Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 4

The national shows all come in by satellite. "Every commercial break, every news break, has a tone that we receive, so we know they're coming," says Patrick Blankens.h.i.+p, a young man who's engineering the programming at WLAC the afternoon of my visit. He's heard the history of the station, and he thinks it might have been fun to work here "when they were doing R&B, and there was that kind of frenzy."

Every day from three P.M. P.M. to six to six P.M. P.M., Sean Hannity's show goes sailing out over the 50,000 watts of WLAC, saying exactly the same thing that he's saying to thirteen million people on five hundred other stations, talking to this particular part of a country full of people grown bored with talking to themselves. Once, WLAC did something remarkable-it developed and sustained a subversive unity that would help undermine the divisions that held America together. Now, though, far away, one computer talks to a satellite, and the satellite talks to another computer down in Nashville in an office filled with the low and melancholy hum of remorseless corporate efficiency. n.o.body sells baby chicks here anymore.

"I've heard the stories," said Steve Gill, whose show precedes Sean Hannity's on WLAC. Gill's a big, friendly bear of a guy with a down-home accent that stands out at the New Media Conference. "One time, Jesse Jackson was in Nashville," Gill recalled, "and he came on the station and talked about how he used to listen to WLAC when he was coming up in North Carolina. heard the stories," said Steve Gill, whose show precedes Sean Hannity's on WLAC. Gill's a big, friendly bear of a guy with a down-home accent that stands out at the New Media Conference. "One time, Jesse Jackson was in Nashville," Gill recalled, "and he came on the station and talked about how he used to listen to WLAC when he was coming up in North Carolina.

"When I started there, Hoss Allen [another legendary WLAC DJ, whose show followed John R.'s back in the old days] used to still be around, and he used to talk about how surprised people always used to be back in his day to find out he was white. I mean, everybody thought he was black."

Gill stood talking outside the movie theater in which the conference was about to give its coveted Freedom of Speech Award to a nationally syndicated talk host named Michael Savage. It is not a major exaggeration to say that Savage makes Gordon Liddy sound like Bertrand Russell. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Michael Savage, whose work this conference is preparing to drape in ermine, is a raving public nutcase.

Born Michael Weiner, he studied anthropology and ethn.o.biology, picking up two master's degrees at the University of Hawaii and a Ph.D. from the University of California. In the latter field, he briefly came into the public eye in the 1980s, when he took an obscure research paper concerning the high incidence of Alzheimer's disease in Canadian bauxite miners and turned it into something of an international brouhaha in which aluminum came to be blamed for the disease. People threw out aluminum cookware. Gla.s.s bottlers ran TV commercials meant to scare the people who still drank their beer out of cans. The frenzy didn't truly abate until the genetic markers for AD began to be discovered.

But Weiner didn't go off the rails until he'd changed his name and become a talk show host. Based in San Francisco-on KGO, the station run by the same Jack Swanson who would have fired Don Imus and then himself-Savage quickly went national. An estimated six million listeners on three hundred stations were treated to rambling, barely coherent babble about "t.u.r.d World" immigrants, gay people, treasonous liberals ("They'll kill you because they're deranged!"), castrating feminists ("human wreckage in high heels"), self-hating Jews, and other denizens of the menagerie that Savage apparently has running around between his ears. The Million Mom March was "the Million d.y.k.e March." Speaking of high school students who were spending time feeding the homeless, Savage suggested that, "There's always the thrill and possibility that they'll be raped in a Dumpster while giving out a turkey sandwich."

And he'd said all of this before MSNBC decided to put him on television.

Savage, said Erik Sorensen, the alleged adult who hired him, was "brash, pa.s.sionate, and smart." Thus Sorensen pretended, in vain, that he wasn't just trying to bring in those six million listeners attracted by someone who celebrates Yom Kippur by running tapes of Adolf Hitler's speeches.

Mercifully, the TV show proved short-lived, Savage celebrated the Fourth of July by stuffing sausages into his mouth while telling a gay caller to "get AIDS and die, you pig," thus burying himself beneath a half ton of Freudian irony. This might have been enough to sink most careers but, once carved, a niche is forever. Now a victim of the dreaded censorious liberal media-and not, as reality would have it, of a rare spasm of common decency in the world of pundit television-Savage found his talk radio career flouris.h.i.+ng even more, until we all gathered in New York to honor him. Less than a year later, Savage would pa.s.s along the shocking news that childhood autism was "a fraud and a racket.... I'll tell you what autism is. In ninety-nine percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent. They don't have a father around to tell them, 'Stop acting like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there screaming and crying, idiot.'"

The autism community exploded in rage. Savage lost some sponsors, and some stations even canceled his show. Mark Masters, whose Talk Radio Network brings Michael Savage to the nation, summoned up all the spine of a ficus to complain: "Unfortunately, by condensing his multifaceted concerns into 84 seconds of commentary, the ... context for his remarks was not apparent."

Savage's remarks could not have come as any shock to anyone who'd been in the theater on the afternoon of the Free Speech presentation. Michael Savage got this award because people were willing to pay him to say exactly the kind of thing he said.

The award was preceded by a speech by Alan Colmes, a tall, pa.s.sive-looking man who once played the role of Sean Hannity's heavy-bag every night on Fox television. Colmes took the pseudo-Lockean high road previously trod by Michael Harrison: "As much as I find much of what Michael Savage says despicable," he intoned, "I am reminded that there are many people who find what I say despicable. I don't want to live in a country where Michael Savage can't say the things he says, because I'm next, or any one of us could be next."

Colmes declined to mention how many times he's speculated on his show how lucky it would be for, say, comely freshmen at Bob Jones University to experience the "thrill" of being raped behind an athletic dorm. He also failed to explain exactly how Michael Savage has been imperiled by anyone save the voices in his own head. But, good liberal that he was, he did mention that Savage had been "the first conservative to speak out against this so-called conservative administration."

Of course, Savage did so because the administration had declined to fulfill his fondest wish, which was to clap in irons everyone who looked like an illegal immigrant and drop them into San Francis...o...b..y. Savage was operating well within his niche, selling the product he was paid to sell. To do anything else would be to throw on the table a new intellectual commodity, for which his market might not pay. What Colmes praised as an act of intellectual courage really was little more than Savage's reluctance to try to sell New c.o.ke to his established audience. "Who gets to decide?" Colmes meeped. The answer, apparently, was n.o.body. We are all enn.o.bled by the blessings of a country in which someone can make a fortune talking about "dog-grilling" Koreans on the radio.

One tires of this easily. Colmes's attempt to graft an intellectual conscience onto an industry based on profitable ignorance was exhausting. It was like watching someone try to explain that his hippo could conjugate verbs. Fortunately, Mark Masters came along with precisely the right corrective. "When I heard Michael Savage," he said, "I thought this was the spark that might give life to independent syndication. Everyone thought I was crazy, and we didn't get paid for two years. But, eventually, Savage proved we could do it, and I'm grateful for that. If it hadn't been for Michael Savage, I couldn't have relaunched Talk Radio Network."

Savage didn't come to New York to pick up his award. Unexplained "personal reasons" kept him home in the city he calls "San Fran Sicko." Instead, he sent a DVD of his acceptance speech. The house lights dimmed. Savage appeared on screen, mysteriously walking down a dock by the ocean. He looked like someone who'd gotten drunk at the yacht club cotillion and spent the next four days sleeping in the boat basin. The video mysteriously kept jump-cutting between Savage on the dock and Savage standing in front of what appeared to be a clam shack. It was an altogether remarkable film. It looked like a hostage tape.

Savage veered wildly between truckling grat.i.tude for the recognition, and paranoid ramblings about the people who have set about to destroy him, and thus, presumably, all of us. These included adherents of the "environmental faith" who "want to make it a crime to deny global warming." The ident.i.ty of these Tofu Torquemadas remains a mystery.

There is some stirring in the theater. This display is not what many of those present had in mind. This is the acknowledged leader of their profession, and he's acting like a guy you'd run away from on the sidewalk. He waves his arms. He shouts at the sky. If there were a moon out, he'd be howling at it.

"Freedom of speech has never been in such a perilous state as it is today," Savage bellowed, as a few people in the distant rows begin to filter toward the back doors of the theater. "That is because in Venezuela, the dictator Hugo Chavez just shut down a TV network. That can't happen here, you say? Oh, it can't?

"As I speak, Congressman [Maurice] Hinchey of New York ... and others are circulating a bill in Congress to return the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Which means that people like Michael Savage will not be able to speak freely. Is that any different than Chavez shutting down a TV network? Is that not dictators.h.i.+p?"

Well, no, of course it's not dictators.h.i.+p, even if it were going to happen, which it isn't. n.o.body's going to put Michael Savage in jail. n.o.body's even going to take him off the radio, even though he's plainly tetched. By this standard, the United States was a dictators.h.i.+p in its public discourse from 1939 until 1987, and at least some of the people in the hall are old enough to remember some robust debates over things like civil rights and Vietnam that occurred while the airwaves were bound by the iron shackles of the Fairness Doctrine-which, even if it came back, which it won't, would require only that, if a station wanted to broadcast Michael Savage, it also would have to find a mushy nonent.i.ty like Alan Colmes to achieve "balance."

The lights come up and there's some low murmuring as the crowd files out. The First Amendment, G.o.d love it, lives to fight another day in a country that's grown bored with talking to itself. America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.

CHAPTER SIX

G.o.d and Judge Jones

In November 1784, the Virginia legislature was in an uproar. A proposal had come before it to support "teachers of the Christian religion" through a new general tax. No less a figure than Patrick Henry lent his voice to the proposal. His arguments will sound somewhat familiar: Henry maintained that this tax was needed because of the "moral decay" that had set in since Virginia disestablished the Anglican church in 1777 by adopting its own Bill of Rights. "Many influential men," writes Ralph Ketchum, "... retained the hallowed ideas that religion was essential to the well-being of society and that the well-being of religion required state support." 1784, the Virginia legislature was in an uproar. A proposal had come before it to support "teachers of the Christian religion" through a new general tax. No less a figure than Patrick Henry lent his voice to the proposal. His arguments will sound somewhat familiar: Henry maintained that this tax was needed because of the "moral decay" that had set in since Virginia disestablished the Anglican church in 1777 by adopting its own Bill of Rights. "Many influential men," writes Ralph Ketchum, "... retained the hallowed ideas that religion was essential to the well-being of society and that the well-being of religion required state support."

Nevertheless, since Virginia had relieved itself of an established church, the spiritual life of the Commonwealth had exploded. There were Baptists and Methodists flouris.h.i.+ng, especially in the western parts of the state. The Presbyterians had gained in strength and numbers. All of these denominations howled in outrage at the notion that tax monies should be sluiced off into the Episcopal Church. The issue so roiled the politics of the state that many of the people who'd supported the law lost their seats in a subsequent election. In June 1785, Mr. Madison took up his pen in opposition to the proposal.

His "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious a.s.sessments" is the most closely reasoned argument for a separation of church and state ever written. As Ketchum puts it, it is "a defense of freedom for the human mind worthy of Milton, Jefferson or Mill. The Remonstrance argued that government suffered when religion was established, and that religion suffered the closer it got to government, and that human liberty suffered in either case. Its phrases were clear and unequivocal."

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties," Madison wrote. "... Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of only one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?"

Citizens had a right to follow any religion they wanted, Madison wrote. They had a right to follow no religion at all. The primacy of the individual conscience was paramount. His language was unsparing. Religion established by the state is of necessity corrupted. Madison "argues that religion will best support morality if it is free and pure, working up from its independent and spontaneous roots," observes the historian Garry Wills. Moreover, Madison contends, the commingling of religion and government is inevitably a recipe for civic discord.

"Torrents of blood," Madison wrote, "have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion." He notes that simply proposing the bill has led to great disharmony. "What mischiefs may not be dreaded, should this enemy of public quiet be armed with the force of a law?"

As in all things, Madison had done his homework. He rooted his arguments in one of the oldest precedents in Christendom: the adoption by the Emperor Constantine of Christianity as the official religion of what had become a fractious Roman empire. Constantine had brought in Christianity not as a moral code, but as a tool to enforce political unity.

"He attempted to use Christianity as a means of bringing order to society," writes the historian Charles Freeman. "... In many of his other laws, he maintained a traditional Roman brutality.... If a free woman had a s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p with a male slave, both were to die, the slave by being burnt alive. Slaves who were found to be an accessory to the seduction of a young girl were to have molten metal poured down their throats. Christians played very little part in Constantine's administration and the army remained pagan."

This, Madison believed, was not a promising start for the notion of an established religion. "Madison agreed with [Joseph] Priestley and other Enlightenment figures that the purity of Christian belief and practice was corrupted when Constantine made it a state religion," writes Garry Wills. "All the abuses of power through the Middle Ages reflected the entanglement of the spiritual with the worldly." What n.o.body antic.i.p.ated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they would meet inevitably in the heart of Idiot America.

Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking s.p.a.ces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to fill the niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.

"MY contention," writes George Barna, a "church consultant," in 1988, "is that the major problem plaguing the church is its failure to embrace a marketing orientation in what has become a market-driven environment." This situation did not last long. contention," writes George Barna, a "church consultant," in 1988, "is that the major problem plaguing the church is its failure to embrace a marketing orientation in what has become a market-driven environment." This situation did not last long.

Today, suppliers of "Christian" products, up to and including the various churches themselves, have created a self-contained and profitable universe in which almost everything that was worthwhile about Christianity's contact with the secular world has been cheapened and fas.h.i.+oned into tawdry souvenirs for the suckers. Sacred music has traded Gregorian chant, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Thomas Dorsey, and Mahalia Jackson for "wors.h.i.+p anthems" sung by stubby white guys who look like they flunked the audition for Counting Crows. A literature that once produced C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton now sells millions of copies of the "Left Behind" series, written by Jerry Jenkins and the noisome political preacher Tim LaHaye, in which the end times occur and the Antichrist arrives in the person of one Nicolae Carpathia, so named, perhaps, because the authors didn't think of calling him "Evil J. Transylvania." Carpathia comes to power preaching a one-world government based in the United Nations, which, at least, proves that Jenkins and LaHaye have rooted their profitable Apocalypse in the American conspiratorial tradition. As far as can be determined, however, Mr. Carpathia is not a Mason.

Anyway, he has a good run of it until Jesus comes back to earth and does a lot of b.l.o.o.d.y slaying and dismembering in and around the village of Megiddo, which has had enough trouble. (Jesus, it seems, has developed a talent for disemboweling people in the years since he left town.) The plot is preposterous. The characters all speak as though they learned English from the Ostrogoths. And the series is a genuine publis.h.i.+ng phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies.

It has sold so well and so widely that Time Time put the authors on the cover, and the article inside the magazine did not find it at all necessary to point out that (a) Jenkins and LaHaye are peddling a fringe interpretation of Scripture rejected by most scholars; and (b) the whole scenario is absurd, no matter how many people believe it. Thousands of people ascending bodily to heaven? Antichrists from the UN with names like James Bond villains? Jesus chopping folks up in the sand? To call this medieval is to insult Thomas Aquinas; this is the kind of thing dreamed up by religious lunatics, dying of thirst in a cave in the Sinai. put the authors on the cover, and the article inside the magazine did not find it at all necessary to point out that (a) Jenkins and LaHaye are peddling a fringe interpretation of Scripture rejected by most scholars; and (b) the whole scenario is absurd, no matter how many people believe it. Thousands of people ascending bodily to heaven? Antichrists from the UN with names like James Bond villains? Jesus chopping folks up in the sand? To call this medieval is to insult Thomas Aquinas; this is the kind of thing dreamed up by religious lunatics, dying of thirst in a cave in the Sinai.

Yes, the old Roman Catholics once sold off their saints piecemeal, and sometimes the saint's finger you bought turned out to be a pig's knuckle, but the vendors of holy relics were absolute pikers compared with those who traffic in the notion of an embattled elect surrounded by a scornful world. Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country's politics. And religion has been sold there solely as a product.

Mr. Madison saw this coming. Political religion always has been a sucker's game for marks and prayerful mama's boys, an ever vain search for a nonexistent pea hidden beneath the swindler's overturned chalices. It exchanges the loaves and fish for the rigged wheel and the marked deck. It speaks not in tongues but in euphemisms. A politician discussing his religion now refers to himself as a "person of faith," which tells you more about the politician's b.a.l.l.s than it does about his soul. He doesn't have enough of the former to call himself "religious," because that leads to the question of which religion and why he chooses to follow it and not one of the dozens of others, or none of them at all.

Such questions cause actual thought to break out, something that all modern politicians endeavor to avoid. So a politician becomes a "person of faith," and good for him. So is the fan in the bleachers who roots for the Red Sox and so is the guy in Oregon who's looking for Sasquatch. Torquemada was a person of faith. So were Marx and Lenin. So is almost any atheist. In its essential cowardice, the phrase means nothing. It's a slogan. A sales pitch.

Consider the sad case of David Kuo, born-twice victim of his own sanctified bunco game. In his memoir, Tempting Faith Tempting Faith, Kuo vividly describes his career as the last of the suckers. Kuo came to Was.h.i.+ngton to work for the second Bush administration on "faith-based" initiatives. The government would divert public money to religious charities, which were presumed to do a better job of confronting the nation's social problems. An Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives would even be established within the executive branch, Mr. Madison thereby having been told exactly where he could stick his Remonstrance.

Kuo was sincere. At least on the surface, this was a G.o.d-drunk administration. There was regular Bible study. The staff came from evangelical diploma mills, and like hired like. (According to a questionnaire obtained by the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post, applicants to the Department of Justice were routinely asked whether they believed in G.o.d.) Kuo a.s.sumed his bosses were sincere as well, at least until it became plain to him that the program had a lot more of Boss Tweed than Beat.i.tude to it. Kuo writes: Every other White House office was up and running. The faith-based initiative still operated out of the nearly vacant transition offices. Three days later, a Tuesday, Karl Rove summoned [Don] Willett [a former Bush aide who initially shepherded the program] to his office to announce that the entire faith-based initiative would be rolled out the following Monday. Willett asked just how-without a director, office, or plan-the president could do that. Rove looked at him, took a deep breath, and said, 'I don't know. Just get me a f.u.c.king faith-based thing. Got it?'"

A f.u.c.king faith-based thing.

And why not? "Faith-based" is another dishonest term for a dishonest time. It's a word for people too cowardly to call themselves religious and it is beloved by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith. It was eagerly adopted by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do either one, because it conforms to the Three Great Premises. It's a cheap salesman's term of art, something you'd use to pitch a television program or a breakfast cereal. It even sounds like an additive-"faith-based"-an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's camouflage under which religion is sold like smuggled goods in places where it doesn't belong.

To call something "faith-based" for the purposes of hiding the clearly sectarian character of what you're actually talking about is to admit that there really is no difference between what went on at Lourdes and what went on at Roswell. In truth, the United States of America can be said to be "faith-based," and one of the primary articles of that faith is that religion-in all its forms-should be kept out of the country's secular inst.i.tutions, both for religion's own good and for the good of the inst.i.tutions in question. Mr. Madison knew it in his bones. To invite religion into government is to invite discord and to establish the tyranny of the righteous. Now, today, in Idiot America, where everything is a marketplace, to sell religion through government is to invite discord and to establish the tyranny of fraud. The transaction becomes just another f.u.c.king faith-based thing.

ON the steps of courthouses, people speak in low tones, head down. They cling to what they're saying as though all of it is secret. Every word. Every syllable. Every diphthong. Every letter. The people on the steps hold all of them close because, once they get inside, everything will come out. Every secret will be revealed. The top step of the courthouse staircase is the last place where anything is private anymore. Inside the courtroom, everything belongs to the world-even, and most dangerously, the truth. the steps of courthouses, people speak in low tones, head down. They cling to what they're saying as though all of it is secret. Every word. Every syllable. Every diphthong. Every letter. The people on the steps hold all of them close because, once they get inside, everything will come out. Every secret will be revealed. The top step of the courthouse staircase is the last place where anything is private anymore. Inside the courtroom, everything belongs to the world-even, and most dangerously, the truth.

It's a warm day running toward spring in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Lawyers and their clients mill around on the sidewalk, in the shade of ancient trees. There are not many people this morning, not enough of them to get in anybody's way. It's a slow Monday at the federal district court. Upstairs, the windows are open in the judge's chambers and there's hardly any noise from the street below. In many ways, the judge is grateful for the quiet.

"I'm an optimist," Judge John E. Jones III explains. "I really am. I think the system ultimately works the way it's supposed to work. What's the old adage? If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. I really believe that. And although this is a very imperfect system in many ways, at the end of the day, I think it works pretty well."

He's a peppery, open man, as far from the stereotypically monkish and imperial federal judge as can be imagined. (The New Yorker (The New Yorker was to describe him as looking like a cross between Robert Mitchum and William Holden, which is a bit much. Gig Young, maybe.) His grandfather came to Pennsylvania from Wales at the age of eight, taking a job as a "breaker boy," picking the useless rock out of bins of anthracite in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania. Farsighted and ambitious, he worked his way out of the mines and became a civil engineer, investing his salary back into the coal industry and becoming wealthy enough to buy up some contiguous farm property in and around Orwigsburg, in Schuylkill County. was to describe him as looking like a cross between Robert Mitchum and William Holden, which is a bit much. Gig Young, maybe.) His grandfather came to Pennsylvania from Wales at the age of eight, taking a job as a "breaker boy," picking the useless rock out of bins of anthracite in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania. Farsighted and ambitious, he worked his way out of the mines and became a civil engineer, investing his salary back into the coal industry and becoming wealthy enough to buy up some contiguous farm property in and around Orwigsburg, in Schuylkill County.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the anthracite business collapsed, and the Jones family business changed radically. They turned their farm property into a series of five public golf courses. They caught a market on the rise. Golf was being liberated from the restricted country clubs of the privileged and thrown open to the postwar suburban ma.s.ses, in no small part thanks to the arrival on the national scene of Latrobe, Pennsylvania's own Arnold Palmer. The golf courses, not the coal, helped put John Jones through d.i.c.kinson College and law school.

His father died at forty-nine, of heart disease. ("He got some bad genes," Jones says.) Jones's first job in the law was as a clerk in the Schuylkill County courthouse. "In the first six months," he recalls, "I had this germ of an idea. I thought, 'Gee, I'd like to do this.' That's not unusual. A lot of lawyers want to become judges. So, I held that thought."

He built a successful law practice, but he also developed a taste for politics. A lifelong Republican, Jones ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in the 1990s and ultimately took a job in the administration of Governor Tom Ridge, a rising star in national Republican circles. "At that point, I sort of tucked that whole thing about being a judge away," Jones says.

However, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush appointed Ridge the first director of the Department of Homeland Security. Ridge recommended Jones, who was then working as a public defender, for a federal judges.h.i.+p that had opened up in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. His confirmation sailed through. For three years, Jones sat on cases large and small. In 2004, he began to take note of a controversy in the small town of Dover, in the southern part of the state.

It is an area of rolling hills with valleys like deep green bowls between them, planted thick with wheat, apples, and odd religion. The Amish still drive their buggies here, trying to live their lives while avoiding the relentless attempts by tourists to turn those simple lives into a horse-drawn diorama. (The movie Witness Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a detective who hides from crooked cops in an Amish community, was filmed nearby.) The Ephrata Cloister, a splinter group of the German Baptist Brethren, ascetic and strictly segregated by s.e.x, established itself near Lancaster under the leaders.h.i.+p of Conrad Beissel. (Beissel was an authentic religious crank. There were rumors that he trafficked with the Rosicrucians and, yes, the Masons.) Ephrata developed its own liturgy and sacred music. The community nursed the wounded of both sides after the battle of Gettysburg. When Beissel died, the Cloister began to die as well. While the Amish try to hold to their faith and avoid becoming a living museum, a museum is all that's left of the Ephrata Cloister.

Both the Amish and the people of Ephrata espoused religions that were in the secular world but not of it. Religion has always been in the air of the place. In October 2004, a firestorm erupted that engulfed Dover and, eventually, the courtroom of Judge John E. Jones III. The Amish and the inhabitants of Ephrata might have had the right idea all along.

That month, the Dover school board proposed to change the biology textbook used in the town's high school. The town itself was undergoing great changes: there had been an influx of new people into the area, and there also had been an explosion in the number of evangelical Protestant churches. A volatile demographic mix was brewing.

This made Dover no different in its local politics from thousands of other small towns that were being devoured by urban sprawl. There were fights over taxes and land use that pitted the older residents of the community against the newly arrived suburbanites. In 2001, three new conservative members were elected to the school board, having run on their opposition to an expensive proposal to renovate the town's old high school building. Once on the board, however, the new members began to lard their remarks with a conspicuous religiosity that unnerved the others. There was talk about the morality of Dover's students. There was talk of bringing back cla.s.sroom prayer and, eventually, of teaching creationism in biology cla.s.ses. The conservatives also seemed to have their own idea of how to best renovate the high school.

"As somebody who used to be involved in politics," Judge Jones muses, "I tell everyone there's an overarching lesson here and that's that you can't take your eyes off the ball. I can't imagine that these guys and gals campaigned on a strictly religious platform. I don't think they did."

School board dissension got uglier in 2003, when a maintenance man took down a mural painted by a former student that depicted the evolutionary process leading from hominids to humans. It had been hanging in the high school for five years. The groundskeeper took the painting home and burned it because, he said, it had offended his faith. Besides, his granddaughter was about to enter high school and he didn't want her exposed to, well, the exposed. The humans in the mural had been naked, after all.

His punishment by the reconst.i.tuted school board was mild, if he was punished at all, which to this day seems unclear. Bertha Spahr was a science teacher at the high school. She told Gordy Slack, the author of The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything, an examination of the controversy, that a board member confessed to her that he'd watched the painting burn. Something was running amok on the Dover school board. Then, a year after the mural was destroyed, everything came together in what would become one extremely noisy, extremely prolonged-and, ultimately, extremely expensive-event.

Over the summer of 2004, it became clear that the board was preparing to change the biology curriculum. The previous textbook would be abandoned because, as one board member put it, it had been "laced with Darwinism." The school board was laying the groundwork to teach creationism in its public schools. Controversy flared. The ACLU threatened to bring a lawsuit. Rather than back off, as the summer ground along, the members of the school board pus.h.i.+ng creationism changed tactics. They replaced "creationism" with "intelligent design." They stopped proposing that the previous textbook be abandoned. Rather, they said, they would agree to purchase the new edition of the standard text as long as they could also purchase a book called Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, which argued for intelligent design. On this, they were adamant.

They lost one vote, but wrangled a compromise in which Of Pandas and People Of Pandas and People would be available for "reference" in the cla.s.srooms. Then, in October 2004, the board pa.s.sed a resolution mandating that intelligent design be mentioned in the cla.s.sroom. Two members of the board quit. A month later, the board announced that science teachers would be required to read a statement promoting ID and criticizing the theory of evolution to all incoming biology students. The statement read, in part: would be available for "reference" in the cla.s.srooms. Then, in October 2004, the board pa.s.sed a resolution mandating that intelligent design be mentioned in the cla.s.sroom. Two members of the board quit. A month later, the board announced that science teachers would be required to read a statement promoting ID and criticizing the theory of evolution to all incoming biology students. The statement read, in part: Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact.... Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

The science teachers, led by Bertha Spahr, went up the wall. Even the Discovery Inst.i.tute, a Seattle-based idea mill dedicated to the promotion of faith-based science, thought the Dover school board had pushed too far.

The town split down the middle. School board meetings degenerated into dockside hooleys. Two more board members gave up and quit. "The town," writes Gordy Slack, "had divided into warring camps." Which was not surprising at all. The whole controversy had left religion, if it ever truly was religious at all, and entered the realm of politics, which meant it had entered the marketplace. Once that happened, the Three Great Premises of Idiot America were engaged.

They were engaged because intelligent design is not science, but a sales technique, developed to respond to a specific need in the political marketplace. (In this, intelligent design is to creationism what "faith-based" is to "religious.") This is of a piece with everything that has gone on since creationism won the battle but lost the war in the Scopes trial. Ever since creationism fell into public ridicule and scientific obsolescence, there have been efforts to rebrand it, gussying it up with scientific filigree to sneak it past the gimlet eye built into the First Amendment and the finely calibrated bulls.h.i.+t detectors of the federal courts.

In the 1980s, there was an attempt to sell the notion of "creation science" as an alternative to evolution. In 1982, creation science suffered a blow in the case of McLean v. Arkansas; McLean v. Arkansas; five years later, the state of Louisiana tried it again and got slapped down, hard, by the U.S. Supreme Court. In five years later, the state of Louisiana tried it again and got slapped down, hard, by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Edwards v. Aguillard Edwards v. Aguillard, the court determined that "creation science" was religion in sheep's clothing and, hence, violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The decision was based partly on what had come to be known as the "Lemon "Lemon test." test."

In 1971, in the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Supreme Court fas.h.i.+oned a three-part test to determine whether governmental funding of private-school programs violated the First Amendment. The program had to have a legitimate secular purpose. It could not have "the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion." And it could not entangle the government excessively with religion. Any program that fails any part of the test is unconst.i.tutional. The Aguillard Aguillard decision made teaching creationism-or, more specifically, "creation science"-in the public schools illegal. This put a considerable crimp in Christian right's marketing strategy and, almost immediately, another attempt at rebranding was under way. decision made teaching creationism-or, more specifically, "creation science"-in the public schools illegal. This put a considerable crimp in Christian right's marketing strategy and, almost immediately, another attempt at rebranding was under way. Aguillard Aguillard forced, Gordy Slack writes, with no little irony, creation science's "evolution into a new species." The new brand name was "intelligent design." forced, Gordy Slack writes, with no little irony, creation science's "evolution into a new species." The new brand name was "intelligent design."

The rebranding was brilliant. On the surface, intelligent design accepts science, even praises it. It simply posits that, at the end of the day-or, more accurately, at the beginning of the day-there was a guiding intelligence behind creation, an intelligence that ID proponents even decline to label "G.o.d." Proponents cite various lacunae in Darwin's work as evidence. They speak in the language of democratic inquiry; having created the "controversy," they then ask "only" that schools be granted the right to "teach the controversy." Their papers and books are mild, couched in the language of science, if not in its most basic principles. How, after all, can anyone develop an experiment to falsify the existence of a guiding intelligence?

And ID even has a historical pedigree, going back even before Darwin climbed aboard H.M.S. Beagle. Beagle. One of the books Darwin read as a student was William Paley's One of the books Darwin read as a student was William Paley's Natural Theology. Natural Theology. "The basic premise ... was that the glories and complexities of living nature were to be seen as prima facie evidence of G.o.d's creative hand," writes Keith Thomson, an Oxford philosopher and historian. "Natural science and theology were not at odds, therefore, but complementary." Paley's work lives on in ID most directly in his a.n.a.logy of the universe as a watch, whose existence must needs imply a watchmaker. In 1996, Thomson points out, the a.n.a.logy was cited in defense of ID by Michael Behe, a biochemist and prominent ID proponent who one day would be reduced to stammering incoherence in a Pennsylvania courtroom. "The basic premise ... was that the glories and complexities of living nature were to be seen as prima facie evidence of G.o.d's creative hand," writes Keith Thomson, an Oxford philosopher and historian. "Natural science and theology were not at odds, therefore, but complementary." Paley's work lives on in ID most directly in his a.n.a.logy of the universe as a watch, whose existence must needs imply a watchmaker. In 1996, Thomson points out, the a.n.a.logy was cited in defense of ID by Michael Behe, a biochemist and prominent ID proponent who one day would be reduced to stammering incoherence in a Pennsylvania courtroom.

In fact, ID sells itself so reasonably that hard-core creationists disdain it as so much materialist backsliding. (In his museum outside Cincinnati, where the humans and dinosaurs romp together, Ken Ham is more withering in his criticism of ID than Bertha Spahr ever was.) However, in its origins and goals, ID is creation science with a thicker scientific gloss.

It comes out of the work of the Discovery Inst.i.tute, founded in 1990 to promote new ideas in fields like bioethics, ideas that nonetheless would conform to hard-line conservative ideals. As Gordy Slack points out, the inst.i.tute floundered for a while, whipsawing between enthusiasm for scientific progress and the rigid demands of a biblical worldview. It was brought to the light, finally, by one Philip E. Johnson, who immersed himself in the study of how to counteract what he saw as the self-destructive "materialism" of modern American culture. Based in the inst.i.tute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, inst.i.tute scholars, few of whom have actually worked in the physical sciences, laid siege to their targets. These included almost all of modern America, but especially the secular world of the sciences.

Slack quotes extensively from what he calls the "Wedge doc.u.ment," a Discovery Inst.i.tute fund-raising memo that leaked in 1999, and which pretty much gives the game away. The goal of the inst.i.tute, it says, is to reestablish "the proposition that human beings are created in the image of G.o.d [which is] one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.... Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science." The doc.u.ment goes on to describe how the CSC-it had dropped the "Renewal" part of its name like a hot rock because of the word's religious connotations-would bring down Darwinism, first by publis.h.i.+ng its own "research," then by selling that research through the broadcast media. This process would help build up "a popular base of support among our natural const.i.tuency, namely, Christians."

In short, ID, because it is a sales pitch, was relying on the Three Great Premises to carry the day. ID would be sold in such a way that people would speak loudly and authoritatively in its support; then, enough people would believe it to make it a fact, and they would believe it fervently enough to make it true. As Gordy Slack writes, "Whether they have paved the way for a scientific revolution or not, they have unquestionably brought about a revolution in public perception ... they have made ID a household acronym, and have given an eccentric theory an aura, in some circles anyway, of intellectual and scientific credibility."

As deftly as it sold the new idea, the Discovery Inst.i.tute treated it very delicately. The inst.i.tute did not want ID measured by the Lemon Lemon test or judged against the standards of the test or judged against the standards of the Aguillard Aguillard decision too soon. When the proponents of ID on the Dover school board announced their intention to defend a lawsuit brought against them by the ACLU, the Discovery Inst.i.tute argued against the move. But Dover was too deeply enmeshed in the controversy to untangle itself. The fight over ID was a fight over schools, and morals, and income, and cla.s.s, and over the primacy of political and cultural tribes. Like so much that happens in Idiot America, where everything is judged by how well it sells, it was a war between proxy armies. The Discovery Inst.i.tute's one mistake was to believe the fight could be avoided. In his office in Harrisburg, Judge Jones still thought the case might never come to court. That hope lasted as long as the first meeting he had with both sides. decision too soon. When the proponents of ID on the Dover school board announced their intention to defend a lawsuit brought against them by the ACLU, the Discovery Inst.i.tute argued against the move. But Dover was too deeply enmeshed in the controversy to untangle itself. The fight over ID was a fight over schools, and morals, and income, and cla.s.s, and over the primacy of political and cultural tribes. Like so much that happens in Idiot America, where everything is judged by how well it sells, it was a war between proxy armies. The Discovery Inst.i.tute's one mistake was to believe the fight could be avoided. In his office in Harrisburg, Judge Jones still thought the case might never come to court. That hope lasted as long as the first meeting he had with both sides.

"I usually try to check the body languages of the attorneys and see whether I should ask them to come into chambers, to see if I can resolve it," he recalls. "You could tell everyone was polarized. There were a lot of lawyers there and their body language was such that I thought, 'Well, I'm not even going to try to settle this.'

"Through the summer of '05, though, I thought cooler heads might prevail and they'll find a way to work this out. Right up until the trial convened, I had some sense or hope that it might work out. But, it did not." On October 7, 2005, the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board opened. On the eve of the trial, a local pastor named Ray Mummert had drawn the best map of the battlefield. His summing-up was reported all over the country. The fight within the Dover school board went worldwide. opened. On the eve of the trial, a local pastor named Ray Mummert had drawn the best map of the battlefield. His summing-up was reported all over the country. The fight within the Dover school board went worldwide.

"We've been attacked," Mummert said, "by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture."

IT did not take long for Judge Jones to suspect that he was being asked by the Dover school board defendants to pa.s.s judgment on the efficacy of a marketing plan, and not on the const.i.tutionality of their actions, let alone on empirical scientific truth. What was playing out in front of him had very little to do with the law and almost everything to do with local politics driven by anger that was in the fullest way "faith-based," in that the people pus.h.i.+ng intelligent design went out of their way to deny, preposterously, that any of this had anything to do with religion. did not take long for Judge Jones to suspect that he was being asked by the Dover school board defendants to pa.s.s judgment on the efficacy of a marketing plan, and not on the const.i.tutionality of their actions, let alone on empirical scientific truth. What was playing out in front of him had very little to do with the law and almost everything to do with local politics driven by anger that was in the fullest way "faith-based," in that the people pus.h.i.+ng intelligent design went out of their way to deny, preposterously, that any of this had anything to do with religion.

Bill Buckingham, a member of the board's curriculum committee and a minister, denied in a pretrial deposition that anyone had ever mentioned creationism during the fight over the biology curriculum, only to be confronted during his testimony at trial with a videotape of himself using the word in an interview. Another revealing witness was the school board chairman, Alan Bonsell, whose answer regarding who donated money to purchase copies of Of Pandas and People Of Pandas and People for the high school completely contradicted what he had said in a deposition. Judge Jones stepped in and reduced the man to a blithering mess on the stand. for the high school completely contradicted what he had said in a deposition. Judge Jones stepped in and reduced the man to a blithering mess on the stand.

"It was a significant issue because they had pa.s.sed the hat at a church to get those books," Jones explains. "And that goes through the Lemon Lemon test that we use that the books were being used for a religious purpose. They deliberately, in my view, lied. test that we use that the books were being used for a religious purpose. They deliberately, in my view, lied.

"Your mind does wander during a trial, and there are different times when your curiosity is piqued. That is the moment when I listened for an extended period of time to Bonsell's testimony. He was, of course, the president of the school board. My mind didn't wander at all during his testimony. If Bonsell and Buckingham had answered truthfully in their depositions, I think there was a good possibility that counsel for the plaintiffs would have sought an injunction and shut down the policy before it even started. They did not answer truthfully."

In Jones's view, the members of the Dover school board had volunteered their town as a test market for those who wanted to sell ID nationwide. And while both sides in the case had brought formidable legal teams into his courtroom-"It was 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' in there," Jones laughs-he cast a particularly wary eye on the attorneys from the Thomas More Law Center, a right-wing legal foundation funded originally by Thomas Monaghan, the ultramontane Catholic founder of Domino's Pizza. The Thomas More lawyers, appearing on behalf of the defendants, were working for free and that may have blinded the people from Dover to the true cost of the action they had undertaken to defend. Under federal law, the loser in a civil rights action has to pay the costs of the litigation, which can run into millions of dollars.

"I was discouraged by the fact that this community of good people, you know, they pay their taxes and all, and they maintained a generally good school system, were going to end up paying I don't know what the legal fees were going to be," Jones says. "I thought, 'It's going to come to me to tag this school district with potentially a couple of million dollars in fees.'"

The More Center's interests in the case went far beyond a parochial scuffle over textbooks. The center wanted a case, any case, through which it could litigate intelligent design all the way up the system until it could get the issue before what the More Center believed was an increasingly sympathetic Supreme Court. Further, the center's strategists believed that they could use an ID case to relitigate a whole host of holdings involving the First Amendment's "Establishment" clause with which the center and its backers disagreed. Among those holdings were the Lemon Lemon test and the test and the Aguillard Aguillard decision. The latter, in shutting down creationism in Louisiana, had made necessary the invention of intelligent design. Styling itself the "Christian answer to the ACLU," the More Center thought it had found its dream vehicle in Dover. Jones thought they were playing the town for fools. decision. The latter, in shutting down creationism in Louisiana, had made necessary the invention of intelligent design. Styling itself the "Christian answer to the ACLU," the More Center thought it had found its dream vehicle in Dover. Jones thought they were playing the town for fools.

"When you're not paying your counsel, you think there's no price to be paid," Jones explains. "It's pretty clear now that then comes the Thomas More Law Center, and they jump in the c.o.c.kpit and they say, 'We'll represent you through this litigation.'

"There was a disconnect that we didn't notice until the trial started. You could see what happened where the Discovery Inst.i.tute said to the Thomas More Law Center, 'Don't do this. Don't litigate this case. You're going to get us killed here.' And they shoved the Discovery Inst.i.tute out. The Thomas More Law Center was litigating this case for the Supreme Court of the United States, it is quite clear. Justice [Antonin] Scalia has had a number of dissents in Establishment clause cases. And the way they phrased their case, the way they structured their briefs, all of that went to Scalia's dissents.

"You could tell. I was fully familiar with all the cases. I think their strategy was, 'Look, if Jones dings us, we'll just take it up. We will go to the Supreme Court. Here's the case where we are going to eviscerate the endors.e.m.e.nt test as it relates to the Establishment clause.'"

Almost nothing went right for the school board and its legal team. On cross-examination, the members of the board sounded like people asked to explain why they sold their public responsibility for a bag of magic beans. Far removed from the niche market of conservative religion in which it was sold, intelligent design and its proponents came off little better. Michael Behe, one of the most influential scientific voices in support of ID, spent several uncomfortable hours being demolished by a plaintiff's lawyer named Eric Rothschild.

Behe's major contribution to what is termed the scientific basis for ID is "irreducible complexity," the idea that, if you could discover a system from which you could not remove one element without demolis.h.i.+ng the system, then that system could not have evolved through natural selection. (Darwin, it should be said, agreed.) Behe's favorite candidate for this was the flagellum. Flagella are the tiny filaments that allow bacteria to swim. Behe argued that the flagellum was made up of so many parts that the removal of any one of them would destroy its function. Being "irreducibly complex," the flagellum refutes Darwin and implies the existence of an intelligent designer, who may or may not be G.o.d; Behe wasn't saying.

The role of bacterial flagellum got a long workout in Jones's courtroom. Scientists explained at length how Behe was wrong about it. And under cross-examination, Behe stumbled badly, admitting at one point that a definition of science he had given during his pretrial deposition would fit astrology as well as it fit ID. It went downhill from there. But the worst damage done to the defendants' case centered around the textbook that had started it all, Of Pandas and People Of Pandas and People, not because it made the proponents of ID and their lawyers look like zealots, but because it made them look like clowns.

Barbara Forrest, a philosopher and vociferous critic of the Discovery Inst.i.tute, had been following the evolution of the anti-evolution movement for years. She'd written scathingly about creationism, "scientific creationism," and ID. Based in Louisiana, Forrest was more than familiar with Aguillard. Aguillard. Just about the time that decision was being handed down, a new edition of Just about the time that decision was being handed down, a new edition of Of Pandas and People Of Pandas and People was being prepared. (One of its authors, Dean Kenyon, had testified in was being prepared. (One of its authors, Dean Kenyon, had testified in Aguillard Aguillard on the creationist side.) When the case threw out creationism, the authors of the book went to work adapting it. The Dover defendants based their entire case on the a.s.sertion that ID was science and not religion; Barbara Forrest blew the whistle. on the creationist side.) When the case threw out creationism, the authors of the book went to work adapting it. The Dover defendants based their entire case on the a.s.sertion that ID was science and not religion; Barbara Forrest blew the whistle.

She'd discovered that, in the aftermath of the Aguillard Aguillard decision, decision, Of Pandas and People Of Pandas and People had been run through a software program designed to replace specific creationist language with that of intelligent design. Gordy Slack points out that the process was as full of holes as the science it purported to explain: "Some careless editor or author must have tried to do a search-and-replace without taking sufficient care. They tried to replace 'creationists' with 'design proponents' and ended up creating an infertile hybrid: 'cdesign proponentsists.'" had been run through a software program designed to replace specific creationist language with that of intelligent design. Gordy Slack points out that the process was as full of holes as the science it purported to explain: "Some careless editor or author must have tried to do a search-and-replace without taking sufficient care. They tried to replace 'creationists' with 'design proponents' and ended up creating an infertile hybrid: 'cdesign proponentsists.'"

Jones had come to believe that he was being asked to pa.s.s on the free-speech rights of con men. His job had turned into a matter of evaluating the efficacy of a sales pitch. He thought he was being asked to judge religion as science and science as politics. Whatever it was, it wasn't the law, and he was determined to judge this case under the law.