There's been a lot to write about, rant about, piss and moan about this past week.
Schadenfreude once again became the hot political stance as those angry, righteous frauds who got cheated out of their much-deserved, illegally-obtained billions by that smug wharf rat Spitzer could wish upon him the deepest level of hell (is that the first or the ninth, I keep forgetting?) for having sex with a prostitute and getting caught. For shame, Eliot, for shame! You've sullied the good name of the New York State Office of the Governor! This is Albany! We don't cotton to that sort of corruption in, well, uh, oh, never mind! Just resign or we'll impeach you for getting caught doing something illegal that none of us have ever gotten caught doing! And swallow your own face while you're at it!
Then there's oil up over $110 a barrel. None of us who lived and drove through the last 19 oil crunches of the past 30 years has any right to complain. But hey, we're Americans! To complain self-righteously about problems we pretty much created with our own arrogance and gluttony is our birthrite, dammit! Love it or leave it, you tree-hugging, Prius-driving pansies!
But that's all over the place now. In less than a week's time, it's gone from cutting-edge to passe to write, rant, piss and moan about those topics. And you can call me a lot things, from a loony liberal to a tree hugger to an anti-Christian to a terrorist sympathizer to a spoiled suburbanite to a nerd to a geek to a slacker to a rambler who unconsciously channels the discarded lyrics from Beck's "Loser" and what was my point again?
Oh, yeah. You can't call me passe. Well, all right, you can, but no one reads this damn thing anyway, so it's unlikely anyone knows I'm here to be called passe.
But my point (finally!) is that today I came upon a topic that hasn't been covered to the point of being smothered, and it's yet another in the annals of my favorite issue that I wish weren't so ubiquitous as to be anyone's favorite issue: Stupidity.
I came upon today's topic in an even more roundabout than usual way. I logged on to the Internet Movie Database homepage this morning, which had a link to New York Times article about Orlando Sentinel film critic Roger Moore (his real name). Moore, a proud liberal member of the always inaccurately classified media, last week found himself shut out of a local film screening of a new documentary entitled Expelled, subtitled "Intelligence Not Allowed." The screening, like others around the country, was intended for local clergy, but Moore found himself with what was probably a mistaken invite. The film's distributor, Motive Marketing, had rescinded the invite before the screening, but Moore had already accepted, so he went anyway, probably spouting pointless sanctimony to no one in particular just to fit in, and wound up screening the film. (Actually he denies posing as a clergyman, so it was probably just an oversight, perhaps his hosts conteding with an obstructed view looking that far down their noses.)
Expelled purports to be a documentary about the shameless suppression of intelligent design and its proponents by the elitist, leftist intellectuals who control public education in this country. Moore panned the film and went so far as to compare its narrator to a Holocaust denier.
The narrator/interviewer is noted commentator - speechwriter - lawyer - humorist - game show host Ben Stein. I don't think I'd go quite so far as to equate Stein with Holocaust deniers, but he may well be the most self-loathing Jew of any public figure short of Krusty the Clown. He's a conservative Christian wingnut-sympathizer, and while he certainly wouldn't deny the Holocaust happened, he seems ever eager to drink the right wing's Kool-Aid, which in this case would most likely be Vichy water.
(Note: I've just been alerted by the Nevada State OSHA that if I mix any more metaphors in today's entry I'll be fined for operating without a valid hazardous materials license.)
Now I understand that stupidity abounds in the activities and positions of the radical Christian right, so much so that you might wonder why it's any better fodder for my first posting in six weeks than Spitzer's dalliances or oil price gouging or any other outrage du jour. But this one also contained the rare element of real irony, to the point where it made me laugh out loud.
Stein, while always openly and proudly aligned with the right, is known for his deadpan wit. He is labeled a humorist almost as often as he is a lawyer, commentator or Nixon speechwriter. And I can attest to the fact that, at various times in the past, he has made me laugh. But when Ben Stein is touting the incomparable joys of freedom, family values and right-wing America, he is invariably 100 percent serious.
In 2000, he appeared on a TV panel of well-known comedians and humor writers discussing the contest between Bush and Gore. The moderator asked several questions, and the panelists, for the most part, responded as expected, with tongues generally resting in cheeks. However, in his response to one question, Stein found no opening for humor.
“What,” asked the moderator, “is the biggest advantage each candidate has in this race?” Stein cited that Gore had already been vice-president for eight years. And Bush? “George W. Bush's biggest advantage is that he's a decent, honest man!” Perhaps it's not so scary in the context of the time, after Bush had gone into recovery but before he'd occupied the White House. But after having witnessed some of Stein's more recent comments on Bush, on the War in Iraq, on the “war on Christmas,” on liberals, on the '08 presidential race, on his general worldview, I honestly believe Stein still believes George W. Bush is a decent, honest man. Martin Lawrence has demonstrated that there's a point where a humorist can go well past comedy into the realm of certifiable mental defectiveness. If Stein still believes in President Bush's unimpeachable decency and veracity, I think he qualifies.
Back to present day. The aforementioned irony came in the Times article when Stein explained why he chose to participate in Expelled: “'there's just a lot of people who don't believe that big science and Darwinism should have a stranglehold on academic life, and they have been waiting for a voice.'”
Big science? You mean, like “big oil,” “big pharma” and “big health care?” An unofficial cartel of extremely powerful and moneyed corporate interests seeking inordinate control of the domestic and international puppet strings of economics, politics, reportage and even individual thought through the use of lobbyists and other influence peddlers, corporate-controlled media and myriad other methods of manipulating the general public? That's the image you have and seek to propagate of the world scientific community and its stalwart adherence to theories such as evolution that can be supported using the scientific method, its unwavering insistence on educating people using FACTS and EVIDENCE? That's what you see as an unreasonable “stranglehold on academic life?”
Ben, Ben, Ben. You're treading dangerously close to being a punchline on The Simpsons. Trust me, an Ivy League educated lawyer and nationally recognized commentator should not ASPIRE to have Homer cite him as an expert when he defends his beliefs, be it that no one remembers what team Babe Ruth played for, or that the waffle affixed to the ceiling with maple syrup is his deity (“Mmmm....sacrelicious.”). And you also might want to avoid demonizing those with opposing viewpoints with anachronistic pop culture references such as the title of a 1984 new wave album by Laurie Anderson.
Lest someone of your supreme intellect and accompanying arrogance be confused by this, Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolutionary Biology in explaning the origins of the species homo sapien, which you and your ilk so condescendingly refer to as "Darwinism," is supported by a century and a half of that annoying evidence, whose validity has been subjected to that equally annoying scientific method. Whereas your Theory of Intelligent Design is supported by 15 or so years of evangelical revisionism whose validity has been subjected to bloviating right wing talk show hosts who prove the validity of their every point by quadrupling the decibel level and comparing their more subdued opponents to Adolf Hitler.
And, for the record, "Big Science" has for centuries pretty much flat out rejected as proof of a theory the ability to locate holes in an opposing theory, no matter what some quack in the biology department at Lehigh trumpets at the top of his own voice. Gaps in the fossil record and biologists' inability to explain beyond a shadow of a doubt how DNA proteins clustered the way they did do not scientifically prove the existence of an intelligent designer. Those high-minded bastards, with their government grants and electron microscopes and their unfair stranglehold on academia, long ago ensured it would be more far complicated than that to untangle their well-woven web of liberal dogma, university sanctioned bureaucracy, and those pesky, intractable facts.
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