IDIOT AMERICA

Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce



Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce

Introduction

“Idiot America- How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free” is written by Charles P. Pierce. The book was initially published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2009. The book comprises of 304 pages, and, copyright was produced in 2009 by the author. Idiot America contains eleven chapters divided in four parts. First part is “The American Way of Idiocy”, second part is “Truth”, third part is “Consequences” and the latter part is “Mr. Madison Library” (Pierce, 2009).

Charles Pierce, author of the book, started with the visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and during the visit, he noticed, that there was a dinosaur wearing a saddle. This strange statue made him to consider various other irrationalities that described the reasons and rationality in America. The examples were walkie talkie, American war in Iraq, refutations and denials of issues like global warming and evolution, the issue of Terry Schiavo, Sarah Palin, etc. He compared the ever-present ignorance and unwariness of today's body politic with the thoughts of James Madison, who described the indications of knowledge, experience and common sense as virtues.

Summary

Idiot America is a place where people neither say anything bad nor believe anything bad. It is not the place where people make profits by fooling others. They serve their attention, observe things, take their time and make an extensive mental effort for building a complete global view. Idiot America emerged as a war on capability and expertise. The book did not contain much about anti-modernism or lack of confidence in the intellectual elite, which Richard Hofstadter contested on a national basis for DNA swiftly, forty years ago. In this new era of media, every one claims to be historians, preachers, scientists, or scholars. If everyone claims to be an expert, nobody is the most horrible thing in a society. People have raised the instinct which is not appropriate, as anyone can check, get angry, beat a wall, throw his racket after losing a point or kick a lawn mower that refuses to work. Occasionally disguising the instinct is called a "common sense". Outgoing Presidential Advisor on matters of medical ethics is commonly referred as "the yuck factor". Idiot America is a country "based on faith," which modeled itself in the world and in turn did not provide a good model of faith. Hofstadter anticipated this view. "The intellect is faced with the feeling," he wrote, "because the idea is somehow inconsistent with human warmth (Bodtker, 2001).

The intellect has become the rival of character, as popular belief dictates that only means wit, which easily equals or something called as diabolical cunning. A politically agile challenge against evolution is as patently ridiculous, it would be a challenge against agronomically agile Euclidean geometry. This makes as much sense as conducting a survey of opinion about the law of gravity or applying for a presidential candidate in the ...