Creation

I saw Creation last night, and really loved it. There is love and madness and science and phosphorescent sea life and an orangutan. Also, Paul Bettany. It's no action thriller, but it is very thoughtful, beautifully shot, and almost satisfying. Almost, because some moments of it makes me despair of humanity: Hooker, Darwin's close friend, pleads with him to write the Origin. It's a battle, he says, in a war we can win within our lifetimes.

Ouch. One hundred and fifty one years later, and where are we?

• We've got a burgeoning Young Earth Creationist movement on our hands. 
• The last post has details, but the numbers on scientific literacy in the United States (specifically with regard to evolution) are pretty ugly.
• The Creation Museum offers your impressionable children a chance to ride a dinosaur, just like Adam and Eve did a few thousand years ago. You can also explore a beautiful model of Noah's Ark! 
• According to Wiki, the otherwise respectable (I think?) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003 to the goons at the Discovery Institute.  
• School boards all over the country are caving to the creationist wedge strategy: first introduce intelligent design into the curriculum, then worm in a little more, then a little more, then a little more, until students who report that the Earth was created in six days six thousand years ago are allowed to graduate. 

But there are those who are fighting back. Hope and vindication after the jump.

Viva la Evolución!

Creation, a Darwin biopic starring the wonderful Paul Bettany, came out recently. In a disgusting development, the majority of US distributors have refused to pick it up. This is a film which would tear the nation apart, apparently. It would prove so hugely controversial in this, our country of Big Macs, guns and superstition, that they could only lose money on it.

That's my charitable interpretation, and the most likely scenario.

The uncharitable one, and the idea that fills me with fear, is that they are simply willfully ignorant, backwards people themselves. The elites, the presumably well-educated potentates who mandate what we see and hear and experience - because media is far more powerful than politics - could themselves be prey to the same regressive pettiness that the rest of us proles face. As a shameless elitist myself, I suppose I had more faith in the sinister media oligarchy.

Numbers after the jump.

Avatar

I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was that great. It was visually stunning, just beautiful. Zoe Saldana was wonderful. But the characters had no depth and limited development. There were no difficult moral dilemmas and the Noble Savage meme was really overplayed. The bad guys were irredeemably awful, the good guys were idealistic and pure-as-the-driven (and the scientists were right, godammit… I liked that part, but it did irritate me). Above all, the natives were supremely harmonic and peaceful and in balance and such. It was Pocahontas in space. The only thing I didn't quite anticipate was the ending being as treacly as it was. I didn't think Cameron was going to go there. He did. Ordinary white man goes into the woods, learns to paint with all the colors of the wind, gets the girl, out-natives the natives and then saves the world.


So, in sum: absolutely gorgeous, but ultimately a rather transparent white-guilt-redemption fantasy. I came home unsatisfied.


The internet!Right, with hilarious predictability, flips out.


Congratulations, libertarian/contrarian commentators: you are smarter than all of us. You’re wise to the hippie leftist, socialist, pinko-commie Marxist agitprop being churned out by Hollywood in their evil plot to... what was it again?


Linking this to climate change was a smooth move too. Climategate proved beyond doubt that global warming is a liberal fantasy. No truth behind it whatsoever. Even if there is, it’s just science, right? Skinny nerds in the pay of the blue elite pumping out misinformation in a desperate bid for grant money. It’s not really as bad as the pantywaist fearmongers would have us believe. Yeah, ok.


I have some questions about that after the jump.