INHERIT THE WIND

 

American Ignorance

Watching one of my favourite films again, Inherit the Wind, - there are two versions, the first featuring Spencer Tracey, the second Jack Lemon in the lead role. The film is based on the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1926, in which the teaching of Charles Darwin was prosecuted  in a small American community.  Without going further into the mechanics of the film the gist of the plot  is the triumph of intelligence over bigotry and ignorance.



Watching the film these days no longer has the same impact on me, for at present the laughable bigotry of the Scopes trial reigns triumphant in Trumpian America. The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, - incidentally a man so riddled with sin, original or otherwise, from adultery to sexual bullying and violence, he could challenge Trump himself in the moral bankruptcy stakes, - now openly promotes a pastor who opposes women’s enfranchisement and holds that women must be subservient to men, always. There role is primarily to make babies. I also suspect that this man’s understanding of evolutionary science may not be that substantial.

That a modern society with the technological capacity to create AI and nuclear fusion, can simultaneously embrace the ‘truth’ of the book of Genesis, is surely alarming.

It would be a mistake to see this absurdity as something new. Religious fundamentalism, white nationalism, and biblical literalism s as old as the republic itself.

Like the shadow of American totalitarian thinking, from the red hysteria of the 1920s, 40s and fifties, to the Hoover and Nixon paranoia, America has always been a battleground between liberal enlightenment and conformist dogmatism, with the latter being in the ascendant far more frequently than the distorting mirror of history often portrays.

Trump is this American nightmare made manifest. He is no temporary phenomenon, no phantom, no bad dream from which we can awake, and when he goes others will take his place, and they will have all the money and power.

We are all participants in this contemporary Scopes trial, this time with the stakes much, much greater. Whatever side of the pond you live resistance is essential, for upon the outcome nothing less than the fate of the civilised democratic project rests.

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