Inherit the Windiness

I watched 'Inherit the Wind' last night and after about 5 minutes started to sense that it was basically a propaganda piece. I paused the movie and read a little of the history of the Scopes Trial on Wikipedia before continuing.

What a disgrace. Michael Moore and Steven Spielberg are the direct inheritors of this line of movie making that exploits reality for the purpose of polemicism. It's depressing to think that in the minds of most Americans, this film serves as the historical reference for a seminal clash between science and religion in the public arena. Yet this film is no more than a nasty piece of Christian-bashing.

It's a sad inversion of history to see that the science teacher, portrayed in the film as a hero of rationalism and democracy, was in fact in cahoots with local businessmen to draw national attention to their town for economic purposes and only avoided perjury by not testifying. Conversely, the representation of William Bryan as a bumbling and pompous fanatic belies his strong history of support for progressive causes in a long history in politics. In fact apparently Bryan's antipathy to Darwinism arose from his disgust at its use as the foundation for the Eugenics movement in America and abroad. In fact, the textbook which sparked the trial, Civic Biology is a eugenics primer replete with racism and I hope is indeed banned from school libraries today. The ACLU wanted to defend the teaching of this repulsive pseudo-science?

The real story of the Scopes Trial is fascinating and I've ordered Larson's 'Summer of the Gods' to learn more about it. 'Inherit the Wind' is a hatchet job on Christianity, which makes it clear that the bigotry and superiority complex of the 'enlightened elite' has a long and illustrious history.