June 30 (Bloomberg) -- In olden days, every village had one: an idiot. Just one, though. A village with too many idiots collected the extra ones and put them on a ship of fools.

Today, fools flourish. They are not banished from sight, but allowed to thrive everywhere you look: Sunday church, radio, TV, Washington, banks and blogs.

Charles P. Pierce, staff writer for the Boston Globe Magazine, has written a book about them: “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.”

Passing underneath rather a lot of low-hanging fruit, he stops to ponder, for example, the fundamentalist mayhem surrounding Terri Schiavo, the brain-dead woman in a Florida hospice who some believed might rise to run a marathon, or the last election, given its shortage of sane candidates.

Pierce is contemptuous of educated elites who abuse the credulous for power and profit, but takes a softer tone to some of their victims, say the happy dummies who wander through the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which includes a small, saddled dinosaur that might have fit into Noah’s Ark -- and thus qualified as one of God’s creatures.

We talked over sandwiches at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters.

Hoelterhoff: You sure small dinosaurs didn’t board the ark?

Pierce: I’m fairly well convinced by people who know a lot about paleontology, geology and earth science that there were no baby dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. I’m not even sure there was an ark.

Idiots Are Us

Hoelterhoff: Define “idiots.” You seem almost kind to the museum visitors.

Pierce: They are not the “Idiot Americans” -- which is all the rest of us who are too lazy to do a number of things that we need to do to run our society and govern ourselves and let this stuff seep into the mainstream.

Hoelterhoff: Why do we?

Pierce: Because in our fair-minded lassitude, we have decided there are two sides to every argument so both are right, or because this is somehow tangled up in faith, it’s beyond our ken.

Hoelterhoff: I’m glad you spent time revisiting the Schiavo case and paying homage to the Cuban nurse trying to care for the dying.

Pierce: Inside, people were trying to do the most impossible work in the world, while outside the Republican Party had gone off the rails. But it was one of the first chinks in the armor that were followed by Katrina and Iraq. Not everyone will experience a flood or know someone in Iraq. But the end of life? Everyone faces this choice.

Bad Brand

Hoelterhoff: Jeb Bush actually pushed through a bill to keep the woman tethered to her tubes. Was this the end of his presidential aspirations? I just heard his name recently.

Pierce: He’ll be around, but his name brand is in bad shape. Michael Schiavo (the husband) has been quite plain, that if he runs, he will haunt him like Banquo’s ghost.

Hoelterhoff: The career that was destroyed was Bill Frist’s, right? The cat-murdering senator?

Pierce: Here he was a physician and though he knew better he got on the Senate floor and claimed he had diagnosed her as reversible via long distance.

Hoelterhoff: We now live in the era of a president who speaks in complete sentences. Take some hope from that?

Pierce: There’s been a pulling back and an understanding of the real-world consequences of believing and acting upon nonsense.

Hoelterhoff: I didn’t know that significant people in the Bush administration and also a Supreme Court justice watched a TV show called “24” -- made by an ex-carpet salesman -- to get tips on torturing people.

Pierce: Yes, people making policy on the basis of “24,” while people who knew what to do to get intelligence were ignored.

Fat and Dumb

Hoelterhoff: It’s a big country. Anything you had to skip?

Pierce: I couldn’t get my hands around why we’ve lost the capacity for intelligent ridicule. And I wish I’d had time for the transformation of the Learning Channel into the Really Fat People With Really Large Families Channel. I was watching that family in Arkansas where they went with their 18 kids to the zoo and stood in front of the chimpanzees and made fun of the theory of evolution.

Which brings me back to the dinos. The museum shows a film about dragons, because their argument is that the small dinosaurs are the basis for the dragon myths that arose after the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat.

I thought to myself: How boring, what good is a dragon if it is just a hand-me-down brontosaurus and not a fire-breathing creature of the imagination?

“Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free” by Charles P. Pierce is published by Doubleday (293 pages, $32.)

(Manuela Hoelterhoff is executive editor of Muse, Bloomberg’s leisure and arts section. Opinions expressed are her own. This interview was adapted from a longer conversation at Bloomberg.)

To contact the writer on the story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 30, 2009 00:01 EDT