If that hit list sounds like a blast from left field, it’s because Pierce’s bias is very much from that perspective. His book is a diatribe against everything that galls Jon Stewart and Al Franken. It sings to the liberal chorus but is unlikely to rouse those of a different persuasion.
What saves Pierce’s book from being so much warmed-over Pablum are his lyrical riffs and raucously mocking gibes. At his lampooning, outlandish best, Pierce invites comparison to H.L. Mencken.
Pierce’s gift for sardonic whacks is frequently on display in his ubiquitous guises as a staff writer for this newspaper’s Sunday magazine, as a brilliantly wisecracking motor mouth on NPR’s “Only a Game’’ and “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,’’ and as a contributor to such national magazines as The American Prospect and Esquire.
In “Idiot America,’’ Pierce recycles parts of an article that he wrote for the November 2005 issue of Esquire. Rather than an interwoven narrative, the book is a patchwork of magazine-length takes that he has embroidered with references to James Madison and the risks to a democracy of unchecked human passions.
Pierce visits the Creation Museum in Hebron, Ky., where he encounters a dinosaur wearing a saddle, the point being that, if God created all living things in seven days, dinosaurs would have co-existed with humans. Following the logic of the exhibit’s biblical literalism, Pierce erupts into a rant. Why wouldn’t Noah’s 300-by-30-by-50-cubit vessel not have sunk “under the weight of the dinosaur couples?’’ he bellows.
When he is skewering conservative talk-show hosts, Pierce is at his scathing, insightful best. How Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and the like parlay an entertainer’s flourish into a huge radio or TV audience - and merely by virtue of their audience’s size qualify in the public imagination as experts on subjects like stem-cell research - outrages Pierce. He notes: “Talk radio pleads entertainment as an alibi for its most grotesque excesses while at the same time insisting on a serious place in the national discourse.’’
