Posted March 16th, 2010 5:59 am

The recent Vanity Fair piece on the insanity of a creation “museum” is rich, rollicking, and hilarious. And then the realization comes back—this “museum” is an hour’s drive away, right here in the Bluegrass State. This “museum” is another gift of irrational embarrassment from Northern Kentucky—a matched set with the irrational embarrassment that is Jim Bunning. And when that realization comes back, it motivates liberal Democrats to fight even harder. From the piece:

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The next things I noticed were the very illiberally accoutred security guards. They are absurdly over-armed, overdressed, and overweight. Perhaps the museum is concerned that armed radical atheists, maddened by the voices of reason in their confused heads, will storm in waving the periodic table, screaming, “I think, therefore I am!”
The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn’t just take on evolution—it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.
We start with the creation of the world, and of light. And there you are, immediately—Houston, we have a problem: you get light three days before you get the sun. But that’s fine—we’ve got an answer: the sun is, in fact, what God made to keep the light in. It was an afterthought, a receptacle born out of necessity.
The early bits, it must be said, are rather boring, like walking past a lot of TVs showing nature programs, with the gravelly voice from trailers for disaster movies: “In a time before man … ” There’s a room that has all the stuff God made on each day; the exhibit looks like holiday photographs or the brochure for an eco-safari. Included with the birds of the air are, apparently, the bats, who are mammals and will be annoyed. But we don’t have time to nitpick. What is truly awe-inspiring about the museum is the task it sets itself: to rationalize a story, written 3,000 years ago, without allowing for any metaphoric or symbolic wiggle room. There’s no poetic license. This is a no-parable zone. It starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That’s tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They’ve got all these “lenses” and things. They can see shit that’s invisible. And they stayed on at school past 14. Science has given itself millions of years, eons, to play with, but the righteous have got to get the whole lot in, home and dry, in less than 6,000 years, using just a pitchfork and a loud voice. It’s like playing speed chess against a computer and a thousand people with Nobel Prizes.
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There is a bit of a sniffy disclaimer between the Flood and the Tower of Babel about Cain’s having to have sex with his sister: First of all, there’s a statute of limitations on this stuff, and it can be excused on some biblical technicality, and we shouldn’t be so prurient as to keep asking about it. The dinosaur thing, though, is a problem. Creationists didn’t have to bother about it before the 19th century, but nosy, faithless scientists—and Michael Crichton—have made them irrefutable. According to the museum, their extinction was caused by men killing them, possibly for sport. I will later learn that this may have happened in the Middle Ages, when dinosaurs breathed fire and were hunted by knights.
It all gets good when the leading man arrives. Adam comes on looking like the Hispanic bass player for a Janis Joplin backup band, with a lot of hair and a tan. He looks a bit stoned. As well he might be, because he’s all on his own in Eden. Nothing can do him any harm, and he’s got the whole pharmacopoeia at arm’s reach. And then you get to Eve, a demure, foxy little girl who could be Juliet in a Guatemalan school play. Her long hair is meticulously glued to her pert and perky breasts. Adam has his as yet unnecessary organ of generation decorously concealed behind foliage. There is something wincingly salacious about this bearded hippie and his schoolgirl mate. And he has what looks suspiciously like a belly button.
The most compelling evidence for the ineffably mysterious ways of God are the people who’ve come here to load up with ammunition for the constant and relentless argument with the free world. Here, it’s safe to say, no one is going to get flung into the fiery pit for overdosing on vanity, though they may get done in early for overdosing on carbs. There was an astonishing number of women dressed as if they’d come from the little house on the prairie, in long, floral frontier frocks with bonnets and shawls. Their men are in bibs and braces, with straw hats, authentic pudding-bowl haircuts, and Abe Lincoln beards. They stare at this Hispanic Adam with a touching reverence and a vengeful fury. This goddamned—and I use the word advisedly—dark-eyed wetback is the reason for all the sin and evil and Communism in the world. If it weren’t for him, we’d live forever. On the other hand, if he’d lived forever, we wouldn’t be here. (Just as an aside, a point of order, wasn’t it divinely unfair of God to say, “If you eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, I will bring death unto you”? Death is a difficult if not impossible concept to explain to an illiterate man who has never seen anything die. And while we’re at it, if God planned on everything living forever, what was the point of heaven?) “This is the Garden of Eden,” a man with jelly-mold hair said to his little Tom Sawyer son. “Really?” replied the lad. “Really,” said the man.
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