Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 6

"When they went to the [U.S.] Supreme Court, and they needed other attorneys to help write the briefs, none of the local attorneys would work with Michael Schiavo. So they were forced to go to the ACLU because the president had so much power, and his brother, the governor, had so much power, that the lawyers were afraid it was going to kill their practice if they touched it because this was a political firebomb to promote the Republican and the Christian agenda that the president and his brother had and n.o.body wanted to get in the middle of that and ruin their career over that."

Annie argued with the lawyers. They were throwing away their own rights to self-determination because they were afraid of politicians and preachers. "I told them, 'Look, you want to be tied to technology against your will because somebody's afraid that their religious views will be damaged?'"

Annie began to monitor the newscasts, as Mike Bell did, trying to discern the outline of the next day's story. She stopped concerning herself with whether the story might have anything to do with what actually was going on in the hospice. "We had things happen here and then the [Schindler] family would come out and tell us something totally different than what had happened and the press would run with it. And whatever story they created that night, that's how we knew what to prepare for the next day. It was always based on whether or not they thought they were doing well. And when they knew the media would be here, there would be more of them doing the carnival circus. You know, it was time for their press releases and their messages of hate and disruption, and yelling at the staff as they drove by, and holding out signs, and calling them murderers, and asking us to repent and not work for hospice, and 'You don't have to do this.'"

Annie turned down police protection, although she'd gotten death threats. "They offered me police, but I didn't need it," she says. "There were so many other people they wanted to kill."

"ANNIE?" says Captain Mike Haworth. "Annie rocks." says Captain Mike Haworth. "Annie rocks."

It was Haworth's job throughout the siege to coordinate security in the neighborhood of the hospice on behalf of the Pinellas Park Police. It was Haworth whose men had busted the fake deliveryman who'd been bribed to smuggle in a camera. It was Haworth who'd have to tell Jesse Jackson's driver that there was no room nearby in which to park the reverend's limousine. Shortly thereafter, while Jackson was giving a press conference down the block, a man sprinted across the street and made it all the way up to the driveway of the hospice. He was going to rescue Terri Schiavo from the people inside who were killing her.

"He made it right to about here, where he engaged one of my canine officers," says Haworth, pointing to a spot not far from the front doors. "The good news for him was that my canine officer had left his canine in the cruiser. The bad news was that the officer deployed his Taser. And that was our only Tasing out there."

Haworth is a native Floridian, a brawny serious man with a signifying crew cut and a steady gaze. He is the kind of cop who asks you politely to do something, and is willing to do so repeatedly, always politely, but with something formidable there in reserve. The son of a police chief in Dunedin, Haworth went away to Texas for college and did five years in the Air Force before returning to Florida, where he worked his way up through the ranks at the Pinellas Park department from traffic officer, through narcotics, until he was placed in charge of the department's SWAT team. He and his men were sent to the neighborhood around the hospice on three lengthy deployments.

"It was always about Michael, Terri, the legislators, the governor, the president," he says. "It was about everybody but us. We did not want to be the story. We wanted everything else to be the story."

From the start, Haworth was aware that his job was to be at least as much a diplomat as it was to be a policeman. Anything his police did they were going to be doing on national television. "'Pleasant' is not the right word. But it was accommodating," he says. "We were very accommodating. I mean, my direction to my troops through my lieutenants was 'Look, they [the protestors] have a job to do. We have a job to do. Okay?' It's hot. It's miserable. It's nasty out here, you know? And we're all just waiting, literally, for this woman to pa.s.s away.

"From a legal standpoint, we did it in the beginning. We established that this is where we're going to allow you to protest. We're not going to allow you to be on the sidewalk. We're going to keep that clear because we've got a school down there."

Haworth's third deployment to the neighborhood came in March 2005. At the end of February, Pinellas-Pasco County Circuit Court Judge George Greer again had ordered the removal of Terri Schiavo's PEG tube. Absent a successful appeal, his order would go into effect on March 18.

(At this point, Greer had been the judicial point man on the case for over five years, consistently ruling in favor of Michael Schiavo and against his in-laws. Greer's rulings were just as consistently upheld in the state appeals courts. As a result, not only was Greer asked to leave his church but a North Carolina man offered to kill Greer for $50,000. The same man set the price on Michael Schiavo's head at five times that. The FBI arrested him.) Around the hospice, and out on the police lines, there was a sense that the endgame had been reached. Haworth sensed a desperation among the demonstrators. "They would grasp onto anything," he recalls. "If Jesse Jackson came, maybe he could save the day. If there was a federal subpoena, maybe that could save the day. Maybe, if there was a piece of federal legislation that everybody flies back from [George W. Bush's ranch in] Crawford, Texas, to get done, that'll be it, you know? They kept waiting for it and, you know, our whole position was that she's in the dying process and we were there to keep the peace. That's what our job was." Haworth personally spent several hours on duty in Terri Schiavo's room on Beech Street.

"We always," he says, his voice catching just a bit, "had someone on her."

Haworth struggled for control as much as anyone else did against the heedless momentum of the events around them. The event of the thing seemed totally unstrung. After three years of seeing their children walk a gauntlet every morning, school administrators finally evacuated the Cross Bayou Elementary School. The last straw was a threat that came in through the FBI. A man had warned that he would take the school hostage and kill a child for every ten minutes that nourishment was withheld from Terri Schiavo. The decision to evacuate was made on Easter Sunday. To Marcia Stone, the princ.i.p.al at Cross Bayou, it felt like a surrender.

She'd come to education because being a stewardess had seemed too dangerous. Flying for National Airlines, Stone had broken her foot when the flight she was working had flown through a hurricane. A career in education had seemed like a safe and sane alternative. Now, she was being forced to abandon her school in the face of a threat that she was not allowed to communicate fully to her staff because of security concerns.

"That Sat.u.r.day night, I sent out the message to my staff that I want you to trust me on this, that we must vacate the school," she recalls. "So, the next day, Easter Sunday, the staff met me here and I still couldn't give them any details even then." On Monday, Stone talked to the parents of her students, and she couldn't give them any details, either.

One thing that Haworth and Stone shared was affection for Michael Schiavo. "I like Mike a great deal," Haworth says. And Stone had a connection to the case because her son-in-law, Patrick Burke, had worked at Palm Gardens Nursing Home, the first place Terri had been taken after her cardiac arrest. Burke had been the first physical therapist to work with her.

"Michael was just incredible, my son-in-law said," Stone explains. "My son-in-law said, 'I can save her,' you know, with the therapy. Eventually, he worked through the reality of 'She's never going to get any better,' and Patrick said that this was the first real incident where he realized, no matter what he did, no matter what anyone did, that there was brain death."

All of these people-Haworth, and Stone, and the people working at Woodside-watched in amazement as the detachment of the coverage from the actual facts reached a mad crescendo. Hospice officials, forbidden by law to discuss the specifics of the case, watched medical professionals with only the most tangential connection to the case trotted out to convince the nation that Terri Schiavo could walk and talk and was demanding to be freed from her captors. They watched as people accused them of letting Terri's lips crack and bleed, as though there weren't an entire protocol for mouth care for people in her situation, and as though the hospice staff weren't following it just as they followed it for every patient. Some of the families of the other residents wanted them to respond, angrily and publicly, to defend hospice care against the slanders of people who didn't care what damage they did. They could not.

"There were people in our community who got a little mad at us," says Louise Cleary, the hospice's spokesperson. "They wanted us to come out stronger. They wanted us to defend ourselves. They wanted us to say, you know, 'We're the good guys.' But we really did stick to the story that this is not our story to tell, that we just happened to be the hospice where Terri was."

Almost everyone involved inside the hospice was frustrated beyond endurance. Elizabeth Kirkman, whose volunteer work had been so extensive that she had been congratulated personally by both presidents Bush and by Governor Jeb Bush, wrote the governor a scathing letter condemning his meddling. "It was unsettling to us," Elizabeth said. She and her husband went out of their way to make sure their living wills were ironclad.

Annie Santa-Maria had to work harder than most to keep from lashing out. "To have the staff here listen to the Schindler family lawyer, and the Schindler family out there, saying, 'Oh, Terri. We're going to have you home by Thanksgiving. You're going to be eating turkey with your friends and family,'" she recalls. "They would be saying they had these yuck-it-up conversations with someone who's not responding. We'd be aghast. She didn't say a word. She didn't move. She didn't blink. But n.o.body knows that. But that's what the country's hearing-that we're killing somebody who has limited dialogue ability. And none of it was true."

Ultimately, the Columbia Journalism Review Columbia Journalism Review published a study that concluded that "coverage of the Schiavo case [has] consistently skewed toward the emotional over the factual.... With its performance to date in the Schiavo case, the press is displaying a tell-tale tendency for tabloid-style exploitation in the guise of serious reporting." The Gut, faith-based as always, was in the saddle and driving events. published a study that concluded that "coverage of the Schiavo case [has] consistently skewed toward the emotional over the factual.... With its performance to date in the Schiavo case, the press is displaying a tell-tale tendency for tabloid-style exploitation in the guise of serious reporting." The Gut, faith-based as always, was in the saddle and driving events.

Bizarre, almost otherworldly slanders flew through the air. A nurse named Carla Sauer Iyer appeared on both Fox and CNN, claiming that Michael Schiavo had poisoned his wife with insulin. She also claimed she'd heard him shout, loudly, "When is the b.i.t.c.h going to die?" Neither network noted that Judge Greer had nearly laughed the woman out of his courtroom almost two years earlier. (On CNN, an anchor named Kyra Phillips breathlessly reported the complete canard that Iyer had come forward for the first time that day.) However, n.o.body frosted the people at the hospice more than did Sean Hannity of Fox News. "He's a peculiar piece of work," says Cleary. "He's not the kind of journalist who's interested much in the truth, let's say."

At one point, Hannity got caught on camera coaching some of his interviewees to be harsher in their a.s.sessment of Michael Schiavo. It was Hannity-along with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC-who brought to the nation the spectacular charlatanism of William Hammesfahr, a doctor who'd been one of many brought in to evaluate Terri Schiavo as part of the seemingly endless litigation over the previous five years. Hannity relentlessly pointed out that Hammesfahr had been "nominated for the n.o.bel Prize in medicine."

In fact, a Florida congressman once wrote a letter to the n.o.bel Committee for Physiology or Medicine on Hammesfahr's behalf. That's not how one gets nominated for a n.o.bel Prize. (If it were, Hannity could "nominate" himself in the category of distinguished letters.) Hammesfahr had told Judge Greer that he could rehabilitate Terri Schiavo. Judge Greer had rejected his findings outright and called him a self-promoter. Previously, he'd been only one of dozens of medical professionals who'd collided with the case, but now he suddenly became useful. He popped up in a number of media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times and on CBS. He argued that Terri could be rehabilitated. That she could be speaking within two years. The people working at the hospice gazed in angry fascination. None of them would have been surprised to see Hammesfahr on television claiming that, in no time at all, he could have Terri Schiavo playing linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. and on CBS. He argued that Terri could be rehabilitated. That she could be speaking within two years. The people working at the hospice gazed in angry fascination. None of them would have been surprised to see Hammesfahr on television claiming that, in no time at all, he could have Terri Schiavo playing linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

"How is it possible," Hannity would intone in meat-headed awe, "we're in this position if you have examined her. You were up for a n.o.bel Prize. This is mind-boggling to me." Hammesfahr was a television star, an actor in the drama. He had a role to play: presenter of the Other Side of the Argument, to whom fair-minded people were somehow obligated to pay heed, no matter what nonsense he spouted. No place was more fair-minded at that point than the Congress of the United States, which somehow managed to go out of its way to make everything infinitely worse.

"What is really frightening," says Elizabeth Kirkman, that once-beloved Point of Light for the Bush family, "is that we're so gullible that crazy people scare us, and they scare our politicians into foolish, foolish decisions. And that, to me, is just mind-boggling-that our politicians are such wusses that they are so swayed by this kind of thing."

JUDGE Greer's final order mandated that Terri's PEG tube be removed for good on March 18, 2005. On that evening, Annie Santa-Maria was in her office. A federal marshal was there with her. That afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives had voted to subpoena Michael Schiavo and several doctors, some hospice personnel, and all the equipment being used to keep Terri Schiavo alive. It also subpoenaed Terri herself to come and give testimony. So the marshal stayed with Annie to make sure that she was there to receive her subpoena, and to take delivery of a subpoena demanding testimony from a woman Annie knew could no longer move or speak or think. Greer's final order mandated that Terri's PEG tube be removed for good on March 18, 2005. On that evening, Annie Santa-Maria was in her office. A federal marshal was there with her. That afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives had voted to subpoena Michael Schiavo and several doctors, some hospice personnel, and all the equipment being used to keep Terri Schiavo alive. It also subpoenaed Terri herself to come and give testimony. So the marshal stayed with Annie to make sure that she was there to receive her subpoena, and to take delivery of a subpoena demanding testimony from a woman Annie knew could no longer move or speak or think.

In antic.i.p.ation of Terri's pa.s.sing, Annie had contacted a local Catholic priest who was on call to deliver the last rites if necessary to the residents of the hospice. She was unaware that Terri's parents had contacted their own priest. The two men encountered each other in the lobby outside Annie's office. Voices were raised to an unholy volume. It looked very much as if a full-scale clerical hooley might ensue. Annie moved to break it up. The marshal blocked her way. He was sorry. She had to stay in her office. She couldn't go break up a fight between two priests because she had to stay there and wait for a subpoena to be served on a woman who was, for all practical purposes, dead. A few minutes later, the Schindlers were outside, telling the world that the hospice wouldn't let them send a priest to give Terri the last rites.

(Later, Annie tried to explain to her mother what had happened. "I said, 'Mother, that's just not true,'" Annie explains. "'That woman had last rites many times over.' And my mother said, 'Why would a priest lie about that?'") The last-minute intervention by both the Congress and the president reflected the Schindler family's last throw of the dice. They'd lost, time and again, in the state courts. They wanted an act of Congress that would then be upheld in the federal system. Remarkably, and to the astonishment of everyone at Woodside, they got what they wanted. Senate Bill 686 was filed and debated and, improbably, pa.s.sed into law on a resoundingly bipartisan basis, although the U.S. Senate bravely did so on a voice vote only.

The bill was not merely aimed at one woman in Florida. A memo that circulated on the floor of the Senate described the case as a "great political issue" for Republicans going forward. The bill was aimed at voters in Pennsylvania in 2006, where inc.u.mbent senator Rick Santorum, who'd shown up at the hospice to pray with the Schindlers, had a tough reelection fight, and at voters in Iowa who would caucus in 2008 to pick the next Republican nominee. For its Democratic supporters, the bill would serve to blunt future attacks on them from the same quarters, even though every poll consistently showed that the public overwhelmingly wanted the federal government to b.u.t.t out of the case. To vote for the bill was a careful act of preemptive cowardice.

Senate Majority Leader William Frist of Tennessee was one of the people with serious designs on those Iowa Republicans in 2008. Frist was also a licensed physician and an accomplished cardiac surgeon. After viewing a carefully edited videotape provided by Terri's parents, Frist proceeded to diagnose her from fifteen hundred miles away. She was not in the persistent vegetative state that her doctors claimed. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay agreed: "Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead. She talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort."

March 20, 2005, was Palm Sunday, a fact noted so often on the floor of the House that Tom DeLay should have ridden to work on a donkey. Late that night, flying all the way back from Texas and interrupting a vacation for the first time in his presidency, President Bush signed what was now called, inevitably, the Palm Sunday Compromise. A great roar went up across the street from the hospice. The Schindlers hurried into federal court to apply for a federal order to replace the PEG and to move Terri to another facility.

Federal judge James Whittemore had gone to bed that Sunday night, but a little after three in the morning, his phone rang. His clerk was on the line and she was in tears. "I am so sorry," she told him. The Schindlers' last-chance lawsuit had landed in his court.

The case shook Whittemore so much that he declines to discuss it to this day-unlike Judge Jones, who will talk about the Kitzmiller Kitzmiller intelligent design case to anyone who will listen. However, the two men shared a panel at a meeting of the American Bar a.s.sociation that discussed the pressures of working high-pressure, high-visibility cases. Whittemore opened up to that panel about the longest three days of his life. The day they got the case, he and his staff worked all night. At about ten o'clock, somebody sent out for pizza. At that exact moment, Nancy Grace, a CNN legal commentator who combines the nuance of a sledgehammer with the social graces of a harpy, was raging at what she said was Whittemore's delay in ruling on the Schindlers' motion to have the PEG tube reinserted. What's keeping this judge? Grace wondered. He's probably out having a steak with his family. intelligent design case to anyone who will listen. However, the two men shared a panel at a meeting of the American Bar a.s.sociation that discussed the pressures of working high-pressure, high-visibility cases. Whittemore opened up to that panel about the longest three days of his life. The day they got the case, he and his staff worked all night. At about ten o'clock, somebody sent out for pizza. At that exact moment, Nancy Grace, a CNN legal commentator who combines the nuance of a sledgehammer with the social graces of a harpy, was raging at what she said was Whittemore's delay in ruling on the Schindlers' motion to have the PEG tube reinserted. What's keeping this judge? Grace wondered. He's probably out having a steak with his family.

On the fly, Whittemore and his staff were enveloped by a complex security system. They unplugged all their phones; Whittemore's secretary had gotten physically ill from the abuse. They secured the phones to the point that even Whittemore's mother's phone was routed to the federal marshal's office. Whittemore's sons were placed under protection. (A run-of-the-mill neighborhood arson in St. Petersburg turned into a federal case because it happened behind the house in which one of Whittemore's sons lived.) The person who cared for Whittemore's disabled daughter had to pa.s.s a full background check. "It does take its toll on you," Whittemore told the ABA panel.

These were not idle precautions. As mentioned earlier, a man had already been arrested for offering a bounty on Judge Greer. The media was aflame. Michael Savage called Democrats "an army of soulless ghouls," and the former White House aide and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan lumped the removal of the feeding tube with activities of German doctors in the 1930s. He called it a "crime against humanity."

The talk in more respectable quarters was little better. On the floor of the Senate, Senator John Cornyn of Texas seemed to threaten federal judges with physical harm, and this in a year in which one federal judge, and the spouse of another, already had been killed. Other members of Congress talked darkly of defunding courts whose rulings they did not like.

For all the emotions swirling around him, Whittemore's ruling was simple and direct. The new law did not mandate a stay, so he was not prepared to grant one; and his court lacked jurisdiction in the matter. This ruling was affirmed on appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. At 9:05 A.M. A.M. on March 30, 2005, Terri Schiavo died. on March 30, 2005, Terri Schiavo died.

"I can tell you it was a sacred time," Annie Santa-Maria recalls. "We had a really moving moment where all of the staff just said good-bye and thank you for the privilege of letting us help you." The head of the housekeeping staff came in and cleaned the room up personally. Hospice workers lit a candle. Outside in the hallway, thirty people lined up silently to watch the body go by.

An autopsy revealed that Terri Schiavo's brain had atrophied almost to the point of insignificance. It had been in that condition when the U.S. House of Representatives had subpoenaed her to testify as to how much she wanted to live. The autopsy showed no evidence of abuse by Michael Schiavo, or by anyone else, for example the staff of the Woodside Hospice. She didn't even have any bedsores.

The late Terri Schiavo had a brief afterlife as a political tool. The following April, at a conservative political conference ent.i.tled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," a reporter for The Nation The Nation heard one panelist refer to the removal of the PEG tube as "an act of terror in broad daylight aided and abetted by the police under the authority of the governor." Another partic.i.p.ant cited a saying of Stalin's that, the speaker opined balefully, suited the situation: "No man, no problem." heard one panelist refer to the removal of the PEG tube as "an act of terror in broad daylight aided and abetted by the police under the authority of the governor." Another partic.i.p.ant cited a saying of Stalin's that, the speaker opined balefully, suited the situation: "No man, no problem." The Nation's The Nation's correspondent noted that Stalin coined the phrase as rationale for solving political problems with political murder. correspondent noted that Stalin coined the phrase as rationale for solving political problems with political murder.

Conservative commentators noisily charged that the memo describing the case as a political G.o.dsend to the GOP, which had so engaged the Senate, had been a piece of Democratic disinformation aimed at making the Republican majority look foolish. This conspiracy theory took flight, attaining the giddy heights of briefly being taken seriously in the Washington Post. Washington Post. Alas, an aide to Florida Republican senator Mel Martinez confessed that he'd written the memo. In the case of Terri Schiavo, the congressional majority hadn't needed the majority's help to look foolish. Bill Frist declined to run for reelection. His presidential hopes were stillborn. Tom DeLay departed the House under a federal indictment for corruption. In 2006, the voters handed the majority of both houses over to the Democrats. Alas, an aide to Florida Republican senator Mel Martinez confessed that he'd written the memo. In the case of Terri Schiavo, the congressional majority hadn't needed the majority's help to look foolish. Bill Frist declined to run for reelection. His presidential hopes were stillborn. Tom DeLay departed the House under a federal indictment for corruption. In 2006, the voters handed the majority of both houses over to the Democrats.

The bonds forged in the siege are as strong as ever. Captain Mike Haworth and his officers regularly partic.i.p.ate in charity fund-raisers-10K runs and the like-to benefit the hospice. Louise Cleary tries to interest the press in them. She now watches CNN only when she wants to watch it; doing so isn't part of the job anymore. Mike Bell had a bad moment when he was told that someone had put what they claimed was Terri Schiavo's PEG tube up for auction on eBay. He checked. The feeding tube was still in the sealed bag it was placed in the moment it came under congressional subpoena. Terri was going to go to Washington and explain how it worked.

The kids are back at school down the street at Cross Bayou Elementary, and Marcia Stone doesn't talk to the FBI anymore. The lots are empty and dusty in the high morning sun. No pundits walk the perimeter. There is no perimeter anymore. Back at work as a volunteer, Liz Kirkman doesn't have to stop at checkpoints anymore. She can walk up the driveway toward the Woodside Hospice and n.o.body calls her a n.a.z.i. There are no priests slugging it out in the lobby, and there's a new patient in the room down on Beech Street.

Annie Santa-Maria walks the stone paths out back in the meditation garden. She has been changed by what happened. Her devotion to her patients and their families remains unflagging. But she finds that her faith in her fellow citizens is not what it was. She has seen private suffering coined into public advantage, and she has seen the public, for all its p.r.o.nounced disapproval, eat up the story as just another television program.

Like the rest of the country, Annie was riveted by the coverage of the ma.s.sacre perpetrated by a young man named Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech University. She sympathized with the families of the victims. She also sympathized with the other students who, confronted by cameras, tried to explain the inexplicable. She believed in their grief, but that was all she believed. She had lost something she'd brought from Cuba, something very much like faith.

"I knew, okay, that they're probably getting thirty or forty percent of the truth," she says. "The rest? We don't really know what's happening because we're only getting that little piece of the pie that somebody wants them to get.

"And I have to ask you, as a journalist, how do you live with that, in a profession that we're so blessed to have in this country, but you know the truth isn't in there. I don't feel vindicated. I still think the public at large is still very confused about what happened."

The heat of midday doesn't penetrate the trees. Neither does the grinding of the machine shops across the way. The clamor of Idiot America is gone, too, and all that's left is the murmuring of the water and the fluttering of the prayer ribbons. And the wind chimes ring like the songs of ghosts in the trees.

CHAPTER EIGHT

How We Look at the Sea

Mr. Madison, it seems, wanted us to be educated, so that we would not be so easily fooled. In 1810, in the annual message to Congress, he proposed what he called a national Seminary of Learning. "Whilst it is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people," he told them, "... the additional instruction emanating from [the seminary] would contribute not less to strengthen the foundations, than to adorn the structure, of our free and happy system of government." Later, not long before his death, he wrote to the Kentucky legislator William Barry that "learned inst.i.tutions ... throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.... They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public agents of every description."

An educated people is a self-governing people, Madison believed. That was why he and Thomas Jefferson spent so much time developing the University of Virginia, Madison organizing the project after Jefferson's death. "They saw it as the nursery of the future leaders themselves, but also as training the teachers who could then teach the rest of the nation," Ralph Ketchum explains on his porch. "They would never have expected that self-government could work with an ignorant and inattentive citizenry. They would have been disappointed."

THE Chukchi Sea is a southern child of the Arctic Ocean. The great Pacific storms that barrel through the tropics and then swing north to devastate China and j.a.pan keep coming, roiling and merciless, until they spend themselves in the Chukchi, battering against the hard barrier islands in the far northwest of Alaska. The storms roar themselves hoa.r.s.e, having finally found a place as implacable as they are. This is where typhoons come to die. Chukchi Sea is a southern child of the Arctic Ocean. The great Pacific storms that barrel through the tropics and then swing north to devastate China and j.a.pan keep coming, roiling and merciless, until they spend themselves in the Chukchi, battering against the hard barrier islands in the far northwest of Alaska. The storms roar themselves hoa.r.s.e, having finally found a place as implacable as they are. This is where typhoons come to die.

Shishmaref is a village on one of those barrier islands, a flat little comma of land between the sea and a broad lagoon that runs eastward, toward the mountains. There are meadows along the banks of the lagoon where musk oxen roam in the summer. The Inupiaq people have lived on this island for longer than human memory can recall, hunting the oxen in the meadows, fishing in the lagoon, and, in winter, taking long, perilous journeys across the ice that formed on the Chukchi Sea in search of the walrus and the seals that the polar bears were also hunting. Once, hunting season began in the middle of October, when the sea froze, and it wouldn't end until the warm breezes of June broke up the thinning ice and swept it back out to sea.

"I remember that the season would be starting in October," says John Sinnok, a lifelong resident of Shishmaref. "The ship that brought supplies to the village for the winter would come in here in mid-October, leave them off, and then get out before it got frozen in for the winter."

The Inupiaq were already here in 1848, when the first whalers came, following the trail into the Arctic blazed by Thomas Welcome Roys, the master of a ship called The Welcome The Welcome, based in Sag Harbor, New York. Roys had discovered a huge population of bowhead whales living in the Chukchi Sea, and word quickly spread from New York to the whaling centers of New Bedford and Nantucket in Ma.s.sachusetts. Whalers were fond of the bowhead because it was a slow, docile beast, rich in baleen, far easier to kill and not nearly as deadly as the sperm whale. In addition, the Chukchi Sea formed a smaller hunting ground than the vast South Pacific. The bowheads there were virtually penned for slaughter between the Alaskan barrier islands on one side and the Siberian coast on the other. The whalemen flooded north. Many of the Inupiaq signed aboard the great fleets as what were called "ship's natives." The hunting was so good that hardly any bowhead whales are left today.

However, as safe as it was to stalk the bowhead, it was just as dangerous to sail the Chukchi Sea. The window for a successful hunt was a narrow one. The ships had to hit the killing grounds around the middle of July, because only then would the winter's ice have broken up enough to allow pa.s.sage. They had only eight to ten weeks to hunt before the ice began to form again. Linger too long in the Arctic whaling grounds, and the merciless ice would trap your ship and, gradually, grind it to splinters.

Some whaling ships wintered in the Arctic at a place called Herschel Island, where a thriving, if rowdy, port city grew. (For a thousand-dollar fee paid to his ship's owners, a captain could have his wife and children join him on the island.) Most of the ships, though, made for San Francisco, where they would lay up for the winter.

Some did not get there. In 1871, thirty-three whaling ships, most of them from New Bedford, were trapped in the ice near Point Belcher at the end of August. The captains ordered their ships to be abandoned, leaving behind an estimated $1.6 million in goods, including an entire season's haul of whale oil and whalebone. All twelve hundred men, women, and children aboard the doomed ships survived after a harrowing journey across the wilderness. The ships were picked clean by the local Inupiaq before being demolished and sunk by the pressure of the ice.

The Chukchi Sea remained a perilous place for sailors even after the whaling industry died. In 1931, a Swedish cargo steamer called the Baychimo Baychimo was trapped in the Arctic pack ice on October 1. For the next three decades, the abandoned was trapped in the Arctic pack ice on October 1. For the next three decades, the abandoned Baychimo Baychimo was a virtual ghost ship. It moved at the mercy of the ice. There were sightings of it in different places. The last place anyone saw it was in the Chukchi Sea, near Point Barrow, in 1968. It is now presumed, finally, to have sunk. was a virtual ghost ship. It moved at the mercy of the ice. There were sightings of it in different places. The last place anyone saw it was in the Chukchi Sea, near Point Barrow, in 1968. It is now presumed, finally, to have sunk.

In his memoir of the doomed voyage, A. F. Jamieson, the Baychimo's Baychimo's radio telegraph officer, recalled a moment earlier in the voyage when he'd scrambled up on deck to take his first look at the Arctic ice pack. According to Jamieson, he got his first look at solid Arctic ice on July 26. radio telegraph officer, recalled a moment earlier in the voyage when he'd scrambled up on deck to take his first look at the Arctic ice pack. According to Jamieson, he got his first look at solid Arctic ice on July 26.

"I was naturally very interested in seeing this for the first time," Jamieson wrote. "The captain took the ship right up to the pack, had a good look around, and decided there was nothing to be done except to drop anchor and wait. The ice was one solid ma.s.s, stretching from the sh.o.r.e as far out as we could see, with no leads in it of any description."

Shishmaref itself was spared the fate of the Baychimo Baychimo and the New Bedford whaling fleet by the permafrost that is fundamental to the island's geology. Underlying the beaches, the permafrost took the brunt of the dying typhoons. Later in the year, when the ice formed, the permafrost staved off its relentless, grinding power. The formation of the ice allowed the people of Shishmaref to go out on the sea and hunt. The permafrost guaranteed they would have a place to which they could return. Nowadays, though, the ice is late and soft. The permafrost is thawing. And Shishmaref is falling, bit by bit, into the Chukchi Sea. and the New Bedford whaling fleet by the permafrost that is fundamental to the island's geology. Underlying the beaches, the permafrost took the brunt of the dying typhoons. Later in the year, when the ice formed, the permafrost staved off its relentless, grinding power. The formation of the ice allowed the people of Shishmaref to go out on the sea and hunt. The permafrost guaranteed they would have a place to which they could return. Nowadays, though, the ice is late and soft. The permafrost is thawing. And Shishmaref is falling, bit by bit, into the Chukchi Sea.

The estimates are that Shishmaref has lost perhaps as much as three hundred feet of its coastline, half of that in the past decade. With nothing to slow them down, and nothing to dissipate their power, the storms that now rage against Shishmaref have already cost the town so many of its boats that the local economy may never recover. Houses have collapsed into the sea. A school playground has been washed away. And while the storms are catastrophic, even without them, day by day, Shishmaref continues to recede. The ice forms later and dissolves earlier, so the beaches are eroding away beneath the bluffs. There is no permafrost beneath the beaches to hold the land there. Little by little, Shishmaref is being devoured.

John Sinnok remembers great hills, up and down the coastline of the little island. They're all gone now. "We lost them all," he says. "When you're up here on the lagoon now, and you see people, you can recognize them right away. Back then, they were just little specks, because there was a bunch of hills here, then a lowland, then another bunch of hills. That's the way it was."

There is no question about the cause of Shishmaref's whittling away. Global climate change-specifically, what has come to be called global warming-is gradually devastating the Arctic. Alaska's mean temperature has risen five degrees in thirty years and the permafrost is receding everywhere. The Arctic Ocean's ice pack, which so impressed A. F. Jamieson even as it was swallowing his vessel, is shrinking about 10 percent a year, and the pace of that shrinkage is accelerating. In August 2007, scientists in the United States and j.a.pan reported that the ice pack had shrunk that summer to the smallest size ever recorded and that, within twenty-five years, the earth might see the ice pack melt entirely one summer, an event that would have severe repercussions everywhere else in the world. A month later, a German team reported that the Arctic sea ice was 50 percent thinner than it had been in 2001. All over the Alaskan coast, small villages and larger towns are in peril. Point Hope nearly lost its airport's runway to a flood that overwhelmed its seawall. Further north, the city of Barrow has been pounded to the point where its status as a vital oil terminal is seriously threatened.

The people of Shishmaref talk about global warming the way they talk about fishing in the lagoon or hunting seals on the ice. They've lived by internal clocks attuned to the weather and the land, the sea and the ice. The old whalemen learned their ways from them. Now, something has knocked askew the calibrations developed over thousands of years. There is no hunt without the ice, and the ice is not where it should be when it should be there. The land is falling into the sea. A nomadic people came to this island longer ago than anyone can remember and they've been living here ever since. In a very few years, they will be refugees.

"'Global warming' are new words for us in Shishmaref," says Luci Eningowuk, who has become something of a spokeswoman for this dying place. "We're used to getting spring, summer, fall, and winter. And now this global warming has made our lives unpredictable. We don't know when it is going to become winter now."

The evening comes late in the Arctic. The sea goes gray in the dying light. Darker still, almost black against the slowly pearling sky, gulls and geese wheel away inland toward the peace of the lagoon. The sound of the surf is steady and endless, not the thunder that comes when the big storms rage, but the steady dirge of mighty tides, pulling bits of the island away and never bringing them back. It is drowned out by a huge truck, trundling around a battered point, its wheels half in the surf, hauling stone northward to where they're building a seawall. From the cab of his steam shovel, Tom Lee watches the truck round the point, grumbling and splashing down the beach.

He's been there for two or three months, building and reinforcing the island's seawall. On the beach in front of him are piles of mashed asphalt and shattered concrete. These are portions of the earlier seawalls before the storms got them, before the ground beneath them got pulled away. They look like the machines of war left behind by a defeated army long ago.

"They tell us that this wall, this new one, might buy this place ten or fifteen years," Tom Lee says, leaning on the tread of his machine. "Hard to argue with the ocean, though." And, down all along the beach, the Chukchi Sea resounds in its remorseless pulsing power, unfrozen and unbound. It's the first week in November.

IN December 2007, not long before Christmas, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma issued a report declaring that "400 scientists" had announced that they had debunked the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding a human basis for the phenomenon of global warming. Upon closer inspection, the four hundred "scientists" Inhofe cited included a couple of local television weathermen, all consultant-bred and Dopplerized, one short evolutionary step up from the days when they got their forecasts from cat puppets and talking clams. Others were economists, and specialists in fields as distant from climatology as sociology is from astrophysics. Actual relevant expertise did not matter. "Scientists" were talking about other "scientists." The "debate" was all too confusing. December 2007, not long before Christmas, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma issued a report declaring that "400 scientists" had announced that they had debunked the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding a human basis for the phenomenon of global warming. Upon closer inspection, the four hundred "scientists" Inhofe cited included a couple of local television weathermen, all consultant-bred and Dopplerized, one short evolutionary step up from the days when they got their forecasts from cat puppets and talking clams. Others were economists, and specialists in fields as distant from climatology as sociology is from astrophysics. Actual relevant expertise did not matter. "Scientists" were talking about other "scientists." The "debate" was all too confusing.

(Sometimes, you don't even need to be a full-time scientist, just somebody who writes about them. The novelist Michael Crichton wrote State of Fear State of Fear, a thriller about bands of eco-terrorists bent on using the global warming "hoax" to capture the world. Inhofe invited Crichton to testify before Congress as an "expert" witness, and he was warmly received at, among other places, the White House. By those standards, poor Dan Brown should have gotten an audience with the pope.) That global warming-shorthand now for the effects of human activity on the earth's climate-is taking place has been the consensus within the community studying the phenomenon at least since the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report in 1995. "The balance of the evidence," said the IPCC report, "suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." This is as loud a clarion as judicious scientists are allowed to sound.

Since then, global warming has lodged itself firmly in the vocabulary of the age and become a pop culture phenomenon. A crack in the Antarctic ice shelf helps cause a new ice age in The Day After Tomorrow The Day After Tomorrow, a 2004 potboiler in which Dennis Quaid loses a partner who falls through the roof of the atrium section of a glaciated New Jersey shopping mall. And in An Inconvenient Truth An Inconvenient Truth, the Academy Award-winning doc.u.mentary made out of Al Gore's traveling PowerPoint presentation, global warming is as destructive a villain as G.o.dzilla ever was. The Arctic ice melts, the seas rise, and whole cities are swallowed up. In one chilling slide, Gore shows the site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan being inundated, a perfectly symmetrical collision of manmade catastrophes. We believe global warming is real and dangerous enough to entertain us, anyway.

What we accept in the darkness of the theater, however, is often not what we accept in the light outside. The reality of global warming, beyond its value as a scary monster, has been fashioned into yet another kind of vaudeville debate, with each side lining up its team like children choosing up sides in a schoolyard, except that, in a schoolyard, the most expert players almost always get chosen first.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to the standards of that context, any scientific theory is turned into mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how there came to be a "debate" over the very existence of global warming, even though the considered view among those who have actually studied the phenomenon renders the debate quite silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving SUVs. It's less about climatology than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank or collecting contributions for your campaign from the oil companies. Even now that the skeptics accept the reality of global warming, they either dispute the importance of human activity to it, or argue that its origins don't matter as long as we try to ameliorate the effects: the debate is still taking place in the provinces of the Gut.

The journalist Chris Mooney describes how the current debate was created. After the release of the 1995 IPCC report, the ascendant Republican Congress, behind Speaker Newt Gingrich, convened a series of hearings attacking the report's scientific credibility, mostly on the grounds that the IPCC used computer models to predict climate change. These techniques have their shortcomings. Most systems devised to project future trends do, as anyone who's ever been to the racetrack knows. "Obviously," Mooney writes, "computer models cannot perfectly simulate the ma.s.sively complex climate system." However, computer modeling is used to project future trends in almost every field. "In other words," concludes Mooney, "should policymakers consider the range of possibilities suggested by these highly sophisticated attempts to project future climate change? Clearly, they should."

Nevertheless, the "debate" was joined. The people arguing against the global warming consensus marshaled their own array of experts, drawn from think tanks, and they argued in the syntax of science, but not in its vocabulary. Their words were drawn from the language of sales and of persuasion, a language that appealed to, and drew its strength from, the Gut. It works to keep the debate in those precincts where the Gut can fight on an equal playing field and win.

It was the tobacco companies who drew up the template. In the 1950s, a scientific consensus was growing around the notion that smoking carried a serious risk of cancer. The consensus was reaching so deep into the mainstream that, in 1952, Reader's Digest Reader's Digest, the best-selling periodical in the country and a mainstay of small-town doctors' offices across America, reprinted an obscure piece from the Christian Herald Christian Herald ent.i.tled "Cancer by the Carton." This was the decade of ent.i.tled "Cancer by the Carton." This was the decade of Sputnik Sputnik, and of the Salk vaccine that eradicated polio. Americans were proud of their science. They trusted it. It saved lives. It would protect them from the new Russian moon. The building momentum behind a science-based a.s.sault on smoking was increasingly perilous to those people who sold cigarettes. The pressure on the tobacco companies to respond to these new studies was overwhelming.

In response, the tobacco companies turned to John Hill of Hill & Knowlton, the most successful public-relations firm of the time. If any field of study was exploding as fast in the 1950s as the physical sciences were, it was the study of how to influence Americans to do what your clients wanted them to do. Hill devised a canny strategy that turned on its head the pride that Americans took in their science. Instead of responding, point by point, to the studies themselves, the tobacco companies created their own Potemkin science almost from scratch. The CEOs of all the major tobacco companies met in New York in December 1953. Allan Brandt, in The Cigarette Century The Cigarette Century, describes the strategy: Its goal was to produce and sustain scientific skepticism and controversy in order to disrupt the emerging consensus on the harms of cigarette smoking. This strategy required intrusions into scientific process and procedure.... The industry worked to a.s.sure that vigorous debate would be prominently trumpeted in the public media. So long as there appeared to be doubt, so long as the industry could a.s.sert "not proven," smokers would have a rationale to continue, and new smokers would have a rationale to begin.

Brandt describes the vital role in the strategy played by a biologist named Clarence Cook Little, who agreed to become the scientific director of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, the group created by the tobacco companies to give a scientific gloss to their sales project. A career eccentric who'd resigned the presidency of the University of Michigan in the face of what was nearly an all-out faculty uprising-he loudly decried the decadent campus life while himself carrying on with a coed-Little believed so strongly in the hereditarian view of biology that he'd become involved in the eugenics movements of the 1930s. In his view, all diseases, including cancer, were traceable to genetic origins. Thus, he was predisposed to reject any evidence of environmental causes, such as smoking. However, his work in cancer research, particularly in the use of experimental mice, of which he'd developed several strains, won him such widespread acclaim that many of his colleagues were shocked when Little took the job with the SAB.

He gave the tobacco industry exactly what it wanted: a thickly credentialed spokesman who could help them sell cigarettes by muddling the scientific evidence. Little argued that cancer was hereditary, and that the research into a link between smoking and cancer was complicated and incomplete, even as study after study piled up outside. As the years went by, Little's hard-won respectability dropped away from him. Nevertheless, the strategy devised in 1953 held, more or less intact, for nearly fifty years.

The echoes of Clarence Little are quite clear when Chris Mooney describes how, in 2002, a Republican consultant named Frank Luntz sent out a memo describing how Luntz believed the crisis of global warming should be handled within a political context. "The most important principle in any discussion of global warming is sound science," wrote Luntz. "The scientific debate is closing [against the skeptics] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." In short, it doesn't matter what the facts actually are, all that matters is how you can make people feel about them.

Luntz's memo adhered closely to the strategy first used by the tobacco companies. Change the language, Luntz advised. Talk about "climate change" and not "global warming." Call yourselves "conservationists" and not "environmentalists." He also advised them to foster within their campaigns skepticism about the results of the research. His strategy depended completely on an American public easy to fool and on his ability to transfer the issue into those places where the Gut ruled, where the "debate" about global warming could be cast with familiar grotesques from all the other modern morality plays-the Meddling Liberal, say, or the Elitist.

In a sense, Clarence Little had a hard job. The American public was deeply in love with scientific inquiry, and he had to bamboozle them about events that many of them had experienced firsthand, as Dad hacked his way to an early grave across the living room while Arthur G.o.dfrey sang on the television set and sold him more Chesterfields. Luntz had a much easier sell. How many Americans had ever seen polar bears outside of a zoo, let alone cared whether they were drowning in the upper lat.i.tudes of Canada? How many of them had seen ice deeper than a hockey rink? Sputnik Sputnik was a dead iron ball in s.p.a.ce. The country was accustomed to being told what to think about things like this. They'd listen to anyone. Even the government. was a dead iron ball in s.p.a.ce. The country was accustomed to being told what to think about things like this. They'd listen to anyone. Even the government.

TRUTH be told, Shishmaref is more rusting than rustic. Along the bluffs behind the beach, old snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles lie in scattered pieces, like broken teeth, in the long gra.s.s by the side of the clotted dirt roads. There's a tread here and a wheel there, and a pile of old engine parts that seems a part of the essential geology of the place. Rows of wooden racks, used for drying sealskins, face the sea. They're pitted by the sand and grit that rides the rising wind; there's no way to tell whether they're still in use. Smiling children ride in carts pulled behind ATVs. In front of his clapboard house, its roof adorned with a cl.u.s.ter of caribou horns, a man guts a seal, its blood reddening the mud of the road. be told, Shishmaref is more rusting than rustic. Along the bluffs behind the beach, old snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles lie in scattered pieces, like broken teeth, in the long gra.s.s by the side of the clotted dirt roads. There's a tread here and a wheel there, and a pile of old engine parts that seems a part of the essential geology of the place. Rows of wooden racks, used for drying sealskins, face the sea. They're pitted by the sand and grit that rides the rising wind; there's no way to tell whether they're still in use. Smiling children ride in carts pulled behind ATVs. In front of his clapboard house, its roof adorned with a cl.u.s.ter of caribou horns, a man guts a seal, its blood reddening the mud of the road.

Shishmaref is not a place anyone but the people who live there will particularly miss. There are two stores and one school. The town's water system is touch and go, and most people catch fresh rainwater in buckets outside the house. In the winter, people chop ice and melt it down, but there's less of that now because of the changes in the ice, which forms later, freezes less thickly, and breaks up sooner than it used to do. Those changes, of course, also affect the winter's hunting, which is still the basis for the subsistence economy on which the town depends. The loss of the permafrost means fewer people use the traditional Inupiaq method of preserving meat for the winter, which is to bury it in the ground. "Even in the summertime, we had our frost that kept our food," recalls Luci Eningowuk. "We didn't have to have freezers years ago; we just put the food underground."

There is a transience about Shishmaref, a vestige of its nomadic origins now exacerbated by time and events into a permanent sense of abandonment. This seems in conflict with the deep attachment of its people to their land. But that attachment has become untenable. Sooner or later, Shishmaref will have to be abandoned. There's not enough of it left to go around, even among the six-hundred-odd people who live there.

"It's eating away at precious little land here," Luci explains. "The main reason that we want to move-that we have have to move-is for the sake of our children. We don't have any more room to accommodate them. There's no s.p.a.ce to make their homes." to move-is for the sake of our children. We don't have any more room to accommodate them. There's no s.p.a.ce to make their homes."

IN 1995, Norman Myers of the Climate Inst.i.tute estimated that there already were between twenty-five million and thirty million "environmental refugees," and that the number could rise to two hundred million before the middle of this century. Environmental refugees are people fleeing an environmental crisis, either natural or human made. As they move, a ripple effect overwhelms the countries in which they live. They flood the cities, overtaxing the social services which, in many nations, are rudimentary to begin with. A UN study explained that, at least in part because of environmental refugees, Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, has doubled its population every six years since 1972 and that the city's main aquifer may run dry by 2010. 1995, Norman Myers of the Climate Inst.i.tute estimated that there already were between twenty-five million and thirty million "environmental refugees," and that the number could rise to two hundred million before the middle of this century. Environmental refugees are people fleeing an environmental crisis, either natural or human made. As they move, a ripple effect overwhelms the countries in which they live. They flood the cities, overtaxing the social services which, in many nations, are rudimentary to begin with. A UN study explained that, at least in part because of environmental refugees, Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, has doubled its population every six years since 1972 and that the city's main aquifer may run dry by 2010.