IT FIT WITH an idea for a new book, a history of human gullibility. In eighty-six volumes. How people make things up, and other people buy in. Organized religions. Notions of national or racial superiority. Political parties. Economic boobery. Whole armies, for example, who thought they could earn indulgences by killing Arabs. Or the seventeenth-century Brits who concluded they were intended by God to carry His truth to the benighted. Or the lunatic Jihadists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. People still believed in astrology. And in cures that medical science didn’t want you to know about.

He was on a book tour, promoting Guts, Glory, and Chicken Soup, a collection of his essays. It had been a profitable trip so far. Readers had lined up in fourteen cities across the North American Union to buy his book and tell him they shared his views on politicians, college professors, bishops, the media, school boards, corporate service centers, professional athletes, and the voters. Well, some of them did. Others came to yell at him, to call him a rabble-rouser and an atheist and a threat to the welfare of the nation. In Orlando the previous evening he’d been told his mother must be ashamed (which, curiously enough, was true), and that no decent person would read his books. One woman offered to pray for him.

But they were buying Guts and Glory. It was jumping off the shelves. I wouldn’t read it myself, but I have a deranged brother. Sometimes they brought pies or whipped cream, hoping to get a clear shot at him, but the dealers knew feelings ran high when he was in town, so they disarmed everyone coming in the door.

In Houston, the mayor, anticipating his arrival, had given an interview saying no person was so disreputable that he wasn’t welcome in that fine city. The Boston Herald advised readers planning to attend the signing at Pergamo’s to keep their children home. In Toronto, a church group paraded outside the bookstore with signs telling him he was welcome at service if he wanted to save his soul.