Stupidity as Virtue

Charlie Pierce is a favorite and I can't wait to read this book!

Since we've elevated stupidity to such prominence, the book seems overdue.

"Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free" [Paperback]

Charles Pierce understands that idiocy is running rampant like a plague in the United States. As he observes in his stinging, rollicking, jaw-dropping journey through a nation in denial of the facts, there are three primary premises in the world of idiot America:

• Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units
• Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough
• Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it

Publishers Weekly wrote of this perennial classic, published in the first Obama administration, "Journalist Pierce delivers a rapier-sharp rant on how the America of Franklin and Edison, Fulton and Ford has devolved into America the Uninformed, where citizens hostile to science are exchanging fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and glutting themselves on reality TV and conspiracy theories. Pierce makes no apologies for his liberal bias, and some conservatives—notably evolution opponents and Rush Limbaugh—endure a good deal of bashing. Pierce writes that in the U.S., Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it.

"He supports his thesis with references to James Madison and other founding fathers, who may have foreseen and rued the emergence of cranks who would threaten the Enlightenment-based nation they were shaping. Although the book is not likely to win any converts from the right wing Pierce so energetically decries, it is an engaging catalogue of those unscientifically verified truths that enthrall and impassion millions of American."

Pierce is a mercilessly sardonic columnist for Esquire Magazine (and also a regular panelist on NPR's "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!"). In an interview with BuzzFlash when the book first came out, Pierce described how he came to write "Idiot America" : "I think I was most struck by what eventually coalesced into the thesis of the book when I was watching the extended media spectacle around the Terri Schiavo case, where people stubbornly, and I think stupidly, self-destructed on so many different levels that it just looked like people willing themselves over a cliff.

"At about the same point, I was reading a newspaper and saw a thing about the building of the 'creation museum.' In an update, they talked about what would be the fundamental belief of the creation museum - that humans and dinosaurs had coexisted somehow, and they mentioned there was an exhibit where they had dinosaurs with saddles on them, showing you how men would have ridden dinosaurs when they both coexisted. I e-mailed my editor at Esquire, Mark Warren, with a three-word pitch, and I sent a link to the story. I still can't remember which newspaper the story was in, but the pitch was 'dinosaurs with saddles.' We went from that."

"There's a guy down at the end of the bar, who's furiously angry, hilarious funny, and has an Irish poet's talent for language. He's been traveling the country, and he's been alternately appalled and moved by what he's found there, and, lucky you, he wants to tell you all about it. Listen." -Peter Sagal, author of The Book of Vices


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