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

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 hell 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. Massachusetts 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 classics?
    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 bunkum—not least because they’re, well, true. Unfortunately forInhofe, his sad misreading of the history of American suckerdom was surpassed 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.
Otherwise, some young lady had been accorded a rather dubious honor on behalf of her classmates. 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