The subtitle provides a succinct synopsis of this treatise of American anti-intellectualism in its present state and how it has impacted not just this country, but the entire planet: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. I found that this made a terrific follow-up to Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason. While Jacoby's language is erudite and intellectual, Pierce cuts through the bullshit and tells it like it is. His humor helps keep the horror of the insanity of his topic at bay.
But why listen to me? I found the following text, in a section about how the Bush administration managed to lie through its teeth to the American people about the threat posed by Iraq with little uproar by the majority of the populace (there was some resistance: a few hundred thousand of us marched the street of D.C. on a freezing today to demonstrate that we knew it was all bunk), to illustrate exactly what he means by "Idiot America":
The successful sale of the Iraq war was a pure product of Idiot America. But Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the results of millions of decisions made and not made, to reduce everything to salesmanship. Debate becomes corrupted argument, in which every point of view is just another product, no better or worse than all the others, and informed citizenship is abandoned to the marketplace. Idiot America is the develtopment of the collective Gut at the expense of the collective mind. It's what results when we abandon our duty to treat the ridiculous with ridicule. It's what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and we not only surrender our right to punish them at the polls but also become too timit to pinish their ideas with daily scorn--because the polls say those ideas are popular, and therefore they must hold some sort of truth, which we should respect.
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