Greetings from Idiot America

This is a great, intelligent and impassioned article all about the war between true believers and science. Even though I just discovered the article last month, "Greetings from Idiot America" was published in Esquire in 2005, focusing around the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the Dover, PA creationism trial. As author Charles P. Pierce, states:

a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up:

"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."

And there it is.

Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents -- for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power -- the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Sorry -- I'm sticking with the intelligent and educated. As much as I can, that is -- I do live in a red state...

The war on science is still going on, over creationism, global warming, stem cell research, you name it. Even though the fundamentalists lost big time in Dover, accompanied by a scathing decision by the presiding federal judge, they've since changed their mode of attack, and now have a strategy that is has been signed into law in the fine and science-friendly state of Louisiana. Check this article out: "The Christian Right's Got a New Stealth Tactic to Smuggle Creationism into Science Class".

You can read the 2005 Esquire article here.

Whatever happened to the age of liberty and enlightenment that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison fought for? Maybe there'll be a special on it...right after the documentary on how they've captured Bigfoot in the remains of Noah's Ark...

Monsters, Mayhem and the Bowman Body

My friend, Cliff, loves the classic movie monsters. So do I. That's the cover of a book he loaned me. I instantly recognized it, and for a few seconds even thought I owned a copy; then I realized I had never been able to find it, anywhere, but I owned a sequel of sorts, bought in the mid-'70s:
I hit adolescence in the 1970s, reading Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, reading Swamp Thing and Eerie and Creepy and Vampirella. Although I lived on the Peninsula, on good nights we could get Channel 8, WXEX, Petersburg-Richmond, and we Hamptonians would be graced with the presence of the Bowman Body, his patented green tennis shoes, and his cry of "Liberty rings the old bell!"
Three notes before I go on:

1. Bill Bowman, thanks! A friend of mine and I, in high school, wrote a Bowman Body poem, which you read on air. You named only me as the author, though. My friend, I fear, still hates me. This is the impact which you had upon us.
2. On the day I got my first driver's license, what did I do? I drove two friends in my father's Galaxy 500 to the WXEX studio, to watch a taping of the Bowman Body show. The show was great and hilarious. However, on the way home, I totaled Dad's car. He forgave me.
3. I mentioned the Bowman Body in a book review in the Times-Dispatch earlier this year, and Bill was gracious enough to call and leave a voicemail message, thanking me for the mention. Bill, if you're reading this, I'd love to talk with you. I need to thank you for your sense of humor and for showing wonderful movies!

The great Universal monster movies have been with us since 1931's Dracula, made without a film score, just after talkies were introduced. In 1966, Universal first syndicated their classic monster movies, some of which made it to Bowman Body's show. Some made it to Shock Theater on WVEC in Hampton-Norfolk (I still remember hiding my eyes whenever Lon Chaney, Jr. appeared on my parents' black and white TV as the Mummy), and some later made it to Dr. Madblood on WAVY out of Portsmouth. Bowman Body showed a bunch of American-International horror movies, if I remember correctly, and Madblood is the place where I first watched the original Dracula and Frankenstein.
The black and whites were always the movies of choice in Famous Monsters; but the ones that hit home with me and my friends were not Universal's monsters, but the more contemporary horrors of Hammer. (More on Hammer in a later post.) I mean, Lugosi's Dracula is really a Victorian play of manners and repressive traditions. I could well imagine the dramatic and fearful impact the caped vampire had on the screen in 1931; but such melodramatic stage theatrics were dull and old-fashioned in the '70s, when all my friends were watching Madblood and wondering what he was smoking in his pipe, and "Dracula" was appearing daily on Sesame Street.

Bowman Body and Madblood were facilitators -- our connectors to the movies. No matter how old -- or, in many cases, how awfully, truly bad -- the movies were, our hosts would make us laugh and wink, and at the same time share with us the joy and wonder of these cinematic horrors. This was a good time, and a good way to grow up -- watching the flickering, grainy shadows of television with your friends and family, laughing at all the wondrous weirdness.

I've never gotten over it. I never will.

Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Jerry.

I owe you guys a lot.

The View from Scenic Cayo Arcana

For those of you keeping score...

My agent called me last week, prior to a long trip to the west coast. When she returns to Cambridge, she will read my manuscript -- again -- and let me know if she thinks it will need changes. She knows how much I have polished it for her already, including splitting one big, big book into a trilogy, and she told me she was pretty confident it wouldn't need a lot of fixing.

She expects to start sending it to publishers in October -- and just in time, too, for a sale would make a great Halloween present for Rusty.

Note to self: stop speaking about myself in the third person...