by John Scalzi
The interplay of this Holy Trinity of explanations comes to its full realization when the Creation Museum considers what really are its main draw: Dinosaurs. Are dinosaurs 65 million years old? As if—the Earth is just six thousand years old, pal! Dinosaurs were in the garden of Eden—and vegetarians, at least until the fall, so thanks there, Adam. They were still around as late as the mid-third millenium BC; they were hanging with the Sumerians and the Egyptians (or, well, could have). All those fossils? Laid down by Noah’s Flood, my friends. Which is not to say there weren’t dinosaurs on the Ark. No, the Bible says all kinds of land animals were on the boat, and dinosaurs are a subset of “all kinds.” They were there, scaring the crap out of the mammals, probably. Why did they die off after the flood? Well, who can say. Once the flood’s done, the Creation Museum doesn’t seem to care too much about what comes next; we’re in historical times then, you see, and that’s all Exodus through Deuteronomy, ie., someone else’s problem.
But seriously, the ability to just come out and put on a placard that the Jurassic era is temporally contiguous with the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt—well, there’s a word for that, and that word is chutzpah. Because, look, that’s something you really have to sell if you want anyone to buy it. It’s one thing to say to people that God directly created the dinosaurs and that they lived in the Garden of Eden. It’s another thing to suggest they lived long enough to harass the Minoans, and do it with a straight face. It’s horseshit, pure and simple, but that’s not to suggest I can’t admire the hucksterism.
I’m quite clearly immune to the ideological charms of the Creation Museum, but then, I never was the prime audience for the place. How were other people grokking the museum the day I was there? Honestly, it’s hard to say. The place was certainly crowded; I and the friends I went with had to wait in line an hour and a half to get into the place (there’s a bottleneck in the middle of the museum in the form of a short film about the six days of creation). No one I could see was getting sloppy over the place; people just more or less shuffled through each room, looked at the displays, read the placards and moved on. My friends occasionally heard someone say “oh, come on,” when one of the placards tested their credulity (there’s apparently only so much of “T-Rexes were vegetarian” propaganda any one person should be obliged to take), but for my part I just noticed people looking, reading and moving on.
There have to be people who believe this horseshit unreservedly, but I suspect that perhaps the majority of the visitors I saw were Christians who may not buy into the whole “six days” thing, but are curious to see how it’s being presented. To be clear, the “horseshit” I’ve been speaking of is not Christianity, it’s creationism, which to my mind is a teleological quirk substantially unrelated to the grace one can achieve through Jesus Christ. Now, the Creation Museum rather emphatically argues that a literal reading of the Bible is essential for true Christianity—it’s got a whole red-lit section that suggests the ills of society are directly related to folks deciding that maybe some parts of the Bible are, you know, metaphorical— but that’s just more horseshit, of a slightly different flavor. There are lots of Christians who clearly don’t need to twist their brain like a pretzel to get around the idea that the universe is billions of years old and that we’ve evolved from earlier forms. For those folks, the Creation Museum is probably about culture, to the extent any installation largely created by someone who previously worked for Universal Studios can be about culture.
At the very least, this is high-quality stuff on the level of production. There are lots of things here that are cheesy, but there’s not much that’s chintzy; you can see where the $27 million went. Whether this will all age well will be an interesting question, although I don’t plan on returning in five years to find out. Here and now, it’s all pretty damn slick, and I think that in itself may be a draw for mainstream Christians. Christian culture has only recently ramped itself up into being something other than a wan and denatured version of pop culture (this is evidenced in part by the fact that many evangelical Christian teens now dress as badly as the rest of their peers), and this is another high-production-value offering for this particular lifestyle choice.
Will these folks find the arguments they find at the Creation Museum convincing? Again, you got me. I certainly hope not, but more to the point I would hope that these folks don’t come away feeling that their love of Christ obliges them to swallow heaping mounds of horseshit from people who are phobic about metaphor. I really don’t think Jesus would care if you think that you and a monkey have a common ancestor; I think he would care more that you think you and your neighbor have a common weal.
What about non-Christians? I can’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t strongly religious or already inclined to agree with creationist ideas would be converted by this place. Between blaming Adam for everything from poisons to sweating and T-Rexes eating coconuts and a particularly memorable placard explaining why in early Biblical times it was perfectly fine to have sex with your close relatives, it’s just way too over the top.
Indeed, it’s over the top enough that I never could actually get angry with the place. Not that I was planning to; I admit to dreading coming to the place, but that’s primarily because I thought it would bore and annoy me, not make me angry. In fact, I was never bored, and was genuinely annoyed only by the “paleontologist” at the start of the walk-through. The rest of the time I enjoyed it as I suspect anyone who is not some stripe of creationist could enjoy it: As camp. At some point—specifically the part where the Scopes Monkey Trial was presented as the end of decent Christian civilization as we know it—I just started chuckling my way through. By the time I got to the Dinosaur Den, with its placards full of patent misinformation about how soft tissue fossilization strongly suggested a massive, worldwide flood, I was a little loopy. It was just so ridiculous.
And I’m happy about that. In the end, the Creation Museum is one of those things that I suspect will comfort those who absolutely believe in creationism, amuse those who absolutely don’t, and be a interesting way to spend a day to lots of people somewhere in the middle. It’s not a front in the culture war, as much as I think it would like to be; it’s designed too much like an amusement for that.
It is what it is: An attractive and diverting repository for a massive load of horseshit. And, well, let’s be realists: That load of horseshit’s not going away anytime soon. Might as put it somewhere that it’s out of everyone else’s way. The Creation Museum manages that well enough.
OH MY GOD!
THEY LOOK JUST LIKE US!
T he New York Times, which recently tried to homo-fy two guys socializing by call it a “man date,” continues on its vein of mild heterosexual panic with an article that frets that thanks to heterosexual men deciding it’d be okay not to be a slob every once in a while, and gay men occasionally not giving a crap if their stubble is exquisitely sculptured, it’s getting harder to tell the gays from the straights. The horror! The sheer, unadulterated, sexually-ambiguous horror! And if we can’t tell the gays from the straights, then the bisexuals are really up the creek, aren’t they? Simultaneously wearing a too-tight ribbed tank top and relaxed fit Wranglers won’t mean anything anymore.
These sort of articles make me want to smack the Times upside the head and yell at it to try its hand at actual news again, you know, for a refreshing change. I hear there’s a war on. Secondly: This is a bad thing? We live in an era in which an active quorum of religious bigots would quarantine gays into concentration camps if they could (“It’s just like Guantanamo—only fabulous!”), and the Times is snarkily concerned that we can’t simply visually identify the gay guys anymore? Hell. I’ll happily wear a leather armband if it’ll flummox a hateful Bible-wielder. And I’ll let a gay man borrow my Wal-Mart purchased t-shirt, just to really throw them off. He can’t be gay—that shirt is 40% polyester! Yes, the gay can blend. Just like polycotton.
You know, when I was younger, a lot of people, includ
ing members of my own family, vaguely suspected I was gay. Why? Well, all the cultural indicators were there. During high school, I had an overly-dramatic crush on a particular girl which kept me from dating other absolutely wonderful girls even when (on occasion) they were standing right in front of me, waving their hands about and saying “Hey, look over here.” Professing to have a long-standing crush on an unapproachable girl, is, of course, very teen gay. So is being verbally clever, slight of build, an active participant in singing and theater groups and enjoying Depeche Mode on a regular basis.
And I took dance. Modern and Jazz. Oh, yeah.
Add it all up and I was queer to the friggin’ core. The only thing that really pegged me as possibly being in the heterosexual camp was that I was a freakin’ slob and that in addition to enjoying Depeche Mode I was also a big fan of Journey. But as anyone can tell you, gay teens compensate for their queerness by doing things like, you know, picking a random corporate rock band to obsess over, hopefully one with a moderately cute lead singer. In my era it would be Journey. 10 years later: Creed (Today: Well, hell. All those new rock bands seem pretty sexually all over the map, don’t they? Have you gotten a gander at, say, Franz Ferdinand?).
So: On paper, as a teen, pretty darn gay. And yet, right through to the monogamous institution of marriage, heterosexual right down the line (it’s a short line, I’ll admit). Also, I’m not afraid to say it: As a general rule, I like me the women. In theory I accept the possibility that some guy out there could get me emotionally quivery and physically all winged-out, and I wouldn’t be all angsty about it if happened. But you know what? Hasn’t. Whereas women distract me all the damn time. I’m good with this; for one thing, simply as a practical matter, it’s caused me far fewer headaches than the alternative. I am appropriately thankful that I and my life partner have our relationship recognized by everyone as being a marriage, and that there are no exclusionary dickheads hiding their pissy fears behind a Bible and telling us we’re going to burn in eternal Hellfire for loving each other and defining ourselves, with our child, as a family. It’s one less thing for me to deal with personally. Would every couple were as fortunate as we.
(It doesn’t seem likely people would confuse me for being gay anymore, what with the wife and child and rural red-state lifestyle and the Wal-Mart clothes, but if they did, you know what I would think? Good. Here in the US, gay is the new British, which is to say that if people think you’re gay, they also think you are smarter, wittier, and more fun to be around than the average guy. Sure, you sodomize other men on occasion, but that’s your business, and we Americans always suspected British men had sodomy as a required subject at Eton. So it’s all the same, really. And in the meantime you always say the perfect thing at the perfect moment. You’re more entertaining than cable! And what could possibly be wrong with that? If people know you’re a straight guy, on the other hand, they automatically think you’re a beef-witted social dullard in a Linux shirt hoping to delude some poor woman into accepting a sperm packet or two. In a word: Eeeeeeew. I blame Queer Eye for the Straight Guy for propagating this “befuddled pathetic straight guy” meme, but since the New York Times tells us it’s getting harder to tell the queers and straights apart, at least it’s on its way way out.)
Point is: the gay/straight cultural checklist utterly failed to predict my overt and flagrant heterosexual proclivities. And I don’t doubt that even now, somewhere in my sleepy Midwestern burg, there’s a guy flying a NASCAR flag, wearing a John Deere cap and owning a pickup with a “W ‘04” bumper sticker who is trying to decide if he should go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith yet again to enjoy his recommended daily allowance of Brad Pitt, or if he should just stick Troy into the DVD player and catch Brad in his buff, half-naked, remote-control-pausable Achaean glory. In the real world the dividing line between gay and straight doesn’t exist anywhere but in the mind and in the bedroom. It’s vaguely appalling that the writers and editors of the New York Times don’t actually get this.
Actually, I’m sure they do. But they have newshole to fill. Well, like I said: Rumor is, there’s a war on.
WHY WE
GRIEVE
Interesting article in Slate today, describing the fact that even though 3,000 or so people were killed on 9/11, most of them American citizens, relatively few of us (meaning the rest of us Americans) actually directly know anyone who was killed—even in New York. I can stand testament to that, since I know several people who live in New York, and as far as I know, none of my friends in NYC know anyone who has died, and like the Slate-sters, we come from the same pool of “elite college, financially oriented” people who largely populated the World Trade Center during the work day.
Personally, I myself know no one who has died; I live in Ohio, which narrows the possibility, but on the other hand several of my clients are in NYC, and much of my work is directly financially related. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, one of the firms that I write financial brochures for was located in the WTC—in Tower 2, to be precise. But I don’t know any of those people personally since I don’t work for the firm directly; I work as a subcontractor for a marketing firm. I do know a few people in my professional sphere who know people who have died—one client of mine had four friends who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, who as you probably know lost several hundred employees in the attack. But again, that’s one step removed. The Slate article, interestingly, notes that 80 percent of Americans are like me and know someone who knows someone who died—”we are all mourners at the second degree,” the article says.
The existence of the story is due to the dissonance that so many of us have felt between how we’ve reacted to the attacks and how, rationally, we feel it is appropriate to feel. Basically, the gist of the article, so far as I got it, was: “If I don’t know anyone who died, why do I feel so bad?” (there is also a more egotistical, self-aggrandizing subtext to the article that asks “I went to good schools and make a good amount of money, so how could I not have known someone who died?” But let’s ignore that one for now). Many people feel uncomfortable with grief if there’s no personal connection; it feels inappropriate, and also, it feels unfocused. If someone you know has died, you have someone to focus your emotions on. If you don’t, you just walk around in a crappy mood for days.
Generally speaking, I wholeheartedly agree with the philosophy that grief is best reserved for those you know and care about personally. I never mourn the death of celebrities, even those I admire, because I don’t know them, and while I have been sad in several cases that this means there is no more output from that particular person, and that a singular mind that I know of has been lost, mourning the death as a personal tragedy is not my purview. I felt a mild twinge at Kurt Cobain, but that was a zeitgeist thing. I got over it in about ten seconds. It sounds callous to put it that way, of course, but remember: I didn’t know Kurt Cobain. Really, it shouldn’t have taken me more than ten seconds to move on.
But the 9/11 attacks are a singular event. 3,000 men and women died in the WTC and Pentagon attacks (not to mention the several dozen in Pennsylvania) which is an enormous number of people to have died at one time for any reason at all. That’s going to be a shocker, to be sure—but it’s not enough for grief. Let’s hypothesize that 3,000 people died because of a terrible hurricane scouring across Florida and the gulf states. Americans would be horrified, of course. And we would be generous in helping those in need. But as a nation, we wouldn’t be grieving. If one plane had somehow hit a World Trade Center tower by accident, causing a collapse of one or possibly both of the towers, again, we’d be shocked first and generous second. But we wouldn’t be walking around with heavy hearts for weeks.
I think we grieve because we don’t know those who died—because we know that those who performed the attacks didn’t know them either, and wouldn’t have cared if they had. I think we grieve because we know the attackers would have been happy to replace any of the thousands who died and thousands more who were wounded with any of us. We ar
e interchangeable to them; they don’t care which Americans they killed, they just wanted to kill Americans. And to that extent, they did the job: The casualty list of the attacks cut a demographic swath through our land. White, black, Hispanic, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheist, gay, straight, rich, poor, middle class, Democrat, Republican, new immigrant, old money, war-monger and pacifist. It just didn’t matter. More Americans to kill. I don’t think it takes anything away from those who died to say that on a fundamental level who they were made no difference to their killers—they were meant to represent any of us, to be any of us. And they were.
This is why it’s right and appropriate to grieve their passing, to feel the pain of their absence, even if you didn’t know a single one of those people yourself. Look at the next person you see: But for time, location and personal circumstance, that person could be under the rubble. Look at your co-workers. Look at your family. Look at your child. Look at yourself. But most of all, look at anyone. That’s who the target was. They just happened not to be in the buildings or on the airplanes. We grieve because we’re all Americans, and in a real sense, it is a personal loss.
I watched Osama bin Laden and his odious lackey yesterday talk about how wonderful it was the towers went down and the Pentagon was hit, and all I wanted was a good five minutes in a room with either one of them and a lead pipe with a little heft to it. A lot of us have been going around and around about the root causes of the sort of terrorism that lead to these attacks, with not a few suggesting that America bears some responsibility for the chain of circumstances that brought planes and buildings together. I may be willfully obtuse, but just right now I can’t see how or why that should matter, as regards hunting down these people. These people want me dead. They want my wife dead, my daughter dead, my family and all my friends dead too. If we’d been in the towers, they’d be happy we were buried beneath them.
