OK, I’m good and steamed now.
The Daily Kos reports that, in a never-ending effort to try and distract this country from Bushco’s myriad horrific screwups (trying to use polite language here), the right-wing noise machine (courtesy of The National Review) is focusing on the documentary “March Of The Penguins” as testimony that intelligent design is practiced in real life and is not merely theoretical (link to New York Times article here).
You know, as much as I despise the Repugs, I really have to give them credit for creativity. I never would have even thought to concoct such preposterous nonsense.
I took the young one to see this movie a few weeks ago, and it is wonderful. I was familiar with the story of the Emperor Penguins before the movie, but even though I knew a lot going in, it was still interesting and new to me. The movie was directed by Luc Jacquet, and the photography from National Geographic is amazing (especially some of the underwater shots while the mother penguins are looking for food).
Another good thing about the movie (as any parent with a young child is aware of) is that the length is perfect (about 75 minutes). He started to get antsy after about an hour, but ended up making it all the way through.
So this movie is some kind of life-affirming declaration about “family values” in the “culture wars,” is it? (I’ll ask the question again – I’ve done so several times and never received an answer; who started this so-called “culture war” anyway? If nothing else, I think that phrase is ridiculous because it trivializes REAL war, which we are DEFINITELY FIGHTING in Iraq, where over 100 people have died from car bomb attacks over the last two days, lest we not forget – update: more getting killed today.)
Well, I have news for you. The Penguins are “monogamous” during the period when they mate and take care of the egg, in which they show incredible sacrifice in the face of sub-zero temperatures and triple-digit wind chills, to say nothing of the birds of prey that come after the penguins and try to steal the babies just learning to walk the minute they stray from the herd. But after they do this and return to the ocean on their way back to Antarctica, they basically return to their partying ways looking for food and generally taking it easy (a break they definitely earn by raising their progeny in the face of these horrific conditions). In the spring, the whole cycle begins anew with new partners in accordance with their “coding” from nature. So, far from showing a “lifetime commitment,” these brave mammals are really randy, libido-driven, uninhibited little bastards who are, to paraphrase Dan Aykroyd on “Saturday Night Live,” “hopping from mate to mate with the frequency of a cheap HAM radio.” What kind of “family values” are those:- ).
(I just checked back to the New York Times story a bit further down and saw where some fundamentalist nutball says that the movie also condemns gay marriage. Yeah, right. Gay Penguins. Are these people loopy, or what?)
There’s another moment in the movie I want to point out for the benefit of all the right-wing crazies (though I readily admit that they probably aren’t reading this anyway). Aside from the few minutes in the movie that shows the mother and father penguins getting picked off by other animals when they’re looking for food (lesson: Penguins succeed by working together, and the minute they stray, many of them die. When have you ever heard of penguins arguing with another about whether they’re a liberal or a conservative…yes, I know that’s a silly argument), the saddest moment of the movie comes when some of the penguin eggs are exposed to the cold and freeze to death, killing the penguin baby (hey, this is nature…the penguins practice a tedious ritual of exchanging the egg by rolling it from one to take care of it so the other can get food, and some of the penguins mess up the ritual). When that happens, sometimes the mother penguin tries to steal another egg for herself, but the other penguins form a group to stop her. It’s a heartbreaking moment, actually, when you see all that the penguins endure to get to that point only to lose their child (my guess is that it is something like Cindy Sheehan and other parents of our service people killed or maimed in Iraq must be feeling).
Here’s the bottom line: “March Of The Penguins” (and, by the way, Morgan Freeman’s narration is perfect) is a great movie about nature, which has no political agenda, but treats everything and everyone of any political affiliation the same way (need I point out again how that has been displayed in the Gulf Coast recently?).
Update 9/15: Hmmm...never too old to learn something, I guess.
3 comments:
Google and Microsoft both claim victory in court
The clich that no one wins in court but the lawyers was turned on its head yesterday when both Google and Microsoft claimed victory in their ongoing fight over former Redmond employee Kai-Fu Lee.
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Hey Doomsayer. Interesting methods these spammers are taking these days (excerpting news articles and then adding their nonsense marketing to the end--I guess that beats Bayesian spam filters).
Anyway, I think this is a great post (by the way, you're a MACHINE--your blog is fulled with more thoughtful analysis than many other official journalistic sites combined). But more than anything else, I wanted to point out how interesting it is that when it's convenient, religious fanatics and conservatives in general (Bushco as you affectionately call them) point to "nature" to be some sort of guideline for how human beings should act.
For example, neoliberal economists (the guys who chant free market all day long) often refer to Darwinism when making arguments about how the so-called "free market" (I hate using that term because it is so Orwellian) is the fairest, most natural system. (This is known as social Darwinism nowadays.) However, they always stop there, never willing to accept the conclusions of their premise and argument--that, for example, then we shouldn't bother curing cancer or fighting disease, since the species will slowly get stronger through survival of stronger genes. Or that to really support Darwinism we should practice eugenics.
Likewise, intelligent designers (who deny Darwin's theory in nature) point to other things in nature to say that things like being gay isn't natural because not too many animals engage in it. Fine, but not many animals engage in CONSCIOUS, INTELLIGENT THOUGHT either. And not many animals know how to play the guitar, or paint artwork, or think about their own existence. But that's not to say these things are off limits to humans: if we restricted our own behavior by the limits of less evolved beings, wouldn't that just be devolution?
Humans are very much a special case of nature, in the sense that we can often "work around natural limits" through thought, reason, and invention. You remember that line in the Matrix where Agent Smith mentions that every other animal establishes an equillibrium with the environment, but we just infest the planet and so we're closer to a virus than anything else? Well, that's because we can do things like build farms and oil refineries, etc. And that same "working around nature" has allowed us to save sick people who are dying through medicine, "run" faster than any animal with bicycles, "fly" better than any animal with jet air planes, establish a civilization better than any animal with writing systems and languages. Humans are quite special, so why do these conservatives always point to nature to support their causes?
But one can actually see some consistency here. I think the reason they ultimately use nature as their support is because these people think God "designed" nature, and then gave us Free Will. So the rules God established for all the animals, those are God's rules. But our ability to go around those rules means we're essentially doing something God never designed, that God never wanted us to do.
For those of us who don't buy that very inconsistent line, we just end up looking at them with blank stares.
Hey PM,
Thanks ever so much for the good words and the thoughtful analysis. Yes indeed, how fascinating it is to watch the Repugs interpret anything the way they choose as long as it fits their preconceived notions. To illustrate, as I've often pointed out in the past, our former PA governor Tom Ridge was a big "states rights" guy when he was here before Dubya tapped him for DHS..."big government is bad, etc."...but guess who was first in line to the Feds for disaster relief when a hurricane hit? That was the right thing to do, but it went against all his previous blather, and he might have had the presence of mind to realize how foolish he had been, but I doubt it.
Speaking of God, I meant to point out, concerning "Real Time" last week, that Cynthia Tucker made an excellent point. She (or maybe it was Carlin) said to Jim Glassman, "You know, why is it that conservatives are always quick to talk about religion via the Old Testament, but they never quote anything that Jesus said or did? Maybe they should try the Beautitudes once in awhile." Glassman talked around the question without answering, of course.
I'll keep doing this as long as I'm able and I have a working keyboard. Thanks for checking in.
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