Sunday, January 05, 2014

Creationism, its museum, and Idiot America.

You may have heard the news.

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” will debate founder of Creation Museum in Kentucky, by Irving DeJohn (New York Daily News)

Nye will argue merits of evolution with Ken Ham, museum’s founder. Ham argued once in a YouTube video that Nye ‘really doesn’t understand science.’

Coincidentally, many thanks to my pen pal DE, who has chimed in at precisely the right moment with a link to a snippet from the righteous and inimitable Charles P. Pierce's book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

I've discovered a book which purports to define the American mind (there's only one?) or mindset, whatever.

In this excerpt, a visit to the Creation Museum is described.

These were impolite questions. Nobody asked them here by the cool pond tucked into the gentle hillside. Increasingly, amazingly, nobody asked them outside the gates, either. It was impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Aqueduct and make the not unreasonable point that it was batshit crazy, and that anyone who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and their own money. Instead, people go to court over this kind of thing.

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