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?

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

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

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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