Okay, so while my favourite part of this story is the "THOU SHALT NOT TOUCH!" sign, this is the terrifying nug:
Many of the quarter of a million people expected to visit the Creation Museum by the end of the year will be children. They will be indoctrinated into an ideology that systematically warps their understanding of the physical world and fills them with hostility toward the facts and concepts of modernity. As we have learned over the past few years, this doesn’t mean that they’ll be outcasts and failures. A great political party has largely abased itself before their world view and offered them unprecedented access to government power. The Creation Museum, a combination of a natural-history museum and a Communist Party propaganda center, will help to arm and arouse the next generation of Christianists in the ongoing war against secular and scientific America.
It’s tempting to treat the museum as an interesting cultural diversion, rather like a guided tour through Colonial Williamsburg, which is how Rothstein, at the the Times, took it. But the museum’s creators are more serious than that, and in a sense they have it right: the family from Columbus came looking for a middle ground that doesn’t exist. Either you accept the claims of science, or you might as well believe that dinosaurs made it onto Noah’s Ark. This disagreement is the size of the Grand Canyon. The mass of ordinary visitors were every bit as alien to me as the few Mennonite families in their nineteenth-century bonnets and long beards. We might speak the same contemporary American dialect, wear the same T-shirts, and eat the same fatty foods, but our basic beliefs are so incompatible that it’s hard to know what political arrangement could ever satisfy us both. Rothstein ended one of his reviews by saying that a visitor “leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.” My experience was different: I had the sense of being a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state, and I kept my reactions to myself. As I was driving away, I realized what the barrage of falsehoods written on slick signboards reminded me of. It was the telescreens in “1984.”
These people are terrifying.
-dx
