Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (34 page)

Pierce found that William S. Johnson of Connecticut had “nothing in him that warrants the high reputation he has for public speaking.” Johnson’s colleague Roger Sherman was “the oddest shaped character I ever remember to have met with.” Alexander Hamilton sometimes showed “a degree of vanity that is highly disagreeable” and Benjamin Franklin “is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however,
a most extraordinary man and he tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard.”

Pierce sized up “Mr. Maddison” as “always … the best informed man of any point in debate…. Mr. Maddison is about 37 years of age, a Gentleman of great modesty—with a remarkable sweet temper. He is easy and unreserved among his acquaintance and has a most agreeable style of conversation.”

This is shrewd, intelligent gossip, but gossip nonetheless, and it serves as a deft counterpoint to what Mr. Madison was about, sitting in his chair closest to the front of the room, taking down with almost preposterous precision the specifics of the great debates going on around him. But the works are not interchangeable, and they ought not to be. Neither Madison’s notes nor Pierce’s sketches ought to define fully any of the people in them. But there seems little question that, had there been cable television news shows in 1787, Pierce would have been booked solid for a week, while you’d have had to scan CSPAN during whiskey hours of the poker game to catch a glimpse of James Madison.

For example, Roger Sherman, of Connecticut, was a ferocious defender of the rights of the smaller states. He threatened to pull all of them out of Philadelphia if his concerns were not addressed. He was not bluffing. (Thomas Jefferson said of him that Sherman had never said a foolish thing in his life.) Luckily for all concerned, Sherman’s great gift was compromise. Without him, the Constitution might not have passed at all. That he also was odd-looking is both beyond question and beside the point. Define him by the latter, and everything is out of place, an eighteenth-century equivalent of John Edwards’s hair, or of the many voices screaming lines from old movies that seem to echo in the head of Maureen Dowd.

Why not apply the most precisely loony of modern standards
and ask with which of the founders you’d most like to have had a beer? Franklin’s the obvious answer, although the ferocious dipsomaniac Luther Martin, from Maryland—“he never speaks without tiring the patience of all who hear him,” according to Pierce—might have been entertaining for an hour or so. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson would have been no fun at all. He was pedantic, and he was always talking about how much he knew. (Pierce admired how Wilson could run down all the stages of “the Greecian commonwealth down to the present time.”) Sure, we might not have had a Bill of Rights without him, but how much fun would he have been?

It’s good that there was gossip. There is a place in our understanding for Madison’s meticulous note-taking on the great questions being decided, and for Pierce’s loose-limbed assessment of the men who came to decide them. It’s good that they were not made of marble. Reality demands that they not be cast as figures from Olympus. But reality also demands the acknowledgment that they were not the cast of
My Man Godfrey
, either.

FOR
a brief moment in 2008, reality disappeared from American television because there was nobody around to write it.

A trend as deeply rooted in Idiot America as anything else is, reality television shakes out as little more than the creation of a context in which one set of connivers is set against another. The ur-program
Survivor
was meant to set a number of contestants against one another in an every-person-for-themselves free-for-all. Within a week, one set of contenders was conspiring against another. The “tribal council” became a venting of boundless suspicion, some justified and some not, but all with
the essential integrity and suspense of a professional wrestling match. We had, after all, already seen the actual plotting as the series went along.

Televised sports and the media attendant on them had already broken a lot of ground, and the creation of a television reality as an arena went back even further than that, all the way to the rigged quiz shows of the 1950s and to forgotten classics like
Queen for a Day
and
You Asked for It.
In the former, a woman with a terrible tale of sorrow and woe would share it with an adoring public and be rewarded with a new stove. In the latter, people wrote in asking to see a man break a board with his head, or to watch a Tahitian fertility rite, and the host would obligingly share it with a grateful, if baffled, nation. Sooner or later, a country that could so invest itself in Charles Van Doren, or in a housewife from Kansas with ulcers, or in dancing South Sea islanders was bound to start arguing about reality.

The essential dynamic of reality programming is the creation of teams through which Americans can vicariously compete against one another, whether in rooting for the personal trainer in the loincloth on
Survivor
, the Shania Twain wannabe on
American Idol
, or the harried mom and dad trying to win the daily battle of getting the sextuplets off to school in the morning. It is the creation of profitable vessels in which to invest whatever we find unsatisfactory in our own lives. In every real sense, we buy the people and their problems. The essential truth of reality shows lies in how fervently we involve ourselves in them.

“All reality shows,” Craig Plestis, an NBC executive, told
Forbes.com
, “should have a visceral reaction for the viewer. You need to feel something.”

Even
American Idol
, Fox television’s star-making phenomenon, is shot through with the notion that the panel of
demi-celebrities doing the judging is conspiring against one contender and in favor of another. (The charges gained a little credibility early on, when a judge, Paula Abdul, was discovered to be dating one of the contestants.) Now, the cable dial is dotted with reality shows involving huge families, dangerous jobs, messy garages, and really big tumors. There are even reality shows about unreality, people going off in search of Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil. Ignatius Donnelly, alas, died much too soon.

After all, there is very little that’s real about a reality show. In them, the imagination is tamed by a re-created reality, as in a zoo. These shows create what looks like an actual habitat for actual human beings, but, since the habitat is designed to be lived in by characters designed to prompt a vicarious involvement on the part of the audience, no less than were Rob Petrie’s suburban home or the precinct house in
The Wire
, the whole thing might as well be a cage. Nobody goes to a zoo to dream of dragons.

Today, though, the dynamic present in the reality shows also drives too much of the more serious business of how we govern ourselves as a country, and how we manage ourselves as a culture, and it pretty plainly can’t stand the power of it. We’ve chosen up sides on everything, fashioning our public lives as though we were making up a fantasy baseball team. First, I’ll draft a politician, then a couple of “experts,” whose expertise can be defined by how deeply I agree with what they say, or by how well their books sell, or by how often I can see them on TV. Then, I’ll draft a couple of blowhards to sell it back to me, to make me feel good about my team.

One of the remarkable things about fantasy baseball is that it provides a deeper level of vicariousness in that it enables its participants to cheer for players who are in no way real people, simply columns of statistics and variables. There are no human
beings playing in the games of fantasy baseball, only columns of figures. In our politics and our culture, there often seem to be no human beings running for office, or making art, or singing songs. There are only our opinions of them, crammed into the procrustean uniform of Our Side. Winners and losers are judged by which side sells the best.

The most revelatory moment of all came in 2008, when the reality shows had to go off the air because the Hollywood writers had gone on strike and there was nobody to write the reality. Deprived of their vicarious lives, the fans of the shows went into a funk not unlike that which afflicted baseball fans in 1997, when a labor dispute canceled the World Series. It seemed to strike very few people as odd that reality had to go off the air because nobody was left to write it. After all, if you’ve already made reality a show, what’s the point in making a reality show at all?

THE
rain came down in torrents, sluicing through the campus of St. Anselm College in Manchester, on a night in June 2007. Ten Republicans came with the rain, all of them seeking the presidency of the United States in what was supposed to be a transformative election, a chance to reorder the country, to separate fiction from nonfiction, faith from reason, that which sold from that which was true: a chance to put things back where they belonged. It was the first election to be held among the people who were blinking from the ruins.

They were a remarkable bunch. Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani was running against the nineteen hijackers in the September 11 attacks, while Congressman Tom Tancredo was running against ragged immigrants who
were sneaking across the Rio Grande. Congressman Ron Paul plumped for pure libertarianism, while Congressman Duncan Hunter seemed to be trying to slice away the moderates among Paul’s voters—the people who did not necessarily dive behind the couch after mistaking the sound of their blenders for approaching black helicopters. Paul was also the only one of the bunch firmly against the war in Iraq, which gave him some cachet among young voters who did not know that Paul also would like us to return to the gold standard.

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas was an out-and-out theocrat, albeit a charitable one. Former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas was just as amiably Jesus-loopy as Brownback was. Outside of Giuliani, the two most “serious” candidates seemed to be former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Senator John McCain of Arizona. As it turned out, Romney spent tens of millions of dollars to prove that he was little more than the Piltdown Man of American politics. McCain would end up as the nominee almost by default, and by virtue of the fact that he was able to allay the fears of the Republican base while maintaining a grip on that dwindling element of his party that can fairly be described as Not Insane. That grip did not hold.

FOR
a time, briefly, it seemed that the country was coming to realize that it had poisoned itself with bullshit and nonsense for nearly a decade. It seemed ready to act upon that realization in its 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama’s rise to the Democratic nomination on a nebulous concept of “change” seemed to be based, at least in part, on the idea that we would all stop conning ourselves.

But no.

In August, in what was the first major event of the general election campaign, both Obama and John McCain went out to California to a “forum” organized by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church. The very notion that an affluent God-botherer like Warren should be allowed to vet presidential candidates was in itself a sign that the opportunity that twinkled briefly in the election was largely lost. At one point, Warren turned to Obama and asked, “At what point does a baby get human rights?”