“[B]elievers in science are now wondering how the rejection of Darwinian evolution, once presumed to be discredited, keeps returning to claim a place in high-school biology classrooms and in popular thinking. The answer is that we’re in thrall to the powerful legend of the Scopes trial. For anti-Darwinist beliefs aren’t returning; they’ve just never gone away.” Slate‘s David Greenberg invokes the misunderstood legacy of the Scopes trial to explain the persistence of creationist thought among Americans today.
Category: History
Love and Death in New Orleans.
“It is not comforting to realize that, in the wake of Katrina, bloated bodies are floating on those streets today. But to speak of New Orleans’s resilience is simply to cite its history — a demographic and cultural melting pot of German industry and French and Spanish elitism, of Irish gregariousness and Sicilian emotionalism, of African exuberance and American frontier cussedness that embraces death, too, as a part of life.” By way of Mystery of the Vampire, an eloquent paean to the Crescent City by long-time resident Ken Ringle.
Down Dives Dubya.
Bush’s poll numbers, low since early summer, just keep on plummeting and might soon reach Carter-like proportions. Somehow, I don’t think calling the Iraq War the moral equivalent of WWII is going to stem the tide. Nor, I’ll hazard, will his making it easier for his corporate cronies to pollute at will. But hey, keep trying, guys. Update: Slate‘s Fred Kaplan blows further holes in the WWII analogy.
Murrow, Mines, Mobsters, Menage, and Monkey.
Soon after posting the last entry, I found a new cache of trailers for films around the corner over at Coming Soon: First off, Edward Murrow takes a journalistic stand against McCarthyism (with much explicit contemporary relevance) in the trailer for George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, starring David Strathairn, Clooney, Patricia Clarkson, Robert Downey, Jr., Jeff Daniels, and Frank Langella. Then, Charlize Theron braves borderline winds, the mining life, and sexual harassment in the preview for North Country, also with Frances McDormand, Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson, Sean Bean, and Richard Jenkins. Meanwhile, law partners John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton look for the big score in Harold Ramis’ The Ice Harvest, with Randy Quaid, Connie Nielsen, and Oliver Platt. And, finally, journalist Alison Lohman looks into the racy reasons behind the demise of comedy team Bacon & Firth in Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies (recently saddled with a NC-17), and video gamer Allen Covert pays respect to his elders in the trailer for the Adam-Sandler produced Grandma’s Boy. (To be honest, I’m only blogging this last one for the “don’t judge me” monkey bit and the too-brief glimpse of the lovely Linda “Lindsey Weir” Cardellini.) Update: Ok, one more: Tilda Swinton, Vincent D’Onofrio, Vince Vaughn, Benjamin Bratt and Keanu Reeves try to help newcomer Lou Pucci stop a nasty habit in the trailer for Thumbsucker, due out in just over two weeks.
Justice Delayed (Again.)
Edgar Ray Killen, the 80-year-old Klansman convicted two months ago of masterminding the infamous 1964 murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, is out on $600,000 bond pending his appeal. Hmmm. Precedent is precedent, I suppose. Still, kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
Once there weren’t greenfields.
“Black inhabitants of the ‘neat little settlement,’ the [1856] article said, ‘present a pleasing contrast in their habits and the appearance of their dwellings to the Celtic occupants, in common with hogs and goats, of the shanties in the lower part of the Park…The policemen find it difficult to persuade them out of the idea which has possessed their simple minds, that the sole object of the authorities in making the Park is to procure their expulsion from the homes which they occupy. It is to be hoped that their removal will be effected with as much gentleness as possible.'” A team of archaeologists from Barnard and City College use ground-penetrating radar to probe under Central Park for remains of Seneca Village, a 19th century settlement displaced to make way for Olmstead & Vaux’s grand refuge and left forgotten for over a century.
The Sun is Burning.
I didn’t post here on the official anniversaries, but nevertheless: a moment of silence for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sixty years ago this week.
The Lowest Grade of Ignorance.
Wanna see something really scary? GOP freakshow Rick Santorum invokes the Founders to rail against the pursuit of happiness. Yes, Rick, the Founders did care about public responsibility, republican citizenship, and the common good, and they went out of their way to explain that these revolutionary American ideals were most assuredly not the province of narrow-minded theocratic nutjobs such as yourself.
Indian Summer of the Gods.
As seen in the NYT Science Times, a volunteer at the Smithsonian discovers a forgotten cache of photos from the Scopes trial, which took place eighty years ago this month.
Destroyer of Worlds.
“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” Have your perambulators and origami cranes at the ready…I missed this ten days ago amid the Half-Blood hullabaloo and drive south, but it’s very well-done: 20/20 Hindsight takes a trip in the Wayback Machine to blog the 60th anniversary of the Trinity Test in real-time.