Secular Sanity

 The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man’s philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of “teaching the argument,” as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”-in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be “one of the refuge states in the Last Days.” For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the “End Times,” that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being “anointed” by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is “spiritual warfare,” in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at “spiritual warfare” events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of “prayer warriors” in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that “God’s perfect will be done on Nov. 4.”

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/

Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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 When John McCain extended his arms in triumph and, with an immense smile, offered up Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention, I was willing to cut her some slack.  After all, dear John has always had a penchant for beauty contestants, so sparkly Sarah was nothing new.  However, a look at her record soon revealed that Governor Palin is the dark side of an update of Jekyll and Hyde.      

As a creationist, she disputes the fact of evolution, and has taken step one toward the banning of books.  She claimed to have turned down the infamous bridge to nowhere, then later admitted having supported it, her switch to “opposition” coming after Congress had seen to its death. She disputed global warming, then softened a bit, but opposed the idea that humans were part of it, then later said – well maybe a little. 

Although she listed Ireland as a country she had visited, her “visit” amounted to nothing more than a refueling stop.  She has approved the killing of black bears with cubs, put a bounty of $150 on wolf paws and spent $400,000 of taxpayer money to defeat a proposal that would have made it illegal to hunt wolves from airplanes.  As a consequence, at the top of the Republican ticket we now have Kill, Kill, Kill from Palin and Drill, Drill, Drill from McCain. And this is the best they can offer?   

Palin initially welcomed an abuse-of-power investigation for allegedly using her office to take revenge against her former brother-in-law, but is now fighting the process with the aid of attorneys provided by McCain.  She’s an End Timer who believes in Rapture and the Apocalypse, so I worry that she’d be willing to “push the red button” to make her fantasies come true.  After all, she claims that G W’s war in Iraq is “God’s task for America”.

She pushes school choice and vouchers that harm the public schools.  She opposes abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest, opposes sex education in schools and supports abstinence only “education,” the effectiveness of which was displayed when her daughter became pregnant at age 16. 

Though seething, I restrained myself until she babbled about polar bears because, as it happens, I’m loaded with facts about Nanook, the Lord of the Arctic, the peripatetic polar bear, which places me far above the governor of our only state that has them.

She admits that the ice pack is shrinking, but when she wrote in the New York Times that these “magnificent cuddly white bears are doing just fine and don’t need our protection.” and “If the ice melts, they’ll adapt to living on land,” she pushed me over the edge.  Why?  Because I have a great affinity for these fantastic animals. I have photographed them from less than 8 feet and have learned the facts of their lives, which are NOT suited to surviving on land.    

Polar bears make their living on the sea ice hunting seals.  At the end of an average winter they come off the ice with enough fat to carry them through till fall, but a shrinking ice pack means less time to hunt, so the bears are coming off the ice some 15% lighter than before.  

A well fed polar bear can be an even tempered bear, but a hungry bear is not.  Although a healthy Ursus Maritimus – the water bear – can swim 100 miles to land, it cannot survive a 200 mile swim.  As a consequence, many of Palin’s ”cuddly white bears” are drowning. Does she know this? She should. Does she care? Why would she? They’re only for shooting!  

As the climate warms, wasps, robins and grizzly bears are slowly moving north.  When polar bears begin to encounter grizzlies, which has already happened, the polar bears will die, for an underfed Nanook is no match for Mr. Griz.

In Palin’s world, belief is what matters, ignorance of science is bliss, and anything goes in the search for power and profit.

Pinocchio Palin talks about the 1000-mile distant gap between the US and Russia as if it was right outside of her door.  Perhaps she should also look to the east, where Alaska and Canada share a 1400-mile border – because you know how war-like they are!  Why there are even rumors that her Anti-Christ is hiding out just north of Saskatoon!  

In a few weeks, too many will vote for Pistol Packin’ Palin and a belligerent man with a bad temper, a private jet and more homes than he can remember who has nothing in common with the working class folks – the same people who must now make sure that the fear monger with simplistic answers is rejected and that the Rapture believer never gets close to the power that can destroy entire civilizations. 

George Erickson 

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