Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce Page A

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 publicforever 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 reassert their fantastical visions.) People pronounced 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 sex. 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: “Grassy 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 damning 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 passively 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 mass entertainment. Dealey Plaza functions as a performance venue. Considering Dallas means accepting that, for more than forty