Song of the Year

First runner-up

Second runner-up

Ham's baloney

I've promised a couple of people a review of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and two is more than enough for me (it's basically the sum total of everyone I know) so I plan to deliver one here.  However, it won't be a particularly extensive review, as I was with my entire family and didn't have my monocular viewing aid with me, which means I didn't read most of the postings in any detail.  For more complete reviews--which I'll often use myself--see these from Daniel Phelps and John Scalzi, who includes a photo tour so you can see much of the museum for yourself.  

The Creation Museum is the brainchild--if one could go so far--of Ken Ham, the Australian leader of the young-earth creationist outfit Answers in Genesis.  I had heard of Ham before, but wasn't aware of the extent of his popularity, which he apparently draws from frequent appearances on Christian radio.  "Young-earth creationism" is an important distinction; unlike supporters of "intelligent design" whose dispute is chiefly with biological evolution, YECs argue that the Earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old, putting them at odds with most of the academic canon, from geology and anthropology to astronomy and linguistics.  Back in my days as a college evangelical, we viewed them as well-meaning but misguided relics, and rarely considered their arguments worthwhile.  The feeling appears to be mutual; a brief section of the Creation Museum is dedicated to slamming advocates of other kinds of creationism as lukewarm accomodationists.  

If there's one thing people are likely to know about Ham and the museum from popular media coverage of the opening in May 2007, it's his preoccupation with dinosaurs, particularly his claim that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.  This has two purposes.  The first is promotional; people, especially kids, think dinosaurs are cool, although the popularity of dinos in the public imagination has declined from the early '90s.  The second, more critical, purpose is for Ham to distinguish himself from earlier generations of young-earthers.  That dinosarus existed and became extinct before humans walked the earth and don't seem to be mentioned in the Bible has long been a major stumbling block for those trying to believe it happened within a theoretical 6,000 year Earth history.  Many reverted to believing God created the world with "apparent age," which, as Slacktivist describes here, becomes an indisputable matter of personal faith.  Ham isn't going to be satisfied by personal belief.  He wants to establish fundamentalist Christianity as the objectively true religion, and thus force the acceptance of his social agenda.  

Curiously, once you leave the main hall and enter the walking tour of the museum, the dino motif recedes to nothingness.  Ham, you see, reads the Bible very literally, so the various mythical beasts mentioned in Job and Psalms must have been dinosaurs because, well...uh...QED?  At any rate, there are none in the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  The YECs are animated by the belief that this section of the Bible must be literally true or else the entire world of Christian theology will be undercut, so the Creation Museum spends most of its time telling and retelling these chapters in various ways.

I was actually quite surprised at the lack of time spent bashing evolutionary scientists and promoting an overt right-wing social agenda.  Sure, there's the requisite warnings about the epidemic of internet porn and abortions blamed on God-denying scientists, but there's also a reminder about the Fall of Man bringing hunger, poverty and war, though perhaps this distinction is meant to claim that these problems are pre-determined, making it futile to try and stop them.  (Why this couldn't apply more broadly, who knows?)  And this occurs within the first few exhibits; most of the rest of the museum's content is Ham's effort to make a positive case for his own hypothesis, however exceedingly flimsy it is. 

And you have to admire his steadfastness if not his creativity.  Ham relies on the Great Flood of Genesis 6-9 to explain away almost every anomaly inconsistent with young-earthism, from the distribution of fossils to continental drift to the formation of major geological events like the Grand Canyon.  This almost necessarily creates a much greater prominence for the Deluge in young-earth theology as well; the literal fact of God wiping out most living things in a fit of jealousy may not be the kind of thing you want to remind people of too often.  But Ham doesn't jsut rely on Bible stories for his theories; sometimes you have to do things yourself.  So he invents the existence of "post-Flood catastrophes" which aren't recorded anywhere.  If anything else, this is the museum of idle speculation; if you're dying to see any demonstration or experiment on how a worldwide deluge could've done all the things Ham claims, there's nothing to be found.  Even Ham's own confidence wavers from time to time; one posting on the migration of life after the end of the flood is weighed down with "probably"s and "must have"s.

Little about the presentation was different from what I expected.  There are brief recitations of many erstwhile young-earth arguments, like the amount of sodium in oceans or the decaying of the earth's magnetic field.  Background about the scientific issues in dispute is seldom given, confirming my earlier contention that this literature exists to reassure people who want to believe in YECism that someone is out there doing the legwork, and they needn't worry about it.  The production values were generally respectable, although the 'museum's only artifact to speak of was a Hebrew Torah taken from Iraq (what this has to do with creationism is anyone's guess.)  However, the short film shown in the museum's "Special Effects Theater," allegedly a light-hearted satire, drew only a scattering of guffaws from the sympathetic audience.  Some things seem out of the reach of fundamentalist Christians.  

Overall, I didn't come away as angry at these folks as I thought I might.  Perhaps I was too tired to care.  Or perhaps the one redeemable thing in the museum softened my view; a posting reminding people that humanity's common ancestors means we are all part of the human family and that "God forbids abuse of any person."  I don't really trust anyone to make the obvious logical connections, but I had a little brighter time knowing they were there.  Truthfully, I don't see much value in getting too hysterical over the existence of young-earth creationists in general.  The fundamentalist Christians and the so-called "New Atheists" have a nice symbiotic game going, where the more outrageous actions of one reinforces the will of the other to raise the bar.  I'll leave that for someone else to play.  

Ho Ho Ho

Merry Yule'n'all to you'n'ems.  Sorry posting has been light, but it'll probably continue for a bit. 

In the meantime, the dreaded family trip to Ken Ham's Creation Museum is coming up on Saturday, so you have that to look forward to.  

Rick Roll

Obama's pick of dough-headed pop theologian Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration has been all the talk in the liberal blogosphere the past few days.  Warren is moderately less loathsome than some other right-wing evangelical priests because of his work on AIDS, global poverty and the environment, but all anyone seems to care about, of course, are his conventional reactionary stances on the Big Two; abortion and homosexuality. 

This action, and the subsequent reaction, tells us less about Obama than it does about liberals.  Identity politickers are often the most enthusiastic boosters of donkey-worshipping lesser evilism, and lefties are well-accustomed by now to hearing of our secret bigotry for not doing the greatest deed possible for social justice, voting straight-ticket Democratic.  Watching them flail furiously while Obama tosses them over the edge would make a less modest man say "I could've warned you."  (Glennzilla, as usual, hits it out of the park.)

Liberals have sat by patiently while Obama mostly appionts a collection of cruise missile liberals, neocon holdovers, and big-business lackeys to man his administration but this, this, is a slight up with which they shall not put.  Perhaps, if they had been a little less demure, the situation  wouldn't have reached this point.  ("First they came for labor, but I said nothing, because all of those working-class people are probably homophobes anyway.")

Ah, there's another point. Liberals are more than happy to play the intellectual totalitarian game when the Big Two are at stake.  The treatment of Warren here reminds us that, regardless of how your position on any number of other issues, if you're not on board with the Big Two, then you can sod off.  Not only does this do little for achieving any other progressive goal, I really doubt it does anything to hurry the pubilc acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships.  Yes, we can wait for older generations to die off and be replaced by younger, more tolerant ones, but that's going to be a mighty slow process. Winning now is going to mean changing the minds of people who presently disagree with you.  That's not likely to happen if you're intent on declaring their entire political person anathema and beneath contempt.  

Happy generic Holiday

I should first note that I'm not going to give any credit, begrudging or otherwise, to the disingenuous "War on Christmas" silliness of the right-wing Christians. It is, I have long suspected, an invention of the Business Right designed to head off creeping anti-consumerist sentiment among evangelicals and fundamentalists. I can remember a time not too long ago when the main complaint among Christians was that Christmas had become too commercialized and materialistic, and they instead wanted to focus on personal and spiritual gifts. But, in a world where our economy is heavily dependent on your need to buy the acceptance of others with the latest gadget or expensive diamond, this subversive cancer obviously couldn't be allowed to spread. Hence, the War on Christmas was invented to remind good Christians of their duty to capitalism.

But, I must say...

The insistence of our moribund commercial culture to refer to a generic "holiday" really is reaching absurdly asinine levels. I appreciate the goal of being as inclusive as possible, but really, it's not going to kill you to recognize what these mysterious "holidays" you speak of specifically are. On a personal level, perhaps people find it intrusive to ask which holiday you recognize before greeting you, and I pity the poor clerk who asks the wrong fundie Christian and gets a sermon. But, for larger audiences, I don't see any harm in mixing it up a bit. I reckon this would make people from a non-Christian background feel more included rather than lumping them all into a grand homogeneous consumer bacchanalia. Then again, that's rather the point, isn't it?

Credit where it's due, I've actually seen a Best Buy ad reference Hanukkah. That's a step in the right direction.

The Republic strike

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For the past five days, workers have occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago after the factory closed down when Bank of America cut off its credit. Bank of America, which received over $25 billion as part of the financial industry bailout, had initially refused to pay the severance and vacation money it owed the factory workers.  Negotiations continue, though reports of a deal may be premature.  

One of the articles at Socialistworker.org mentioned how much of the gathered media scampered away yesterday to cover the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, which, coincidentally or not, came one day after Blagojevich appeared in support of the strikers.  

I can see that we are gonna be friends*

I've been thinking a bit over the weekend about this strip of the webcomic xkcd, which is a witty observation of the male phenomenon often called the Nice Guy (so named for his predilection for uttering some variation of the following:  "I don't understand why women won't date me, I'm such a nice guy.")  In lieu of being straightforward about his romantic intentions with women, the Nice Guy pretends to be magnanimously making friends with them, only revealing his ulterior motive periodically to denounce her boyfriends as jerks.  It's pretty easy to see why this guy is an annoyance, not to mention the fact that someone with such an inflated self-image already has a relationship with the person of his dreams, and doesn't need another one.  In college I had the voyeuristic pleasure of reading the blog of a friend's friend who fit this caricature like a glove and marvel at how unaware he seemed to be of this fact. (Of course, he's probably a bigshot TV producer now, and therefore gets the last laugh at me).

Nonetheless, this makes me a little uncomfortable because I don't really understand the impulse to draw these great lines between friendship and romantic interest. Back in my evangelical bubble days, men and women were strictly segregated, and it was generally understood that they have no reason to truck with each other except for the biblically-mandated mating hunts.  I never quite understood how this worked.  "I'd like to spend the rest of my life with you, but you're not my friend."  Or, "have my children, but don't speak to me."  In the the world of evangelical gender relations, men are beset by a litany of Man Problems that they certainly shouldn't trust women to be of any help.  The women, I guess, were kept around to be baby machines.  (I wonder now what the women were told; I'll have to find someone and ask someday.)  I have to admire their faith in the power of marriage; these people truly believed in miracles. 

Then there is the equally ornerous inverse of the Nice Guy you find in popular laddie culture, who subscribes to the "ladder theory" of interpersonal relationship.  This guy, by contrast, studiously avoids becoming friends with women, claiming "once she thinks of you as a friend, she won't put out."  They advise their younger charges in the backslapping jock fraternity on ways to stay out of this mythical "friend zone." 

All of this is fairly nonsensical to me.  I persist in the fairly peculiar belief that women are people, and as such are not dramatically different from men-people.  Not having had the experience, I can't really say why two people decide to take their relationship to that special plane, but I've always imagined that, were there sexual tastes inclined differently, they would still get on well with each other.  What makes the Nice Guy so odious, I hope, is his dishonesty, not the radical idea that men and women can't be acquainted without thinking about sex (though perhaps he never truly believed this, anyway). There is understandably some tension between single hetero members of the opposite sex, but it's nothing more honesty and less adherence to pop psychology can't dispel.

*I'm breaking my vow to only write about sex and dating issues on Valentine's Day.  Well, it's only two months away, so maybe this can count for this year's entry.

In good company

Last Wednesday, over 100 nations gathered in Norway to sign a treaty renouncing the use of cluster bombs.  Unsurprisingly, the United States wasn't one of them.  We need more efficent methods to maim and kill poor people; the ordinary ones aren't getting the job done all that well.  This, of course, is the kind of rebuff we usually show for the international community, which goes unremarked upon at the time but will be dismissed as Totally Unserious when it ends up in a Noam Chomsky book years later. 

"Oh boo-hoo Blame-America-Firster!" the jingoes inevitably cry.  "Uhmerica wasn't the only nation to turn down the cluster munitions treaty!"  Well, they're right.  We were joined by such leading lights of Enlightenment as Russia, China, Pakistan, and Israel.  Hey, if you line it up, it surely forms some kind of Axis.  A bit crooked but...hey, Axis of Crooked.  I think it'll work.

I wish we'd all been Ready

The cover of Daniel Radosh's book Rapture Ready:  Inside the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture looks like one you might find in a Christian bookstore, although you probably cannot.  It depicts a grossly out-of-scale scene of a pre-teen girl in a pink dress smiling and floating happily above a row of trees and into the blue sky.  And there are sparkles.  Always with the sparkles.  Unfortunately, it also betrays the serious nature of the book, which begins with a jaunt through the world of gospel golf balls and other "Jesus Junk" but develops into a serious meditation on the possibilty of Christian culture as a moderating bridge to the rest of the world. 

Most people are familiar with the existence of "Christian rock" music, but the world of Christian culture hardly begins or ends there.  For virtually every kind of popular entertainment you can imagine, there is probably a comparable "Christian" version of it.  Books, movies, comedy, skateboarding, raves, superhero comics, you name it.  As far as I know, there are no Christian sports leagues; just professional wrestling.  While the quality of most of these ventures is about what you'd expect, Radosh often has a more forgiving verdict; the Christian wrestlers, he notes, put on "a hell of a show."  

Radosh, a humanist Jew from New York, began his journey with few expectations that he might find anything redeemable.  Curiously, it's his encounter with Christian music, the erstwhile whipping post of the secular world, that gives Radosh his minor epiphany.  Specifically, Radosh lands at Cornerstone, the music and art mega-festival in Bushnell, IL hosted by Jesus People USA, the original Jesus hippies.  Not only does he find more talented performers making genuinely good art, but also people eager to challenge right-wing Christian orthodoxy.  Logic would tell us that these two things are not coincidental, and Radosh notes several cases of the Christian culture industry's struggle to keep its artists on the straight and narrow path of promoting social conservative values. 

Radosh becomes greatly enamoured of Cornerstone and many of the people he finds there, including the incomparable Aaron Weiss of the post-hardcore band mewithoutyou, recalling it fondly in many of the subsequent chapters of the book.  He argues that embracing "transformational" Christian artists who are less concered with proselytizing than about creating reflections on personal faith is a way for the secular world to encourage a moderating trend in the Christian world at large.  

It's a nice sentiment, but probably unrealistic.  Notably absent from Radosh's discussion of Christian musicians is Sufjan Stevens.  This is largely because Radosh gets entangled in the oft-debated question of what qualifies as Christian music.  There is a simple answer in practice; Christian music is produced by anyone who has even the most fleeting association with the Christian music industry, even if that only means playing Cornerstone festival and nothing else, which is true in a good many cases.  Stevens doesn't, so he isn't counted as Christian music, even though he was a member of Danielson Famile, which is.  It's complicated.  The point is, even though Stevens has become an indie superstar, he's still largely unknown to the general public.  The mainstream public, like the Christian public, likes its art easily digestable.  Radosh may enjoy Over the Rhine as a hipster-aware New Yorker, but getting them beyond that point is probably a lost cause.

Radosh also has many flattering things to say about the world of Christian comedy, where he finds many surprisingly frank commentaries on living with faith.  And his daydreaming of an honest Christian sitcom probably has a greater chance of coming true, with Hollywood chasing the post-Mel Gibson Jesus dollars.  Again, though, it won't come to fruition until the current gatekeepers--who are naturally more concerned with portrayals of non-conforming Christians than any kind of secular depravity-have passed on.  

Reading Rapture Ready felt like going through a time warp.  I saw mewithoutyou play supporting their first album six years ago this winter.  I've also seen Over the Rhine and Bill Mallonnee of Vigilantes of Love, who Radosh touts in the book as well as the companion website.  Any of them stack up quite well to comparable non-Christian counterparts, though it's quite unfair to make the distinction.  Luckily, though, I've never been to a Bibleman live performance.  Let's hope it stays that way.  

Christian pop culture is becoming more pervasive; fifteen years ago none of this stuff was visible in my hometown, and the Christian bookstore still primarily sold books.  Now, my family is dragging me to the Creation Museum.  However, there is a chance that conservative evangelical forces will be eaten by their own monster.  Many members of the "emerging church" of younger evangelicals cut their teeth on Jesus junk as kids, and have set out to erase the distinction between Christian and secular culture, just as fundamentalist skeptics of embracing popular culture warned against.  Never tiring of imitation, however, reactionaries are even copying the tattoos-and-beer-drinking ethos of the emergants into their old authoritarian package.  This chameleon is difficult to quash. 

In Soviet Canuckistan, liberal hawk pundits you!

Less than two months after winning re-election, Stephen Harper's Tory government looks to be on the verge of falling after a series of rapid-fire economic blunders, including a proposal to end public financing of political parties.  

In case the discovery that Canada has public financing of parties--and it's apparently so politcally ironclad that opposing it helped bring down the government--has made you yearn to move North again, bear this in mind.  The new Liberal-NDP coalition government could be led by none other than Michael Ignatieff.  Liberal hawk idiots may be able to fall great distances upward in America, but at least they have so far been unable to achieve head of government.  So while you may not be moving to Canada, Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, and Matt Yglesias are all packing their bags.