Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 2

Donnelly was the perfect American crank. When Ragnarok Ragnarok failed, he didn't write three more books trying to get it to succeed. He moved along to debunking Shakespeare. He didn't care what the accepted wisdom was, nor did he insist that his work be included in it. He seemed to realize that the struggle to be respectable renders a crank worthless to the culture. The crank must always live where the wild imagination exists. The crank pushes and prods but does not insist that his ideas be judged by standards that do not apply. The crank lives in a place of undomesticated ideas, where the dinosaurs do not wear saddles. failed, he didn't write three more books trying to get it to succeed. He moved along to debunking Shakespeare. He didn't care what the accepted wisdom was, nor did he insist that his work be included in it. He seemed to realize that the struggle to be respectable renders a crank worthless to the culture. The crank must always live where the wild imagination exists. The crank pushes and prods but does not insist that his ideas be judged by standards that do not apply. The crank lives in a place of undomesticated ideas, where the dinosaurs do not wear saddles.

It's always been there, in the oldest folk songs, in the whispered politics of the colonial tavern, in the angry speeches at the grange hall, in the constant rise of fringe religions, and in the persistence of theories about who's really in charge and what they're doing. There are gray s.p.a.ces in the promises of freedom that made inevitable the rise of a country of the mind wilder and freer than the actual republic, what the critic Greil Marcus calls "the old, weird America." That country has its own music, its own language, its own politics, and its own popular culture. It has its own laws of reality. Ignatius Donnelly didn't discover Atlantis off the coast of the Azores. He discovered Atlantis in this country of the mind, in the willingness of Americans to believe.

What Donnelly did was to keep this counterhistory in its proper place as a subtext, as grace notes, as the niggling little doubts that are as firmly in the democratic tradition as any campaign speech is. After all, sometimes there are are wheels within wheels. Sometimes people are keeping real secrets, and sometimes those secrets involve actual events that are as cosmically lunatic as anything Ignatius Donnelly ever dreamed up. We should always listen to our inner Donnellys. But we shouldn't always take their advice. wheels within wheels. Sometimes people are keeping real secrets, and sometimes those secrets involve actual events that are as cosmically lunatic as anything Ignatius Donnelly ever dreamed up. We should always listen to our inner Donnellys. But we shouldn't always take their advice.

A brief word, then, about politics. brief word, then, about politics.

It will appear to most readers that the politics in this book concerns the various activities of the modern American right. This would seem to make the work something of a piece with Richard Hofstadter's in the 1960s. However, we are emerging from a period of unprecedented monopoly by modern American conservatism-what some people call "movement conservatism"-over the inst.i.tutions of government.

The long, slow march from the debacle of the Goldwater campaign in 1964 through the triumph of Ronald Reagan and, ultimately, the consolidation of power under George W. Bush from 2000 to 2008 depended in everything on how tightly the movement fastened itself to popular irrationality from economics to fringe religion. The movement swallowed whole the quack doctrine of supply-side economics, adopting it with almost comically ferocious zeal.

The movement lapped up Reagan's otherworldly tales, such as the famous one about how he had helped liberate n.a.z.i death camps, even though he'd spent most of World War II defending the bar at the Brown Derby. It was thereby prepared to buy whole hog the notion of George W. Bush, the brush-clearing cowboy who was afraid of horses. It attached itself to the wildest of religious extremes, sometimes cynically and sometimes not. On one memorable occasion in 2005, just as the controversy over intelligent design was heating up generally in the media, The New Republic The New Republic polled some of the country's most prominent conservative intellectuals concerning the theory of evolution. The paleoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan stated, flatly, that he didn't believe in Darwinian evolution, but a number of others confessed a thoroughgoing fondness for it. Jonah Goldberg, for one, despite his heavily footnoted distrust for priestly experts who use science to discredit traditional notions of faith, was notably lucid on the subject. But once intelligent design-with its "scientific" implication of a deity-was thrown into the discussion, an exhibition of tap dancing erupted the likes of which hadn't been seen since Gene Kelly in polled some of the country's most prominent conservative intellectuals concerning the theory of evolution. The paleoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan stated, flatly, that he didn't believe in Darwinian evolution, but a number of others confessed a thoroughgoing fondness for it. Jonah Goldberg, for one, despite his heavily footnoted distrust for priestly experts who use science to discredit traditional notions of faith, was notably lucid on the subject. But once intelligent design-with its "scientific" implication of a deity-was thrown into the discussion, an exhibition of tap dancing erupted the likes of which hadn't been seen since Gene Kelly in On the Town. On the Town.

Norman Podh.o.r.etz, the G.o.dfather of neoconservatism, told the reporter that the question of whether he personally believed in evolution was "impossible to answer with a simple yes or no." And Tucker Carlson, the MSNBC host, seemed to be chasing his opinion all around Olduvai Gorge. Asked whether G.o.d had created man in his present form, Carlson replied, "I don't know if he created man in his present form.... I don't discount it at all. I don't know the answer. I would put it this way: The one thing I feel confident saying I'm certain of is that G.o.d created everything there is." In June 2007, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of the Republicans surveyed said that they did not believe in evolution at all. And this was the ascendant political power of the time.

Movement conservatism was so successful that it drove its own media, particularly talk radio, and conservative media fed back the enthusiasm into the movement, energizing it further. The movement's gift for confrontation was ideally suited to media in which controversy drove ratings, which then drove the controversy, and so forth. The more traditional media joined in, attracted, as they always are, by power and success. The more the movement succeeded politically, the tighter it was bound to the extremes that helped power it. The September 11 attacks functioned as what the people on the arson squad would call an accelerant. Even popular culture went along for the ride. The vague, leftish conspiracies of The X-Files The X-Files gave way to the torture p.o.r.n of gave way to the torture p.o.r.n of 24. 24.

It was a loop, growing stronger and stronger, until a White House aide (rumored to be Karl Rove himself) opened up to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2004 and gave him the money quote for the whole era. Suskind, and those like him, the aide said, "represent the reality-based community," which is to say, the kind of people who believe "that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernable reality.... That's not the way the world works anymore." If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right, that's because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and succeeded very well.

Which brings us, for the moment, to the two U.S. senators from the great state of Oklahoma, a pair of the most entertaining primates ever to sit in the world's greatest deliberative body. Once, they might have been beloved local cranks, amusing their neighbors, scandalizing their friends, and enlivening the meetings of the local town council with their explanations of how everything went to h.e.l.l once the Illuminati took us off the gold standard. Now, though, they are members of the U.S. Senate. And, even given the proud history of that great deliberative body, which includes everything from the fulminations of Theodore Bilbo to Everett Dirksen's campaign to make the marigold the national flower, the Oklahoma delegation is a measure of how far we have come.

Usually, states will elect one boring senator and one entertaining one. For example, until 2006, Pennsylvania was represented by Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum. The former was aging and bland, but the latter was the funniest thing about Christianity since the Singing Nun fell off the charts in 1964. Ma.s.sachusetts has as its senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, which is like being represented simultaneously by Falstaff and Ned Flanders. However, Oklahoma has demonstrated almost unprecedented generosity in sharing with the nation its more eccentric political fauna.

The senior senator is James Inhofe, who once chaired the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works. In that capacity, he once informed the nation that global warming "might be the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state."

With all due respect to Senator Inhofe, he doesn't know his great American hoaxes. Global warming isn't much of one, what with all that pesky scientific data, all those pesky collapsing ice shelves, all those pesky tropical diseases, and all that other troublesome reality. And Inhofe has the same problem with that church-and-state business. The founders wrote an awful lot about it and it's hard to believe that they all died without writing down the punch line. These are great American hoaxes? What about the spiders in the beehive hairdo, and the prom-night hitchhiker, the thumb in the bucket of fried chicken, the maniac on the other phone in the house? What about the hook on the handle of the car door? Whatever happened to the cla.s.sics?

This is the country where the Cardiff Giant, the Ponzi scheme, and the Monkees were concocted. Aimee Semple McPherson worked this room, and so did P. T. Barnum. Inhofe's hoaxes don't deserve to stand in the proud tradition of American bunk.u.m-not least because they're, well, true. Unfortunately for Inhofe, his sad misreading of the history of American suckerdom was surpa.s.sed almost immediately by his junior colleague Tom Coburn, a doctor elected in 2006.

Coburn showed promise during the campaign, when he happened to mention that he'd been talking to a campaign worker from the tiny town of Coalgate in central Oklahoma. This person, Coburn said, told him that, down around Coalgate, lesbianism was "so rampant in some of the schools ... that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom."

Presumably, Coburn meant one girl at a time. at a time. Otherwise, some young lady had been accorded a rather dubious honor on behalf of her cla.s.smates. She'd probably have preferred to be elected prom queen. Speaking of which, one can only imagine what dark conspiracies must have occurred to young Tom Coburn at his prom, when all five girls at his table excused themselves at once. Otherwise, some young lady had been accorded a rather dubious honor on behalf of her cla.s.smates. She'd probably have preferred to be elected prom queen. Speaking of which, one can only imagine what dark conspiracies must have occurred to young Tom Coburn at his prom, when all five girls at his table excused themselves at once.

On the other hand, Coburn likely could teach Inhofe a little something about great American hoaxes. According to the most recent figures, there are only 234 students at Coalgate High School, and fewer than half of them are girls. It's doubtful that much of anything can be said to be "rampant" in that small a sample, except, perhaps, gossip about something being "rampant." (Yeah, right. Whatever. As if.) Coburn probably should check to see if there's a cannibal murderer listening on his upstairs phone.

Encouraged by the infrastructure of movement conservatism, and insulated by its success from any carping that might arise from outside a mainstream political establishment that respects success and power more than it does logic, these two paid no political price for saying things in their official capacity that would have cleared out their end of the bar in any respectable saloon. It wasn't always this way. Once, aggressively promulgating crazy ideas could cost you dearly. Global warming a hoax? Rampant lesbianism on the Oklahoma prairie? You might as well believe in Atlantis or something.

IT is October 13, 2007. Exactly seven hundred years ago, King Philip IV of France undertook to round up all the members of the crusading order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar. The Templars had ama.s.sed great wealth; supposedly, they found their seed money while excavating the site of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. They also accrued considerable influence as a protected prefecture of the Vatican, so much so that they scared Pope Clement V as well, and he signed off on the dragnet personally. (This is a dreadfully ungrateful way to treat people who invented, among other things, the traveler's check.) Philip picked up many of the French Templars, including most of the leadership. He tortured them horribly and killed them even more horribly. But most of the order got away-probably on a fleet of ships that the Templars kept, as the Wizard of Oz says about his balloon, "against the advent of a quick getaway"-and reportedly the majority wound up in Scotland where, legend has it, they came riding out of the mists at Bannockburn to help Robert the Bruce kick the English king back across the border where he belonged. And that was pretty much it for the Templars-unless, of course, they've been controlling the world ever since. is October 13, 2007. Exactly seven hundred years ago, King Philip IV of France undertook to round up all the members of the crusading order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar. The Templars had ama.s.sed great wealth; supposedly, they found their seed money while excavating the site of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. They also accrued considerable influence as a protected prefecture of the Vatican, so much so that they scared Pope Clement V as well, and he signed off on the dragnet personally. (This is a dreadfully ungrateful way to treat people who invented, among other things, the traveler's check.) Philip picked up many of the French Templars, including most of the leadership. He tortured them horribly and killed them even more horribly. But most of the order got away-probably on a fleet of ships that the Templars kept, as the Wizard of Oz says about his balloon, "against the advent of a quick getaway"-and reportedly the majority wound up in Scotland where, legend has it, they came riding out of the mists at Bannockburn to help Robert the Bruce kick the English king back across the border where he belonged. And that was pretty much it for the Templars-unless, of course, they've been controlling the world ever since.

Perhaps they're doing so from deep in a place like this one, on Walnut Street, in Newtonville, Ma.s.sachusetts, a tall, handsome brick building across the street from a ma.s.sive old Congregational church that most recently has done service as an office complex and a Chinese restaurant. The brick building has one round corner, a series of spires on its roof, and carefully wrought carvings on its facade. At street level, it houses a bookstore and a defunct Christian Science reading room. The people who may be controlling the world are upstairs, on the second and third floors. They're having an open house today.

The Dalhousie Lodge of the Freemasons was founded in Newton in 1861, in the upper story of a Methodist church. An earlier anti-Masonic fever in Ma.s.sachusetts had largely subsided, and Masonry was beginning to revive again. Not only the Dalhousie Lodge, but various Masonic subgroups, such as the Royal Arch Masons and the Gethsemane Commandery of Knights Templar, were flourishing in town, and they all needed a larger place for their meetings. In 1895, they bought the property on Walnut Street, laying the cornerstone of their temple in September 1896 in a ceremony that shared the front pages of all three Newton newspapers with news of local men involved in that fall's heated presidential campaign. "The craze for political secret societies, advertising, and slangy b.u.t.tons is particularly widespread now," one of the papers noted. The combined membership of the three lodges helped put up the building. It was dedicated on December 6, 1907. The Masons expected to rent the ground and second floors out to local businesses and to use the third and fourth floors for their functions.

The upper floors of the old building are awash in dusty autumn sunlight, the corridors sweet with the smell of old wood and varnish. In the past, the building has hosted reunion meetings of the Grand Army of the Republic; one wall displays the autographs of Generals Grant, Sherman, and McClellan. The club room features the mounted heads of big game killed by Masons past. On one wall is an impressive old print of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where the Templars supposedly found the treasure-or the Holy Grail, or some valuable, if theologically inconvenient, evidence regarding the early Christian church-that supplied the basis for their wealth and power and influence. The connection between the Templars and the Masons seems to have been made first by those Templars who escaped to Scotland, most notably in the construction of the famously symbol-laden Rosslyn Chapel.

In truth, n.o.body knows exactly what the Templars found in Jerusalem, if they found anything at all. But the order's secretive nature and the elaborate plot under which they suddenly were hunted down have made them central to almost every conspiracy theory that arose in Europe after their fall from grace. Meanwhile, the Masons prospered in Europe, particularly through their role in building the great cathedrals. They were particularly careful to keep the secrets of their trade away from ambitious compet.i.tors. They became adept at codes and various other forms of sub-rosa communication. Many of their vaunted symbols were little more than rudimentary copyright emblems carved into the stone by individual craftsmen-what Philip Ball calls "medieval bar-codes."

"There seems to be no indication of any 'esoteric' content in Freemasonry until the lodges began to admit 'non-operative' members in the seventeenth century," writes Ball in Universe of Stone Universe of Stone, his history of the building of the great cathedral at Chartres. "Gradually, these non-operatives, who did not work in stone but instead had antiquarian interests in the masonic tradition, came to dominate the organization, transforming it from a trade guild into the 'speculative' fraternity that still exists today." The Masons' role in American history centers largely on the actions-alleged and real-of these "non-operatives." George Washington was famously a Mason, but n.o.body would ever have hired him to build a wall.

The Masons, then, right here on Walnut Street, renting s.p.a.ce to the Christian Scientists and having their open house on a fine fall day in an American suburb, have long been a.s.sumed by the fertile American conspiratorial mind to be either the heirs to the Templars, or their ideological stepchildren. And, the unfortunate historical resonance of the day aside, it's a good time to be a Mason. Or a Templar.

The Masons are having an open house because the national organization is in the middle of a thoroughly modern membership drive. There are television commercials featuring an actor portraying Benjamin Franklin, a Mason himself, talking about the benefits of membership. Their official recruitment pitch has been helped immeasurably by the explosion of interest in the Templars prompted by Dan Brown's speculative literary supernova, The Da Vinci Code The Da Vinci Code, which postulates that the Templars discovered the bones of Mary Magdalene, who was actually the wife of Jesus Christ. In Brown's book, Mary flees Jerusalem after the crucifixion and takes up residence in France, where she gives birth to little Sarah Magdalene-Christ, their daughter.

For the benefit of the eleven human beings who have neither read the book nor seen the movie: The Templars dedicate themselves to guarding Mary Magdalene's bones, blackmailing the Vatican with what they know until Clement V gets fed up and sets Philip on them. Some of them escape with the bones, set up an absurdly complex system of perpetual guardianship that inevitably breaks down, and protect their secret down through the years against a network of shadowy clerical operatives, including a self-flagellating albino monk. The book ends with the discovery that the gamine French detective who has been helping the hero is actually the long-lost Magdalene-Christ heir. To his credit, Brown wrote an intriguing thriller. It's hardly his fault that people read it and integrated it into their personal views of the hidden world. The Masons, for example, play a tangential role in the book, but by all accounts, the novel's success spurred a great burst of interest in Masonry worldwide.

In fact, The Da Vinci Code The Da Vinci Code touched off a Templar frenzy in the popular culture. The hit movie touched off a Templar frenzy in the popular culture. The hit movie National Treasure National Treasure has Nicolas Cage running down the Templars' treasure-which, in this case, actually is a treasure, and not a desiccated figure from the Gospels-by following a map that the various Masons who signed the Declaration of Independence secretly drew on the back of the original parchment. This map can only be read by someone wearing complex multifocal gla.s.ses invented by that future Masonic television pitchman Ben Franklin. (The movie posits that the treasure was whisked off to the New World on that famous Templar fleet.) The History Channel ran so many programs about the Masons, the Templars, and the Holy Grail that the subject actually threatened the long-standing primacy of World War II on that outlet. has Nicolas Cage running down the Templars' treasure-which, in this case, actually is a treasure, and not a desiccated figure from the Gospels-by following a map that the various Masons who signed the Declaration of Independence secretly drew on the back of the original parchment. This map can only be read by someone wearing complex multifocal gla.s.ses invented by that future Masonic television pitchman Ben Franklin. (The movie posits that the treasure was whisked off to the New World on that famous Templar fleet.) The History Channel ran so many programs about the Masons, the Templars, and the Holy Grail that the subject actually threatened the long-standing primacy of World War II on that outlet.

Soon, everybody had climbed aboard. On the very day when the Masons were holding open houses all over the country, and on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the Templars' last roundup, the Vatican announced that it would release copies of the minutes of the Templars' trials.

The doc.u.ment-"Processus Contra Templarios"-had been unearthed in 2001 from deep in the Vatican archives. Now, the Vatican planned to publish a handsome, limited-edition, leather-bound collector's edition of the doc.u.ments, including expert commentary and reproductions of the seals used by the various inquisitors. And at only $8,333 a copy, too. The Vatican always was a little more open about its treasure-hunting than the Templars were.

"We were talking in the other room about the Vatican releasing this today," says Larry Bethune, the Grand Master of the Dalhousie Lodge. "Is it a coincidence that they release these doc.u.ments on the seven-hundredth anniversary? This is how conspiracy, or conspiracy theories, get started."

Bethune is the vice president for student affairs and dean of students of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and he got into Masonry through the De Molay Society, which he joined as a teenager in New Jersey. He cheerfully admits that his organization has benefited from the renewed interest in the various conspiracy theories involving the Masons. It's not that dissimilar to the Da Vinci Code Da Vinci Code tours offered in Europe, which take devotees of the book around to the spots where the big moments in the novel take place, so that they can pester elderly museum guards with questions about exactly what secrets the elderly museum guards are being paid to conceal. tours offered in Europe, which take devotees of the book around to the spots where the big moments in the novel take place, so that they can pester elderly museum guards with questions about exactly what secrets the elderly museum guards are being paid to conceal.

"It's made a big difference," Bethune explains. "We have to be careful now because there are a lot of people who come to us now because they're taken by the mystery of it, and that's not the point of the organization. The people who come thinking that, it's very hard to argue with them because a lot of it is just hypothesis, even within the organization.

"They'll come in here thinking it's Indiana Jones and all that Knights Templar stuff and they'll be sort of disappointed."

Bethune himself is interested in the connection between the flight of the Templars and the rise of Masonry. In his ancestral home on the islands west of Scotland, he's seen Templar graves, the monuments flat on the ground and depicting the knight interred there. "I happen to believe it's true," he says, "but it's still just hypothesis. When Philip rounded them up, he hardly got any of them. A whole bunch of them were gone. They did disappear and the story is that they went to Scotland. And that part of Scotland where my family comes from had a lot of Masonic lodges. A connection between the Templars and the Masonic lodges, so far as I know, has never been proved.

"There are probably four or five million Masons, so there's probably some group that's doing something. I always say to potential candidates that they should come to one of our annual dinners first. Watch us plan that dinner and see if you think we're capable of pulling off some major conspiracy. We can barely get that dinner done."

Of course, that's what they would say.

Hmmmmm.

EVEN though the action in his novel takes place in Europe-the bones of the late Ms. Magdalene-Christ eventually are discovered to be resting beneath the Louvre-Dan Brown could not have tossed his novel more directly into the American wheel-house. For good or ill, there's nothing more fundamentally American than conspiracies or, more precisely, conspiracy theories. There is always secret knowledge, somewhere, being kept from us somehow, by someone. It's just not the secret knowledge everybody presumes is there. though the action in his novel takes place in Europe-the bones of the late Ms. Magdalene-Christ eventually are discovered to be resting beneath the Louvre-Dan Brown could not have tossed his novel more directly into the American wheel-house. For good or ill, there's nothing more fundamentally American than conspiracies or, more precisely, conspiracy theories. There is always secret knowledge, somewhere, being kept from us somehow, by someone. It's just not the secret knowledge everybody presumes is there.

For example, Brown published his novel concerning a secret cabal within the Roman Catholic church in 2003. At the time, the church in the United States was reeling from almost daily revelations about how its inst.i.tutional structure had been used for decades as, at best, a conspiracy to obstruct justice. The newspapers that published the exposes ran into storms of criticism and disbelief. It seemed that people were more willing to suspend disbelief in the case of fictional murderous monks than they were concerning the elaborate lengths to which the church had actually gone to cover up its complicity in the s.e.xual abuse of children.

Secret knowledge-at least, temporarily secret knowledge-was essential to the founding of the nation. In 1787, when the delegates to the Federal Convention in Philadelphia agreed to debate and write the new Const.i.tution in complete secrecy, they had a number of reasons to do so-most notably, the desire of some to maintain their political viability if the whole enterprise crashed and burned later.

Not everyone approved. (Lobbing his objections from Paris, Thomas Jefferson made it clear that he hated the idea of a secret convention.) When the Const.i.tution finally did emerge, it was greeted by some people as though it were a collection of magic spells, written in mystic runes and decipherable only to a handful of initiates. According to political polemicist Mercy Otis Warren of Ma.s.sachusetts, the convention was nothing less than a cl.u.s.ter of "dark, secret, and profound intrigues" aimed at creating, at best, an American oligarchy. In reply, the people defending the convention, and the Const.i.tution that it produced, argued that they were afflicted on all sides by dark cabals. Some time pa.s.sed before the Const.i.tution was debated primarily on its merits. At first, everyone chose up sides to defend themselves and their position against the black designs of the conspirators arrayed against them.

Not much has changed. In November 2007, a Scripps Howard poll revealed that nearly 65 percent of Americans surveyed believed that the federal government ignored specific warnings prior to the September 11 attacks, and that fully a third believed in a whole host of other conspiracies, including a plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate John F. Kennedy and a government effort to conceal the truth about UFOs.

Conspiracy theories are basic to most American popular culture as well. The rise of black American music-blues, jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop-to a position of dominance within the culture is richly attended in history by a dynamic of Us versus Them. Aficionados enjoyed an undeniable frisson of underground excitement that was sharpened and hardened by a demonstrable organized reaction from the predominant culture of the times. The endless, nearly incomprehensible "culture wars" are a manifestation of one side's oppositional ident.i.ty to the cabal meeting across the faculty lounge. There is a misapprehension about conspiracy theories that ought not to make us lose sight of their true value. In fact, it can be argued that a conspiracy theory-airy and vague and not entirely moored to empirical fact-can be more important than is the revelation of an actual conspiracy itself.

Conspiracy theories do engage the imagination. In their own way, they are fragments of lost American innocence in that they presume that the "government" is essentially good, but populated at some deep level by evil people. At the heart of some of them, at least, is a glimmering of the notion of self-government. They tumble into Idiot America when they are locked solely into the Three Great Premises, when they're used merely to move units, and when they're limited to those people who believe them fervently enough to say them loudly on television. To look at how that can work, you have to spend some time in Dealey Plaza.

I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it.-JOHN F. KENNEDY, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961 Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961My G.o.d, they are going to kill us all.-JOHN CONNALLY, Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963 Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963 There is an X in the middle of Elm Street, just down the little hill that runs away from the Book Depository and toward the gra.s.sy hill with the fence behind it. The sun in Dealey Plaza is merciless on a summer's day. People squint and shade their eyes. They toss a couple of bucks to the freelance experts who work the plaza every day, with their diagrams and their newsletters. They wander up the knoll, through the blessed shade, and behind the fence-not the original fence, long ago lost to souvenir hunters, but a newer one, rebuilt there because the fence is important to people who wander into the plaza and never find their way out. Even this fence is weatherbeaten now. On one board, almost in a line with the X in the roadway, there once was a line of graffiti.

"Thanks for Chicago and West Virginia," it said. "Sincerely, Sam Giancana."

In his study of the Kennedy presidency, the political writer Richard Reeves quotes Kennedy describing himself as the center of a spoked wheel and, in doing so, inadvertently posing an insoluble riddle to what would become, after his murder, a nation of his biographers. By the time he touched down in Dallas, Kennedy had grown comfortable living in the plural.

"It was instinctive," Kennedy said. "I had different ident.i.ties, and this was a useful way of expressing each without compromising the other." Consider what we have come to know about him in the decades since he was killed: that he was an icon of vigor-vigah!-who was deathly ill and gobbling steroids and shooting speed just to function daily; that he was the golden child of a golden family with a s.e.x life that can properly be called baroque; that he was a public intellectual whose books were ghostwritten; that he bought West Virginia in 1960, probably with the mob's money, in a deal brokered by his good friend Frank Sinatra.

After all, every frontier is a New Frontier, landscape and dreamscape at once, a horizon but also an architecture of belief. But frontiers are also wild and uncivilized places where people struggle to survive, where people die over private grudges, and where people, a lot of them, carry guns. John Kennedy needed every ident.i.ty he'd crafted for himself to survive on the New Frontier he proclaimed. In 1960, he got up in Los Angeles and promised to make all things new. In his murder, three years later, he managed to do it for the ages.

Consider Dallas, the nexus of distrust that became the template for modern political paranoia, and consider that, while Kennedy was president, the executive branch was a writhing ball of snakes. A memo has survived in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff seriously suggest blowing up John Glenn on the launch-pad in order to concoct a casus belli for invading Cuba again. Consider that this lunacy made it all the way up the chain of command to the secretary of defense before someone finally turned it off. Consider Dallas when you consider how quickly theories sprang up about who might have known what before the airplanes were flown into the buildings in Washington and New York.

It turns out there were actual conspiracies going on throughout the brief history of the Kennedy administration. It was a fertile time for conspiracy, since so many things seemed to be changing all at once. The issue of civil rights had moved swiftly past the hope of easy compromise; there were murderous plots planned under the Spanish moss in Mississippi, and the people involved in them believed they were arming themselves against a conspiracy from the North that dated back to Lincoln. Elsewhere, there were off-the-books efforts to kill Fidel Castro in Cuba, and covert wranglings in (among other places) Iraq, where a young officer named Saddam Hussein backed the right side in a CIA-sponsored coup. A rat's nest was growing in Southeast Asia that already seemed beyond untangling.

The Joint Chiefs were barely under civilian control; Fletcher Knebel did not pluck the plot for Seven Days in May Seven Days in May out of the air. Knebel was a veteran Washington journalist who knew what he heard around town. The intelligence services vanished into the dark blue evening distance of the frontier in which John Kennedy had declared could be found the nation's best new hope. These were actual conspiracies, many of which have come to light in the years since the a.s.sa.s.sination, just as the conspiracy theories about the president's murder have hit high tide, but they have had less historical resonance in that context than the notion, completely unsubstantiated by anything resembling a fact, that Kennedy was shot from a storm drain beneath the street in the plaza. out of the air. Knebel was a veteran Washington journalist who knew what he heard around town. The intelligence services vanished into the dark blue evening distance of the frontier in which John Kennedy had declared could be found the nation's best new hope. These were actual conspiracies, many of which have come to light in the years since the a.s.sa.s.sination, just as the conspiracy theories about the president's murder have hit high tide, but they have had less historical resonance in that context than the notion, completely unsubstantiated by anything resembling a fact, that Kennedy was shot from a storm drain beneath the street in the plaza.

Back in 1991, shrewd old Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw clearly what would happen. In an essay prompted by the release of Oliver Stone's film JFK JFK, Moynihan argued that the Warren Commission's capital mistake from the start was the failure to recognize that Americans were not predisposed to believe it.

"I was convinced that the American people would sooner or later come to believe that there had been [a conspiracy]," Moynihan wrote, "unless we investigated the event with exactly that presumption in mind."

By the time Moynihan published his essay, a solid 70 percent of the American people did not believe the conclusion of the Warren Commission that, acting alone and from ambush, Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. This percentage has not changed substantially since the day in 1964 when the commission first published its findings, even though both the journalist Gerald Posner and the former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi have published lengthy and detailed defenses of the Warren Commission's conclusions. To this day, the official U.S. government report into the public murder in broad daylight of the president of the United States has rather less credibility with the American people than does the Epic of Gilgamesh. Epic of Gilgamesh.

No matter what the polls indicate, the reality is that we have kept the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination as a conspiracy theory, rather than accepting it as an actual conspiracy. Once we believe in the latter, it becomes a deadening weight on the conscience. It loses its charm. Accepting it as a reality means we probably are obligated to do something about it, and that we have chosen, en ma.s.se, not to.

The revelation of an actual conspiracy-the Iran-Contra matter, say-has come to have a rather deadening effect on American politics and culture. It runs through stages. There is disbelief. Then the whole thing dies in ba.n.a.lity. It's too hard to understand, and it's Just One More d.a.m.n Thing that proves not that something called "government" is controlled by a secret conspiracy, but that "government" itself is the conspiracy. This is commonplace and boring, and it leads to distrust and to apathy, and not, as it is supposed to do, to public outrage and reform. There is no "Us." There is only a "Them." There's no game if there's only the other team playing.

In fact, Iran-Contra was a remarkable piece of extraconst.i.tutional theater, far beyond anything the Watergate burglars could've dreamed up. Arming terrorist states? Using the money to fund a vicious war of dubious legality elsewhere in the world? Government officials flying off to Teheran with a Bible and a cake in the shape of a key? A president whose main defenses against the charge of complicity were neglect and incipient Alzheimer's disease? Who could make this up? Iran-Contra was a great criminal saga, even up to the fact that it was first revealed not by the lions of the elite American press, but by a tiny newspaper in Beirut.

Iran-Contra should have immunized the American public forever against wishful fact-free adventurism in the Middle East. It would have, too, if the country had been able to bring to this actual conspiracy the fervor that it readily brings to conspiracy theories. As has become sadly plain over the past seven years, the Iran-Contra affair had no immunizing effect. (Remarkably, several of its architects even returned from think-tank limbo in 2001, eager to rea.s.sert their fantastical visions.) People p.r.o.nounced themselves baffled by the plot, and the production closed out of town. It is little more than a footnote in history. It sells no books. It moves no units. Mark Hertsgaard, in his study of how the press functioned during the Reagan administration, describes in detail how interest dried up. "Editors were convinced that, after months of heavy play, readers and viewers were tired of Iran-Contra."

Consider Dallas when you consider Watergate and Iran-Contra, in which we learned that the Nixon and Reagan White Houses were not the Kennedy White House primarily because we found out about the covert wiretapping and the crackpot foreign policy moves. Consider Dallas when you consider the Monica Lewinsky affair, through which we learned that the Clinton White House was not the Kennedy White House primarily because we found out about the s.e.x. Consider Dallas when you consider poor Vincent Foster, dead by his own hand, and the speculation hovering over his body almost before the cops were. Consider Dallas when you consider a White House set up almost as a living diorama of the Kennedy White House, one beset by real political enemies acting in secret concert, a White House in which the nickname of presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal closed the circle for good: "Gra.s.sy Knoll."

A country that so readily rejects the official story about how its president was killed should not have taken almost three years to fully believe the truth about Watergate. It shouldn't have taken the White House tapes-on the most d.a.m.ning of which, it should be recalled, President Richard Nixon tells his aide H. R. Haldeman to have the CIA turn off an FBI investigation into the break-in with a cover story about how this will open up "that whole Bay of Pigs thing"-to seal the deal. A country that readily puts shooters almost everywhere in Dealey Plaza should not have found Iran-Contra to be so "complicated" that the criminals got away simply because the country got too bored to pursue them.

Logic dictates that a people who believe that their president was gunned down in broad daylight as the result of a conspiracy made up in part of dark forces within their own government would become aggressively skeptical, rather than pa.s.sively cynical. They would be more difficult to govern, in the sense that they would become harder to fool. For example, you wouldn't think of trying to scare them by floating stories that a tinpot tyrant in the Middle East could launch a fleet of drone aircraft, and that these puppet airplanes, having eluded a multibillion-dollar air-defense system, would then blithely cruise up and down the East Coast, spraying anthrax as they go. We entertain ourselves with skepticism or, at worst, cynicism. But we govern ourselves with apathy or, at worst, credulity.

The JFK conspiracy sells, so it remains nothing more than ma.s.s entertainment. Dealey Plaza functions as a performance venue. Considering Dallas means accepting that, for more than forty years, we have believed the unthinkable and gone right on with our lives. Because John Kennedy led plural lives, Dealey Plaza freezes us in the plural. If you make that bafflingly tight turn from Houston onto down-sloping Elm, a turn that still doesn't make any sense if you're trying to protect a president riding in an open car, hair in the breeze, if you enter in the first-person plural-"we lost our innocence"-then you must leave in the third: They killed him.

But it ends there, in Dealey Plaza, where there is an X on the roadway and where German tourists cool themselves in the shade of the trees atop the gra.s.sy knoll. It wasn't always so. The country once managed to make actual conspiracies, and the theories that attend them, work in concert in such a way that our appet.i.te for the grotesque was satisfied, our appet.i.te for hidden knowledge sated, and, most important of all, our appet.i.te for freedom was sharpened. And, yes, the Masons were behind it all. Or so some people believed.

ON an October day in 1827, people in the small town of Lewiston in western New York state, hard by Lake Ontario, fished a body out of Oak Orchard Creek. The body was badly decomposed. Townsfolk, however, were sure they knew who it was. It was a man who had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jail in Canandaigua a year earlier-kidnapped and murdered, the townsfolk believed, because of what he knew. This unpleasant-looking lump of recent fish food, they said, was William Morgan, and it was the Masons who killed him. an October day in 1827, people in the small town of Lewiston in western New York state, hard by Lake Ontario, fished a body out of Oak Orchard Creek. The body was badly decomposed. Townsfolk, however, were sure they knew who it was. It was a man who had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jail in Canandaigua a year earlier-kidnapped and murdered, the townsfolk believed, because of what he knew. This unpleasant-looking lump of recent fish food, they said, was William Morgan, and it was the Masons who killed him.

Morgan had come to New York from Virginia, a tramp bricklayer and stonemason, and a full-time pain in the a.s.s. He joined one Masonic lodge, moved, and was denied admission to another, upscale lodge, probably because its membership looked upon Morgan as something of a b.u.m. In retaliation, Morgan wrote and distributed a pamphlet describing in lurid detail Masonic rituals and ancient legends. The local Masons fought back, repeatedly having Morgan tossed into various local hoosegows as a habitual debtor and, eventually, even trying to burn down the shop of the fellow who'd printed up the pamphlet. The second time Morgan was incarcerated, two mysterious men showed up at the jail, paid his debt, and took him away. n.o.body ever saw him again, unless it actually was William Morgan who was pulled out of the creek.

(Morgan's wife and his dentist both said the body was his. It was disinterred several times and, amid charges that someone had tampered with the corpse to make it look like Morgan, the local coroner just gave up entirely, declining to identify the corpse. The historian Sean Wilentz writes that a positive identification eventually became unnecessary: a local anti-Masonic leader admitted that the corpse was "a good enough Morgan" for the purposes of local political agitation.) Western New York exploded with the controversy. Local Masons were hauled before grand juries. The jailer in Canandaigua, who was a Mason and who had released Morgan to his two abductors, was indicted. When some Masons were brought to trial, other Masons refused to testify against them. Charges often were swiftly dismissed-because, people said, of Masonic influences on the judges and the juries.

The Masons had been central to early American conspiracy theories, most of which connected them not to the Templars but to the Bavarian Illuminati, an obscure group founded in 1776 by a wandering academic named Adam Weishaupt and suppressed by the elector of Saxony eight years later. As Sean Wilentz points out, anti-Masonry had its beginnings in America not as a populist revolt against a mysterious, monied elite, but as the reaction of high-toned Protestant preachers in Federalist New England, who saw the hidden hand of Weishaupt's group behind everything they considered politically inconvenient.

The Illuminati were a constant, stubborn presence in the emerging underground American counternarrative. By 1789, in addition to being blamed for the Jacobin excesses in France, and accused of attempting to import those excesses, the group also had been linked to the hidden secrets of the Templars and, therefore, to the Masons. At one point, they were charged by the Catholic Church with engineering a Masonic plot to overthrow the papacy while, simultaneously being accused elsewhere of being central to a conspiracy between the Masons and the Jesuits to take over the world. The Illuminati were enormously useful.

(Theories about the Illuminati have never really gone away. They were blamed for the Russian Revolution. In the 1950s, the John Birch Society saw the hand of the group behind a movement toward one-world government based in the United Nations. A writer named Jim Marrs, whose book Crossfire Crossfire was one of the primary texts Oliver Stone used to concoct the plot of was one of the primary texts Oliver Stone used to concoct the plot of JFK JFK, puts the Illuminati not only in those places, but in Dealey Plaza as well, and also in prehistory. Marrs makes them the keepers of the knowledge that came to earth with our alien ancestors, a group of s.p.a.ce wanderers called the Annunaki. And, before hitting it big with The Da Vinci Code The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown used the Illuminati as the villains in Angels and Demons Angels and Demons, the novel in which he introduced the Harvard symbologist Robert Lang-don. The plot is kicked off when a priest is found murdered in a church with "Illuminati" carved backward into his chest.) Even in 1827, then, there was a history on which the anti-Masonic movement in New York State could build. However, the fervor was fueled by rising political and social tension between the local farmers and rural landowners, and the expanding commercial cla.s.s that had grown up in the area since the opening of the Erie Ca.n.a.l.

Cla.s.s tensions were exacerbated when justice seemed thwarted in every venue that attempted to parcel out guilt in the murder of the person believed to be William Morgan. Less moneyed citizens saw the rise of Masonry as the rise of an unaccountable elite-an idea that still had fearsome power only fifty years after the revolution. For all the conspiratorial filigree attending the movement, and for all the lurid speculation about what went on behind the doors of Masonic temples, there was a powerful cla.s.s-based political opportunity here, and there also were people more than ready to grab it.

At the time, national politics was locked in a struggle between President John Quincy Adams, the son of a president himself, and the populist enthusiasm for General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee-who was, it should be noted, a Mason. In 1824, when the tangled and messy four-way presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, Adams managed to defeat Jackson, partly because he cut a deal with Representative Henry Clay-who was, it should be noted, a Mason-that made Clay secretary of state in exchange for throwing his support to Adams.

The "corrupt bargain"-a boiling stewpot of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in its own right-set off a raging brawl in national politics. Jackson never accepted his defeat. By the time somebody who might have been William Morgan was fished out of Oak Orchard Creek, it was clear that the old general had become an even more formidable political power. Those lining up behind President John Quincy Adams needed something just as formidable to match Jackson.

In Rochester, New York, not far from the hot zone of anti-Masonic fervor, a publisher named Thurlow Weed bought a local newspaper. When the Masons refused to produce Morgan's murderers, Weed put his publication behind the anti-Masonic cause. However, he did so in such a purely pragmatic way that the anti-Masons soon became a legitimate political force. Gradually, talk of secret rituals gave way. In its place, Weed-and his eventual ally William Seward-brilliantly exploited legitimate grievances of cla.s.s, and the inevitable issues that were arising from the growth of the country.

Neither Weed nor Seward had any use for Jackson, and both men did believe in a Masonic elite that endangered democratic inst.i.tutions; Wilentz points out that they called for a "Second Independence" from the elite. But they grafted anti-Masonry onto their National Republicanism by tempering the more outre elements of the conspiracy theory, and by channeling the emotions raised by that theory into pragmatic, even liberalizing, politics. By 1832, Weed and Seward had helped build a political party so big that it held the first national nominating convention in U.S. history. The anti-Masons now held the balance of power in the political opposition to Andrew Jackson, and the party's most surprising convert was a retired politician from Ma.s.sachusetts named John Quincy Adams.

Stewing in Ma.s.sachusetts, the aristocratic Adams had soured on politics generally and on political parties in particular. He was not overfond of his countrymen, either, and at first he considered the conspiratorial basis for anti-Masonic politics to be an unpleasant inflammation of distant hayshakers. However, Adams found in the evolving movement a new const.i.tuency. It was rougher than he might have liked it to be, but its enthusiasm revived the old man. In 1830, he was elected to a seat in the House of Representatives.

By then, as Wilentz writes, anti-Masonry was spent as an independent political movement, but it had played a critical role in transforming the National Republicans into what would become known as the Whig party. Among Whigs, it was the politicians whose careers had begun in anti-Masonry who often were ahead of the party, particularly on the issue of slavery, which was gathering a fearsome power within the country's politics. In 1835, William Henry Seward bolted the anti-Masonic party that he'd done so much to promote and joined the Whigs.

For the next fifteen years, Seward and Weed and the other anti-Masons worked within the Whig party to close the ideological gap. They didn't talk much about the Masons anymore, but the anti-elitist energy that had fueled the anti-Masonic movement in upstate New York was easily translated into a dislike of southern plantation society when the slavery issue became inflamed. The abolitionist movement pressed on the Whigs from the outside while Seward and the rest of them pushed from the inside, until the party could bend no further. Gradually, as their conspiracy theorizing fell away, and their visions of a dark Masonic cabal went up in smoke, the democratizing part of the anti-Masonic movement stayed, and it helped to defeat the slave power in America, which actually was was the conspiracy that was running the country. the conspiracy that was running the country.

The Whigs imploded. Seward and his fellow renegades left, founding the Republican party and, eventually, nominating Abraham Lincoln. Seward would serve Lincoln as secretary of state until he was nearly killed in his home on the same night Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre. It was a confederacy of drunks and idiot children that attacked Lincoln and Seward, not the Masons. That would have been crazy. And still, n.o.body was sure who they'd pulled out of Oak Orchard Creek all those years before, although some people continued to have their suspicions.

NOT far from where the Masons gathered in Newtonville, and not long after the Masons held their open house, the Royal Order of Hibernians opened their hall to a convention of UFO enthusiasts and some fellow travelers: there was some interest on display in Bigfoot, and in lost civilizations. The Hibernians had already decorated for their annual Halloween party. The walls were adorned with old movie posters- far from where the Masons gathered in Newtonville, and not long after the Masons held their open house, the Royal Order of Hibernians opened their hall to a convention of UFO enthusiasts and some fellow travelers: there was some interest on display in Bigfoot, and in lost civilizations. The Hibernians had already decorated for their annual Halloween party. The walls were adorned with old movie posters-King Kong and and The Bride of Frankenstein. The Bride of Frankenstein. Black and orange balloons bobbed to the ceiling in every corner of the hall. Black and orange balloons bobbed to the ceiling in every corner of the hall.

Browsing through the literature, it was easy to see the lasting impact that Ignatius Donnelly's work had had on the national historical counternarrative. Even those volumes arguing that Atlantis had an alien origin conformed to Donnelly's notions as to where the place was and what had happened to it. And clearly, Dan Brown's labors had done as much for the Illuminati-Templar-Masonic publishing industry as it had for the membership of the Masons themselves.

But the main focus of the conference was lights in the sky-or, in several cases, lights under water. There was about the whole evening a sense of faintly acknowledged bunk.u.m mixed with a charming desire for a kind of personal revelation, for acquiring hidden knowledge. There was nothing theoretical about what these people knew. The conspiracy or conspiracies were almost beside the point. It was the hidden knowledge that was important, a Gnosticism for the media age, with action figures for sale.

"There's a little P. T. Barnum and a little Don King to it, I guess," said Jack Horrigan, who organized the conference. "There's some substance to it, and then there are the guys from the Planet Beltar, and this is a photo of their alien s.p.a.ceship. Pa.s.s it on."

The essential Americanness of the whole thing was hard to deny. The isolation of conspiracy theories as mere commercial commodities, tightly circ.u.mscribed within the Three Great Premises, has not been a good thing. It has forced upon conspiracy theories the role of history's great patent-medicine show. The creative imagination at work in them never crosses over into what's glibly described as the real world. How different would American politics look if people generally applied to it what every poll says they believe about what happened in Dealey Plaza? The people looking into Iran-Contra could have used a little of the att.i.tude Ignatius Donnelly brought to the works of Shakespeare. Not that Donnelly was right, but that he allowed himself to believe there was knowledge hidden somewhere to which he had a right; in pursuit of it, he summoned all his creative powers, which, as we've seen, were considerable. To demand to know is the obligation of every American. That it occasionally leads people down blind alleys, or off to Atlantis, is to be celebrated, not scorned.

In 2007, Jonathan Chait published The Big Con The Big Con, a mordantly funny examination of how conservatives in general, and the Republican party in particular, came to believe so deeply and fervently in the crackpot notion of supply-side economics. Chait is a fanatically moderate liberal, a bright and wonkish soul, and a positive sobersides on almost every issue. And yet, on the very first page of his book, he's already calling supply-side enthusiasts "a tiny coterie of right-wing extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane." And, well, boy howdy, it gets rougher from there. By page 21, we learn that "American economic policy has been taken over by sheer loons."

However, Chait seems just a bit troubled by this. "I have this problem," he writes. "Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics-I mean, what's really happening-I wind up sounding like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not." This disclaimer is utterly unnecessary. If there weren't something of the conspiracy theorist in him, he wouldn't have been able, clearly and hilariously, to depict the lunatic economic nonsense that the country's dominant political party so rigidly adopted. He should be proud of sounding that way. We all need to unleash our inner Donnellys from time to time.

Modern conservatism, of which supply-side economics is the beating heart, did more than anything else to devalue traditional American conspiracy theories. People who held to the old conspiracies did so because they knew something important was at stake. They considered the government something of value. That's why the anti-Masons were so h.e.l.l-bent on exposing the Masons who were running government.

But to the supply-siders, and to the movement behind them, government is not worth the trouble. For all their faults, the old iron American conservatives did believe in the essential importance of the American government, which was why they were so afraid of what the Bavarian Illuminati might be doing with it. On the other hand, movement conservatism is a style, not a philosophy, and the government is merely a performance s.p.a.ce. Thus, conservative conspiracies have lost their essential lunatic tanginess. If you've made yourself rich and powerful deriding the government, what do you care if some shadowy cabal is running it, as long as it's not also running the corporations who fund your research?

Every election cycle or so, we still get some tub-thumping about the shadowy liberals who are running things, but now the dark forces are the Dixie Chicks, not the Rothschilds. Where's the threat, except perhaps to the memory of Patsy Cline?

Chait needn't have worried. The people he's writing about don't care whether he sounds unhinged or not. They don't even care if he's right. (He is.) Their theory is valid because it has made them money and sold itself successfully. The facts are what they believe, and the truth depends on how fervently they believe it. All Chait has done is to show them for what they are-charlatans, but not cranks. Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America-Greil Marcus's old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who's sold out.