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loses another piece of its mind.
    The best thing about American cranks used to be that, if they couldn’t have the effect they desired, they would stand apart from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone completely mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court. One recalls the lament of Paul Newman’s ace con artist Henry Gondorff in
The Sting:
“There’s no point in being a grifter if it’s the same as being a citizen.”
    It is, of course, television that has enabled Idiot America to run riot within modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It’s not that there is less information on television than there once was. In fact, there is so much information that “fact” is now defined as something believed by so many people that television notices their belief, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it. Just don’t be boring. And keep the ratings up, because Idiot America wants to be entertained. In the waron expertise that is central to the rise of Idiot America, television is both the battlefield and the armory. “You don’t need to be credible on television,” explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own nightly television show on the MSNBC cable network. “You don’t need to be authoritative. You don’t need to be informed. You don’t need to be honest. All these things we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.”
    Further, television has killed American crankhood by making it obsolete. Because television has become the primary engine of validation for ideas within the culture, once you appear on television, you become a part of the mainstream so instantly that your value as an American crank disappears, destroyed by respectability that it did not earn. Because it’s forced neither to adapt to the mainstream nor to stand proudly aloof from it, its imaginative function is subsumed in a literal medium. Once you’re on television, you become an expert, with or without expertise, because once you’re on television, you are speaking to the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who’s ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked a lawn mower knows.
    The Gut is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. It knows what it knows because it knows how it feels. Hofstadter saw the triumph of the Gut coming. “Intellect is pitted against feeling,” he writes, “on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical.” If something feels right, it must be treated with the same respect given something that actually is right. If something is felt deeply, it must carry the same weight as something that is true. If there are two sides to every argument—or, more to the point, if there are people willing to take up two sides to every argument—they both must be right or, at least, equally valid.
    Dress it up and the Gut is “common sense,” which rarely is common and even more rarely makes sense. It often comes down to assessing what Everybody Knows, even though Everybody might be as false as blue money to the truth of things. The Gut is as destructive to the value of the American crank as television is. While television undermines the crank by making the crank instantly respectable, the Gut destroys him by forcing him into the procrustean bed of commercial salesmanship. Time was when the American crank forced the mainstream into a hard choice. It could come to him, engage him on his own terms, and be transformed; or it simply could leave him alone. The Gut changes the equation by adding the possibility that the crank can be a part of the mainstream without effecting any change in it. The component of imagination is gone. The crank then becomes simply someone with another product to sell within the unimaginative parameters of the