Don't Make A Monkey Out of Me!

Here's looking at you, kid

Darwin would be rolling in his grave if he could see us debating evolution over 150 years after his seminal On The Origins of Species, but it seems a lot of folks have yet to be convinced. This sounds more like a promotional stunt for the Creation Museum in Kentucky than an honest debate, as Ken Ham has invited Bill Nye to challenge him on the theory of Creationism, in a debate entitled "Is Creation a Viable Model of Origins?"

Seems things have gotten kind of slow at Petersburg, Kentucky, seemingly only a stone's throw from Dayton, Tennessee, where John Scopes had the audacity to introduce evolution into the classroom in 1926, only to be charged by the state for violating the Butler Act, which expressly forbade the teaching of evolution in state public schools. Here we are nearly 90 years later and it seems the shoe is on the other foot, with a concerted effort by the religious right to reintroduce creationism into public schools.

Funny enough, Ken Ham is not even from Kentucky, but hails from Australia, and has been trumpeting a literal interpretation of Genesis ever since he co-founded the Creation Science Foundation in Queensland. It seems he couldn't find the backers for his audacious museum down under and pitched his idea to Americans. Seems he also left Australia under a cloud of controversy. Not surprising.

Ham is not one of these advocates of Intelligent Design that is willing to fudge the Biblical time line a few million years. No sir! Ken takes Genesis straight up, claiming the earth is no more than 6000 years old, and that dinosaurs co-existed with human beings, just like in One Million Years BC (minus 996,000 years). One of the popular religious notions for extinct species is the theory of "divine upheavals," in which God periodically wiped the slate clean and started over. I guess dinosaurs weren't allowed on Noah's Ark given the lack of head room.

Ride 'em cowboy!

It is hard to take an asshole like this seriously, and I'm sure Bill will try to use humor to deflate Ken's bloated ego, maybe even refer to Raquel Welch's tour de force. However, Bill is going to be debating on hostile turf with an audience most likely hand-picked by Ham, who has been known to turn away persons at the door who might make light of his $27 million monument to God's Creation.

If Ken is as ardent a believer as he makes himself out to be, he must also discount Copernicus and Galileo, and for that matter Newton and Einstein. For him, evolution (and it seems all of science) is just one Big Lie. Everything you need to know about the Heavens and the Earth is right there in Genesis. You can throw away all those other books. But, I imagine he is just another one of those charlatans preying off the gullibility of fundamental Christians. Why else set up shop in the backwoods of Kentucky?

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer. Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions. I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters. Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs. Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77. I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not. Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud. -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!

Rick DiguetteJanuary 8, 2014 at 2:44 PM
Mick Luckovitch has an Op/Ed cartoon in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution that speaks to this kind of ignorance: http://blogs.ajc.com/mike-luckovich/2014/01/07/0108-luckovich-cartoon-chilled-out/?icmp=ajc_internallink_textlink_homepage
James FergusonJanuary 8, 2014 at 4:38 PM
Yep, pretty much sums it up.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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