Idiot America

[marmar]

"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 competitions 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 sturdy 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 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.

...(snip)...

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.)

...(snip)...

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 god Ganesh that decorated the elephant exhibit. They listened intently as Ham went on, drawing a straight line from Adam's fall to our godless 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."


- excerpt from Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

[teach1st]

1. Read more at Google Books

Read more of Idiot America at Google Books.

[struggle4progress]

2. Here's a link to the Esquire piece that became the book:

October 31, 2005, 11:00 PM
Greetings from Idiot America
Creationism. Intelligent Design. Faith-based this. Trust-your-gut that. There's never been a better time to espouse, profit from, and believe in utter, unadulterated crap. And the crap is rising so high, it's getting dangerous.
By Charles P. Pierce
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0207GREETINGS?click=main_sr

[etherealtruth]

3. "We've been attacked," he says,

"by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."

WTF?

[imdjh]

7. "having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn"

[patrice]

8. Some good stuff in there:

I especially like the distinction between faith and faith-based, with the latter contradiction taking on pseudo-rational trappings in order to justify what is BELIEVED. Pierce says those "rational" trappings also amount to: If enough people believe it, it is true and the intensity of one's belief is proof of its Truth.

These are the phenomena that make Sarah Palin a political factor.

Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's 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. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents -- for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power -- the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.

After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.

Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he wrote, "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 mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical."

The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0207GREETINGS?click=main_sr#ixzz0Wx4UE2R2

[CrispyQ]

4. I read this book a few weeks ago.

There were sections that made you want to both laugh & cry.

[ixion]

5. "The Flintstones" was a documentary, apparently

:rofl:

[rurallib]

6. As Obama said last year "These people are ignorant and proud of it!"