All the converging lines of civilization," Donnelly writes, "lead to Atlantis.... The Roman civilization was simply a development and perfection of the civilization possessed by all the European populations; it was drawn from the common fountain of Atlantis." Donnelly connects the development of all civilization to Atlantis, citing the fact that Hindus and Aztecs developed similar board games, and that all civilizations eventually discover how to brew fermented spirits. The fourth part of the book is an exercise in comparative mythology; Donnelly concludes by describing how the Atlantean remnant fanned out across the world after their island sank. He rests much of his case on recent archaeological works and arguing, essentially, that, if we can find Pompeii, we can find Atlantis. "We are on the threshold," he exclaims. "Who shall say that one hundred years from now the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day!"

Harper & Brothers in New York published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in February 1882. It became an overnight sensation. The book went through twenty-three editions in eight years, and a revised edition was published as late as 1949. Donnelly corresponded on the topic with William Gladstone, then the prime minister of England. Charles Darwin also wrote, but only to tell Donnelly that he was somewhat skeptical, probably because Donnelly's theory of an Atlantean source for civilization made a hash of Darwin's theories. On the other hand, Donnelly also heard from a distant cousin who was a bishop in Ireland. He deplored Donnelly's blithe dismissal of the biblical accounts of practically everything. in February 1882. It became an overnight sensation. The book went through twenty-three editions in eight years, and a revised edition was published as late as 1949. Donnelly corresponded on the topic with William Gladstone, then the prime minister of England. Charles Darwin also wrote, but only to tell Donnelly that he was somewhat skeptical, probably because Donnelly's theory of an Atlantean source for civilization made a hash of Darwin's theories. On the other hand, Donnelly also heard from a distant cousin who was a bishop in Ireland. He deplored Donnelly's blithe dismissal of the biblical accounts of practically everything.

The popular press ate Donnelly up. (One reviewer even cited Atlantis Atlantis as reinforcing the biblical account of Genesis, which showed at least that Donnelly's work meant different things to different people.) The as reinforcing the biblical account of Genesis, which showed at least that Donnelly's work meant different things to different people.) The St. Paul Dispatch St. Paul Dispatch, the paper that had stood for him in his battles against Ramsey and the Washburnes, called Atlantis "one of the notable books of the decade, nay, of the century." Donnelly embarked on a career as a lecturer that would continue until his death. He got rave reviews.

"A stupendous speculator in cosmogony," gushed the London Daily News. London Daily News. "One of the most remarkable men of this age," agreed the "One of the most remarkable men of this age," agreed the St. Louis Critic. St. Louis Critic. And, doubling down on both of them, the And, doubling down on both of them, the New York Star New York Star called Donnelly "the most unique figure in our national history." called Donnelly "the most unique figure in our national history."

CHAPTER TWO

The War on Expertise

This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, s.h.i.+ne them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it's the only country to enshrine that right in its founding doc.u.ments. a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, s.h.i.+ne them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it's the only country to enshrine that right in its founding doc.u.ments.

After all, the founders were men of the Enlightenment, fas.h.i.+oning a country out of new ideas-or out of old ones that they'd liberated from centuries of religious internment. The historian Charles Freeman points out that "Christian thought ... often gave irrationality the status of a universal 'truth' to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of the natural laws."

In America, the founders were trying to get away from all that, to raise a nation of educated people. But they were not trying to do so by establis.h.i.+ng an orthodoxy of their own to replace the one at which they were chipping away. They believed they were creating a culture within which the mind could roam to its wildest limits because the government they had devised included sufficient safeguards to keep the experiment from running amok. In 1830, in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, James Madison admitted: "We have, it is true, occasional fevers; but they are of the transient kind, flying off through the surface, without preying on the vitals. A Government like ours has so many safety valves ... that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Inst.i.tutions can not be exempt." The founders devised the best country ever in which to go completely around the bend. It's just that making a living at it used to be harder work.

SLOWLY, but with gathering momentum, the realization is dawning on people that we have lived through an unprecedented decade of richly empowered hooey. At its beginning, Al Gore was vice president of the United States. He was earnest to the point of being screamingly dull. He was interested in things like global climate change and the potential of a mysterious little military project called Arpanet which, he believed, could be the source of the greatest revolution in communications-and, thus, in the dissemination of knowledge-since Gutenberg set his first line of type. Gore had the rhetorical gifts of a tack hammer. In 2000, he ran for president. He lost because of some jiggery-pokery in Florida and because of a Supreme Court decision that was so transparently dodgy that its own authors did everything except deliver it in a plain brown envelope. But he was beaten, ultimately, by nonsense.

He was accused of saying things he didn't say, most especially about that curious little initiative that subsequently blossomed into the Internet. He told jokes that people pretended to take seriously. His very earnestness became a liability. His depth of knowledge was a millstone. (On one memorable occasion, a pundit named Margaret Carlson told the radio host Don Imus-and that would have been a meeting of the minds, if they hadn't been two short-that she much preferred picking at Gore's fanciful scabs to following him into the thickets of public policy, where a gal might trip and break her gla.s.ses.) By comparison, George W. Bush was light and breezy and apparently forgot during one debate that Social Security was a federal program. In fact, his lack of depth, and his unfamiliarity with the complexities of the issues, to say nothing of the complexities of the simple declarative sentence, worked remarkably to his advantage. As Jimmy Cagney's George M. Cohan said of himself, Bush was an ordinary guy who knew what ordinary guys liked. That was enough.

This was not unprecedented. Adlai Stevenson's archness and intellectualism failed twice against the genial Kansas charm of Dwight Eisenhower, but at least the latter had overseen the largest amphibious invasion in human history and the triumphant destruction of European fascism. Bush had no similar accomplishments, nor did he accrue any during his eventful first term in office. Nevertheless, four years later, at the end of August 2004, a Zogby poll discovered the critical fact that 57 percent of the undecided voters in that year's election would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry.

The question was odd enough on its face, but a nation to which it would matter was odder still. Be honest. Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? How many of them can you envision in the Oval Office? Running a Cabinet meeting? Greeting the president of Ghana? Not only was this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it wasn't even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.

By the end of the second term, and by the writing of this book, the hangover was pounding. The nation was rubbing its temples, shading its eyes, and wondering why its tongue seemed to be made of burlap. Al Gore had moved along, putting his tedious knowledge of global climate change into a film that won him an Academy Award, a Grammy, and, ultimately, a share of the n.o.bel Peace Prize. He also wrote a book called The a.s.sault on Reason. The a.s.sault on Reason. "Faith in the power of reason," he wrote, "... was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under a.s.sault." "Faith in the power of reason," he wrote, "... was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under a.s.sault."

The national hangover seems to be moving into that moment when the light feels less like daggers in your eyes, and regret and guilt start flooding in to replace the hammers that have ceased to pound inside the head. This is that moment in the hangover in which you discover that your keys are in your hat, the cat is in the sink, and you attempted late the previous night to make stew out of a pot holder. Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have been knocked over and spilled on everything. We have rummaged ourselves into disorder. And we have misplaced nothing so much as we have misplaced the concept of the American crank, with dire consequences for us all.

The American crank is one of the great by-products of the American experiment. The country was founded on untested, radical ideas. (The historian Gordon Wood argues that it was in the provinces, in America and in Scotland, that the ideas of the Enlightenment grew most lushly.) The country's culture was no different from its politics. It ran wild, in a thousand different directions. More than anything else, the American crank is simply American, first, last, and always.

The American crank stood alone, a pioneer gazing at the frontier of his own mind the way the actual pioneers looked out over the prairie. American cranks fled conventional thinking for the same reasons that people fled the crowded cities of the East. They homesteaded their own internal stakes. They couldn't have found the mainstream with two maps and a divining rod and, truth be told, they didn't care to look for it anyway.

For example, largely because of the play and film Inherit the Wind Inherit the Wind, William Jennings Bryan has come down to us as a simple crank, but there never has been anything simple about the American crank. In his biography of Bryan, Michael Kazin describes the endless woodshedding that Bryan did in and around Nebraska, including an almost inhuman campaign schedule in his first run for Congress. He wasn't moving the country. The country was moving toward him, long before he electrified the Democratic National Convention in 1896 with the "Cross of Gold" speech that made him famous. "Bryan was using his talent ... to signal the arrival of a new era," writes Kazin. The establishment politicians of the time had a name for Bryan and the people who rallied to his call; they called them the "money cranks."

American cranks did not seek out respectable opinion. It had to come to them. It adapted to the contours of their landscape, or they simply left it alone. If it did so, that was fine, and if in doing so it put some money into their pockets, well, so much the better. Very often, it was the cranks who provided the conflict by which the consensus changed. They did so by working diligently on the margins until, subtly, without most of the country noticing, those margins moved. As the margins moved, the cranks either found their place within the new boundaries they'd helped to devise, or moved even further out, and began their work anew. That was their essential value. That was what made them purely American cranks. The country was designed to be an ongoing and evolving experiment. The American crank sensed this more deeply than did most of the rest of the country.

The American crank was not necessarily a nerd or a geek, although some cranks certainly are. The American crank was not necessarily an iconoclast, a demagogue, or a charlatan. That's merely what some cranks do for a living. At bottom, the American crank's greatest contribution to the country is to provide it with its living imagination. All of our cranks did that-the sidewalk preachers and the sellers of patent medicines, always in the market for suckers and a quick getaway; populist politicians and old men singing the blues on a sharecropper's porch as the sun fell hotly on the Delta and on Huck Finn's raft.

American cranks always did their best work in the realm of the national imagination. They were creatures of it, and they helped create a great deal of it. They wandered out to its far borders and they mapped its frontiers. They took risks in creating their vision of the country, and the biggest risk they took was that everything they believed might be the sheerest moons.h.i.+ne. They acknowledged that risk. They lived with it. They did not insist on the approbation of the people living in the comfortable center of the country. They did not yearn, first and foremost, for the book deal, or for the prizes, or to be the chairman of the department. Without this nagging, glorious sense of how far they've strayed from the mainstream, American cranks simply become noisy people who are wrong. To win, untested, the approval of the great ma.s.ses, whether that's indicated by book sales or by, say, conventional political success, is to make American cranks into something they never should be-ordinary. The value of the crank is in the effort that it takes either to refute what the crank is saying, or to a.s.similate it into the mainstream. In either case, political and cultural imaginations expand. Intellectual horizons broaden.

The crank is devalued when his ideas are accepted untested and unchallenged into the mainstream simply because they succeed as product. The more successful the crank is in this latter regard, the less valuable he is to America. There is nothing more worthless to the cultural imagination than a persistently wrong idea that succeeds despite itself.

The failure of Idiot America is a failure of imagination or, more specifically, it is a failure to recognize the utility of the imagination. Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. It neither encourages them nor engages them. Rather, its indolent tolerance of them causes the cla.s.sic American crank to drift easily into the mainstream, whereupon the cranks lose all of their charm and the country loses another piece of its mind.

The best thing about American cranks used to be that, if they couldn't have the effect they desired, they would stand apart from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone completely mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court. One recalls the lament of Paul Newman's ace con artist Henry Gondorff in The Sting: The Sting: "There's no point in being a grifter if it's the same as being a citizen." "There's no point in being a grifter if it's the same as being a citizen."

It is, of course, television that has enabled Idiot America to run riot within modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It's not that there is less information on television than there once was. In fact, there is so much information that "fact" is now defined as something believed by so many people that television notices their belief, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it. Just don't be boring. And keep the ratings up, because Idiot America wants to be entertained. In the war on expertise that is central to the rise of Idiot America, television is both the battlefield and the armory. "You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own nightly television show on the MSNBC cable network. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things we used to a.s.sociate with what we do are no longer factors."

Further, television has killed American crankhood by making it obsolete. Because television has become the primary engine of validation for ideas within the culture, once you appear on television, you become a part of the mainstream so instantly that your value as an American crank disappears, destroyed by respectability that it did not earn. Because it's forced neither to adapt to the mainstream nor to stand proudly aloof from it, its imaginative function is subsumed in a literal medium. Once you're on television, you become an expert, with or without expertise, because once you're on television, you are speaking to the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who's ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked a lawn mower knows.

The Gut is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. It knows what it knows because it knows how it feels. Hofstadter saw the triumph of the Gut coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he writes, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for cleverness, which trans.m.u.tes easily into the sly or the diabolical." If something feels right, it must be treated with the same respect given something that actually is right. If something is felt deeply, it must carry the same weight as something that is true. If there are two sides to every argument-or, more to the point, if there are people willing to take up two sides to every argument-they both must be right or, at least, equally valid.

Dress it up and the Gut is "common sense," which rarely is common and even more rarely makes sense. It often comes down to a.s.sessing what Everybody Knows, even though Everybody might be as false as blue money to the truth of things. The Gut is as destructive to the value of the American crank as television is. While television undermines the crank by making the crank instantly respectable, the Gut destroys him by forcing him into the procrustean bed of commercial salesmans.h.i.+p. Time was when the American crank forced the mainstream into a hard choice. It could come to him, engage him on his own terms, and be transformed; or it simply could leave him alone. The Gut changes the equation by adding the possibility that the crank can be a part of the mainstream without effecting any change in it. The component of imagination is gone. The crank then becomes simply someone with another product to sell within the unimaginative parameters of the marketplace; his views are just another impulse buy, like the potato chips near the cash register. The commercial imperatives of the Gut restrict the crank's ability to allow his ideas to grow, lushly and wildly, to their fullest extent, and they deprive us of the crank's traditional value. In exchange, the Gut becomes the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.

In her book, The Age of American Unreason The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby mercilessly lampoons the very American notion that, because there are two sides to every question, both deserve respect and both must, in some way, be true. The Gut tells us that this is only fair, and we are a fair people, after all. All one has to do is muster an argument with enough vigor, package it well, and get enough people to buy both the idea and the product through which it is expressed. The more people buy, the more correct you are. The barriers that once forced American cranks to adapt or withdraw-or even merely to defend-their ideas all have fallen. It is considered impolite to raise them again, almost un-American, since we are all ent.i.tled to our opinion.

"The much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates," Jacoby writes, "are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling block to deeper, instinctive 'ways of knowing.'"

Two of America's best-selling authors present a good case study in what Jacoby is talking about. In 2008, a conservative writer named Jonah Goldberg shook up the best-seller list with the publication of his Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Apparently written with a paint roller, Goldberg's book is a lugubrious slog through a history without reliable maps, a pre-Columbian wilderness of the mind where, occasionally, events have to have their hearts ripped out of all context and waved on high to the pagan G.o.d of the unblinking sun. Apparently written with a paint roller, Goldberg's book is a lugubrious slog through a history without reliable maps, a pre-Columbian wilderness of the mind where, occasionally, events have to have their hearts ripped out of all context and waved on high to the pagan G.o.d of the unblinking sun.