December 12, 2005
Crystal Warship
One of the things that was most interesting about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ, besides all its other little heresies, was that the devil was played by a woman, Rosalinda Celentano. It’s hard to know what Gibson was going for, asexual androgen or shedevil. George Bernard Shaw is not so cryptic in his 1921 play Back to Methuselah. (As is the case in pre-Christian mythology) the serpent is definitely a woman. Shaw subtitled the play “A Metabiological Pentateuch” and it was very much meant as a satire of the original theological vs. scientific debate in the 19th-century. The play is, in fact, often accompanied by Shaw’s screed on the issue, “The Infidel Half Century”, a remarkably thorough essay in which no sides come out unscathed. What is so annoying about the recent attempt by Christo-fascists to reinvigorate the century-and-a-half old debate in the guise of “Intelligent Design” is ultimately how dull they are. No doubt the media saw nothing but a divisive spectacle, a lightning rod issue, to promote their own ratings. The thinly fabricated debate was nowhere made more entertaining than on the August 10th episode of Ted Koppel era Nightline. The topic was, of course, “Intelligent Design” and Nightline producers, in a stroke of theatrical genius, pitted conservative Washington insider George Will (a.k.a., George Swill) against Stephen Meyer, the slimy bible thumper type from something called the Discovery Institute. Swill’s job as a self-serving rationalist was to articulate the scientific position, while Meyer represented the religious backlash. As lightning-rod issues go there is unfortunately still some juice left in this one as witnessed by the Jesus Fish / Darwin Fish emblems sporadically still visible on the trunks of cars. The clash of these two personalities was, however, what makes for a good show. Meyer is the mustachioed greasy country preacher with the hair died black incarnate, popularized in movies like The Night of the Hunter (1955), who send enlightened conservatives running for shelter in their basements, while Swill is the faithless intellectual ogre who makes irrational fundamentalists pray for fear in their own dark basements. The episode had it all. There was even the subtle (subtle for TV, anyway) subtext that these two positions perfectly underscored the widening rift within the conservative party. After the Harriet Miers debacle, that rift has become more like a chasm that the Busheviks have regrouped to straddle. Shit is flying. The proto science fiction type deliberation of Back to Methusaleh about faith and human evolution, especially the moral kind, is unfortunately out of the question in a country that has seen the fearsome specter of its theocratic underside, usually prudently and well hidden from the light of day, so publicly exposed.