{"id":1659,"date":"2020-03-07T22:41:56","date_gmt":"2020-03-07T22:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1659"},"modified":"2020-03-13T15:03:36","modified_gmt":"2020-03-13T15:03:36","slug":"idiot-america-by-charles-pierce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1659","title":{"rendered":"Idiot America<\/em> by Charles Pierce"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Idiot America<\/em> by Charles Pierce<\/h1>\n

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As suggested by its subtitle — “How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free<\/em>” — the premise of this book is that once upon a time our country was in a certain way enriched by dreamers, eccentrics, and philosophical outliers<\/strong> of various stripes.<\/p>\n

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Ignatius Donnelly<\/em><\/p>\n

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Author Charlie Pierce describes, for example, the case of one of Minnesota\u2019s own —\u00a0Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901). His legitimate contributions include serving in the state legislature and U.S. Congress as well as being elected Lt. Governor.\u00a0Unfortunately, Donnelly’s contributions are overshadowed by (a) his brick-shy-of-a-load attempt to found a Utopian community near Hastings, Minnesota and (b) his pseudo-scholarly books explaining such things as the origins of the continent Atlantis.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Pierce argues that we have gone from having in our midst lovable but harmless cranks such as Donnelly to the present day wherein knuckleheads and know-nothings are treated as credible commentators and intellects of the first order.\u00a0He rails against right-wing talk radio and TV gasbags like Michael Savage and Sean Hannity.\u00a0He uses as an object lesson in stupidity the perfectly serious fundamentalist founders of the Creation Museum in Petersburg,\u00a0Kentucky<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Life-size scene of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden at the Creation Museum<\/em><\/p>\n

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Some of Pierce\u2019s stories are laugh-out-loud tales where the fish in the barrel deserve to be shot.\u00a0Sadly, others bring a tear as they reflect the loss of civility, common sense, and reasoned disagreement that burdens us these days<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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Charlie Pierces encapsulates his book with\u00a0this line: “America’s always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.oganovic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Cover-of-book-by-Charles-Pierce-Idiot-America.jpg?fit=552%2C345&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1659"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1676,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1659\/revisions\/1676"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}