Moreover a lot less than booking a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit can get you in the soup – a headline, a retweet, even likes are costing people jobs. Today Matt Yglesias signing a group letter with Noam Chomsky is considered threatening. Right-wingers from time to time made headlines campaigning against everything from The Last Temptation of Christ to “Fuck the Police,” though we laughed at the idea that Ice Cube made cops literally unsafe, and it was understood an artist had to do something fairly ambitious, like piss on a crucifix in public, to get conservative protesters off their couches. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.Ĭonservatives once tried to legislate what went on in your bedroom now it’s the left that obsesses over sexual codicils, not just for the bedroom but everywhere. Doing so would have meant opening the floodgates on a story most everyone in media sees but no one is allowed to comment upon: that the political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. When the absurdity factor rocketed past Dover levels this week, the nation’s leading press organs barely commented, much less laughed. This time it’s not a few Podunk school boards under assault by junk science and crackpot theologies, but Princeton University, the New York Times, the Smithsonian, and a hundred other institutions. Especially in 2005, which felt like the dawn of a new thousand-year reign of Bushian conservatism, liberal audiences jumped at any opportunity to re-create the magic of one of their foundational knowledge-over-superstition parables, the Scopes Monkey Trial.įifteen years later, America is a thousand Dovers, and the press response is silence. For decades, whether in Arkansas or Texas or Louisiana, every time even a small group of fundamentalists tried bullying teachers via this stacking-the-school-bureaucracy trick, northern press heathens would descend in mammoth numbers. Muise tried to cross-examine the smooth-talking Superstars of Science who’d flown in from places like Brown and Harvard to denounce “intelligent design,” journos murdered their thesauruses looking for new words for “hayseed.” The chuckling press section felt like front row of a comedy club.ĭover’s failed school board rebellion inspired multiple books, law review articles, and films, including a Nova doc that won a Peabody award. When a Christian attorney named Robert J. The science geeks fought back, however, and roughly a year later I sat in a packed courtroom with overeducated reporters from all over the world who came to gape at the spectacle of rural ignorance showing its rump in an American courtroom. It was after this meeting in October, 2004 that a passage about teaching “gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory” was inserted into the curriculum.
Spahr pulled back, shocked, and then sat down without saying a word. Neither Nilsen nor Bonsell spoke up to address Buckingham’s rudeness to the thirty-year veteran teacher. Author Laurie Lebo in the book The Devil in Dover described what happened next:
“Where did you get your law degree?” he snapped. When the head of the district’s science department, Bertha Spahr, begged the board not to promote “intelligent design,” listing past Supreme Court decisions about religion in classrooms, another fundamentalist board member named Bill Buckingham – an ex-cop who wore a lapel pin in the shape of both a Christian cross and an American flag – shouted her down. The bureaucratic atmosphere Bonsell presided over was not kind to the eggheads trying to teach. His wife told him he looked like Chuck Norris. “If you can’t see that, you’re just not thinking clearly,” he said. It was said Bonsell would stand at his window at night, wondering, as he gazed at the stars, at the intervening hand of God.
#Struggle session lost episode trial
In a small Pennsylvania town called Dover, residents contrived to insert a sentence about teaching “intelligent design” into the curriculum, and fought for its right to do so in an extravagantly-covered trial in the “big city” capital of Harrisburg.ĭover’s school board president, Alan Bonsell, was a fundamentalist who believed God shaped man from dust. In August, 2005, Rolling Stone sent me to cover a freak show.
0 kommentar(er)
