Category Archives: Evolution

Someone tell Tyler Durden: Marketers have appropriated ‘Fight Club’

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Brad-Pitt-fight-club-body2

Back when I was in college, I read James Michener’s book Kent State: What Happened and Why, which came out the year after four students were shot and killed there by the Ohio National Guard. This was a time when memories of the event were still pretty raw. That one semester I attended USC before transferring to Memphis State, I used to wear a T-shirt (I forget where I got it) with a big target on the back under the word “Student.” It was less a political statement than me just being edgy, ironic and immature.

Michener’s book went into a lot more than what happened that day in May 1970. It painted a portrait of student life at that time and in that place. At one point, he interviewed a campus radical who was complaining about how the dominant white culture kept appropriating and mainstreaming, and thereby disarming, countercultural memes, particularly those that arose from African-American culture. (I would say he was making some point vaguely related to Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance,” but I’ve always tended to understand Marcuse as meaning something other than what he meant. By the way, my version makes sense; Marcuse’s didn’t.)

Anyway, to make the point that there was no limit to the dominant culture’s ability to absorb culture from the edge, he said, “I’ll bet that within two years Buick will come out with full-page ads claiming that the 1972 Buick is a real motherf____r.”

Well, that still hasn’t quite happened. But I saw something today that comes close. I got an email from the travel site Orbitz with the headline:

The first rule of Flight Club is – Columbia deals from $200 RT

Wow. Think about it. “Fight Club” was all about characters who were utterly, savagely rejecting mainstream consumer culture and everything that went with it. But now the best-known line from the film is being appropriated to sell airline flights. Are you digging the irony here?

It doesn’t even make sense, since the first rule of Fight Club is that you do NOT talk about Fight Club. Presumably, Orbitz would like us to talk about this deal.

But the line got me to look — and that was the point.

I can’t wait to see how next year’s Buicks are marketed.

Must we fight about evolution AGAIN?

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This morning I was in the men’s library (to use an old Knight Ridder Washington Bureau euphemism) perusing The New York Times. Turns out it was the NYT of Dec. 19, but under such circumstances beggars can’t be choosers.

Anyway, I ran across a piece about Mike Huckabee’s famous "floating white cross" TV commercial. We’ll set the cross controversy aside for the moment. What struck me was the Times‘ assessment of the potential downside of the ad:

While that may work in Iowa, the religiosity of the message may turn
off more-secular voters elsewhere, and remind them that Mr. Huckabee
has been dismissive of homosexuality and indicated that he does not
believe in evolution.

We’ll also, if you don’t mind, set aside the homosexuality thing. What got me going was the bit about how "he does not
believe in evolution."

What does that mean — "believe in evolution?" As an overriding credo — as opposed to, say, believing in God? If so, then put me in the disbeliever’s corner with Mr. Huckabee.

Or does it mean believing in evolution as a mechanism through by which organisms have developed into their present shapes? If so, yeah — I believe in evolution. But I can certainly understand why Mr. Huckabee has been dodgy on the issue, saying such things as "I believe God created the heavens and the Earth. I wasn’t there when he did it, so how he did it, I don’t know."

Or at least, I can understand why I would be dodgy about the issue, were I in his shoes. I would resist every effort to pin me down on one side or the other of what I see as a false choice: That between religion and science.

To me, this dichotomy is as bogus, as pointless and as unnecessary as the chasm that the MSM tell us exists between "liberal" and "conservative," "Democrat" and "Republican," or what have you. I’ll tell you a little secret about this universe: Very few things that are true fit into an either-or, yes-or-no, black-or-white model. At least as often as not, it’s "both-and" or "neither."

Trying to make a Southern Baptist preacher either offend secularists by asserting that the world was created in six days or dismay his co-religionists by saying that’s a metaphor is a lot like those wise guys asking Jesus to offend either his followers or Caesar with the trick question about taxes. I’ve gotten nothing against asking a guy to be clear; I do have a problem with a question that seems designed to make the questioned a bad guy either way.

In fact, in the interest of clarity, here’s what I believe:

  • Evolution seems to me exactly the sort of majestic, awe-inspiring way that God would have created us.  He’s no magician doing parlor tricks, as in Poof, here’s a man! or Zing! There’s a mountain; he’s the actual Master of Space and Time (and more; I just can’t explain it, being trapped as I am in space and time). He’s the only Guy I know who can complete a project that  takes billions of years. Therefore evolution has his handwriting all over it. It’s his M.O.
  • I believe in "natural selection," if by that you mean mutations that adapt an organism to his environment and enable him to
    survive to reproduce are the ones that prevail. The guy who can
    outrun the saber-toothed tiger is the one who gets all the grandkids.
  • I do not believe in "natural selection" if by that you mean "random chance." I don’t believe those  aforementioned mutations just happen. That offends me intellectually. So many adaptations seem so clever, so cool, so inspired, that there’s just gotta be somebody out there to congratulate for having come up with the idea. Yeah, 4.54 billion years gives random chance a lot of room to work with, but not enough to satisfy me. If you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with a typewriter you do not get Shakespeare; you get an infinite amount of monkey poop smeared on a perfectly good sheet of paper.
  • I believe that, judging by this photograph, Charles Darwin may indeed be descended from an ape. Check out the brow on that guy!
  • I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, in that it describes better than any other book the development of a continuing relationship, a blossoming revelation, between Man and  God over a period of thousands of years.
  • I do not believe that Adam and Eve were actual individuals, living at the same time, whom you could photograph if you had a time machine, the way you could photograph Benazir Bhutto if you dialed that same machine back a couple of weeks (and had a plane ticket to Karachi). I read a lot, you see, and I’ve developed a knack for telling poetry from prose, hyperbole from understatement and the like. And reading Genesis, it’s pretty clear that this is an allegory that describes truths about our relationship to God, not a court stenographer’s version of what happened in a leafy garden in Mesopotamia one week long ago. Have you never noticed that novels often tell us more true things about how life is lived in the world than, say, nonfiction textbooks about geology or algebra do? There is great moral truth in Genesis, and that’s what we’re supposed to take away from it.
  • I do believe that some wise guy asked Jesus (who was probably known as "Yeshua" among friends) the aforementioned trick question about taxes. That has the ring of a very real situation, one that takes its meaning from the particular political situation in which a first-century rabbi would have found himself. It was clever, but not nearly as smart as his answer, and it’s just the sort of thing his friends would have remembered and told about him later. It also contains great moral truth, as does the story of the Garden of Eden.

Well, I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I get offended when someone is questioned in a format that seems designed to make him choose sides between the "godless Darwinists" or the "Bible-thumping rubes."

Finally — and this is really where I was going with all this; the Huckabee stuff was just my way of warming up — do we really have to have another stupid, pointless argument over evolution in the classroom? This story I read over the holidays seems to indicate that we do. May God deliver us.

Fight or flee? Neither, actually, old boy.

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Imagine this in Andy Rooney’s voice, only with an edge…

Didja ever have one of those days when you were utterly convinced that those experts out there are right, that evolution has not prepared us in any way for modern life — especially of the white-collar variety? A day when you reach the realization that Ron Livingston‘s character did in "Office Space" — that Man was not meant to sit in cubicles (or offices) doing TPS reports?

I mean, our bodies — and particularly our central nervous systems — were just not made for responding to stress by smiling and being being all civilized and diplomatic and constructive and filling out the proper forms. We’re hard-wired to fight or flee, and all the rules nowadays say we can’t do either.

Anyway, while most days I love my job and can honestly say that I wouldn’t trade it for any other (except maybe directing movies, and I don’t think that’s realistic at this point), there are days — and I’m not saying this is one of them, nor am I saying it isn’t — when I wish I were something like a soldier, or a boxer. Days when instead of saying, "Yes, sir, well, I’m sorry you feel that way about that column/editorial/blog item," you want, on an atavistic level, to just go out and take out the objective (or at least blow something up), or kick some butt.

Of course, neither of those options is any more realistic than my chances of directing. The Army wouldn’t take me even when I was young and relatively fit. As for boxing — well, I took up kickboxing several years ago, when I was 47, and in my very first (and last) sparring match, my opponent broke four of my ribs in the first round. I still went the full three rounds, even after he dropped me to one knee by hitting me again in the very spot where my ribs were broken. That one hurt. (I am proud of having gone the distance, even though it was only three rounds. Conversely, my wife sees it as final proof, as though she needed any more, that I am an idiot. Which isn’t my fault, since, speaking of evolution, my brain still hasn’t fully developed.) Basically, this guy didn’t get the idea of sparring; he seemed to think it was a real fight. Combine that with my inability to think defensively (as in, keeping my stupid elbows down), and I was in trouble.

So really, I’m pretty lucky that I do have a weenie job such as editorial page editor. Especially since someone just came in while I was writing this and gave me some good news that made this day a lot better. So I guess I’ll wait until another time to strip off my clothes and go running through the savanna — or the would-be Green Diamond project — looking to kill a wildebeest with a rock. For now, blogging is about as close as I’ll get to that.