The Journal of Provincial Thought

jptHome Issue 4

luminance

jptArchives

Disclaimer: Please note that jpt management and staff take variable views of Ms. Fossille's attitudes, assertiveness, and leisurewear.

_____________________________________________________________________

A Grand Day Out at The Creation Museum

By Tawny Fossille

                I don’t care if it rains or freezes,
                Give me multi-media Jesus,
                Easily accessible by car.
                     —old hippy chant

The world started 6006 years ago on Tuesday, April 12, at 2:30 p.m.!
Dinosaurs and kangaroos were stocked in the Garden of Eden!
Adam was a retired porn star!
The above dinosaurs were vegetarian (like people) before the Fall!
The Flood occurred 4350 years ago and killed the dinosaurs!
The Grand Canyon was cut in a very short time through soft rock!
The Ice Age was a quicky, and woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses were standing by for use, through God’s foresight!
Noah’s shipyard was staffed by Yiddish comedians who said things like “Oy gevelte!” “Meshuganah!” and “Chutzpah!”
The Ark was a container ship prototype that exhausted the world’s supply of goferwood!

These and many other pronouncements, factoids and astonishing sights await on a Grand Day Out to the Creation Museum, in the approximate middle of nowhere beyond the flight paths of the Cincinnati airport (in the first of many paradoxes, oxymorons and twisted paradiddles, the C. airport is actually in northern Kentucky).  Find your way to invisible Petersburg, enter at the Stegosaurus Gate and prepare to queue up.  Beware: owing to inefficient corridor design and too few ticket sellers, the ravening hordes soon bottleneck and back up, so the tour of the C.M. progresses at a nonagenarian shuffle.  The crowds of the eager-to-believe, however, are quiet and well-behaved.  This is Holy Stuff!

Nothing more excites the base than a totally worn-out argument no one in present generations remembers. Back to the future via Origin of Species!  I expect any day now a revival of phrenology, leech medication, dowsing, alchemy, grail-seeking and the search for Prester John.  Here we have all the ingredients for success—dinosaurs + old-tyme sin = savage guilt, with a smiley face of promised repentance.

Presiding over the maze of too-narrow corridors and crowd bottlenecks among the exhibits is a bald Daddy Warbucks-like Anthropologist (in the form of photos and an animatronic display android—his corporeal reality is yet unrevealed, like Jesus’), who seems to be the Founder.  It is implicit that he has been whisked up off this Fallen World by some process of Assumption.  Yet in his surrogate shapes (including as voice-over and host in the maze’s concluding movie, The Last Adam), he is there to reassure us with his Nobodaddy voice that you can grow up loving dinosaurs, become an educated paleontologist, dig up the veritable bones and still cling unassailably to the fundy worldview and the literal words of the literal Bible.  That’s a shrewd pitch, too, since every one of the visitors yearns for a pleasing reconciliation like this—it’s OK to assert a sappy and childish belief system if it allows me to have what I want:  Not thy will but mine be done, O Lord.  Give me this day my me me me. Befuddle me not with the vastness and mystery of thy Creation, but give me a handy Operation Manual with all the answers, written by a Paleolithic sheep-minder and approved by King James.

Evidently the Founder imported the idea of the Creation Museum from Australia to bring light to the gentiles, from that place whence came Vegemite, Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ and a myriad other bad things.  But the manifestation of the C.M. in KY is as American as apple pie, one of those inevitabilities that makes you exclaim “Why didn’t I think of that!” and slap yo’ thigh.  It manifested itself in the spring of 2007 and has since done a land-office business, even if tucked away into a crevice of topography once known only to cows and tobacco patches.

Intrepid dino hunter called in to quell tyrannosaur menace.

The Creation Museum is a clean, organized and basically efficient Fundy-Funday operation, with ample parking lots and a lavish meandering garden under construction.  It has a big bookstore-cum-gewgaw place (they do have multiple editions of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, by far the noblest book on sale—Bunyan at least could write and truly believed in what he wrote), several fastfoodatoriums, a presentation on The Real Astronomy (presumably the Ptolemaic system) and many excellent and accurate recreations of dinosaurs and other extinct beasties, far more convincing than the platoons of animatronic peoploids. (I did have trouble distinguishing manikins from spectators—they all took on the same glazed, evangelical expression.)  To make the average paranoid and ignorant American feel safe,  numerous C.M. rentacops patrol with black shades, badges, walky-talkies, protomilitary uniforms, bulky sidearms, handcuffs and many other comforting rods and staves.

All in all, much is to absorb among the many milling people:  the Scopes trial diorama includes a young H.L. Mencken in the background, always a soothing presence, the good old Great Chain of Being ideas of the Middle Ages are all about, along with presence of all those terrific dinosaurs, looming like benign monsters, Calibans for Christ.  The neorealist “Culture in Crisis” section (the world today) is as sinister as a stage set for Brecht, lacking only Mack the Knife, the Garden of Eden promenade is like a Busby Berkeley backdrop for chaste nudity, and the random exhortations from Old and New Testaments flashed on computer screens everywhere recall Huxley’s Brave New World in a Dr. Whoish way.  Everything to enchant the childish mind and soothe the savage breast, probably a better buy for precious family vacation time than Sixty Flags Over Scranton or BlowupIraqLand or whatever abomination some entertainment corp. owned by Rupert Murdock has now erected. ###

WHERE:  Creation Museum, 2800 Bullittsburg Church Road, Petersburg, Kentucky 41080  Contact:  creationmuseum.org  Phone:  888-582-4253

Admission prices start at $19.95 per adult, with lower children’s and oldsters’ prices and added charges for discovering the secrets of astronomy, etc.

jptHOME Issue 4

Copyright 2007- WJ Schafer & WC Smith - All Rights Reserved

____________________________________________________________________________

Based on a blithering blizzard of ambitious alliteration, the Creation Museum believes in and promulgates to the heathen the Seven Cs:  Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross and Consummation.  In reality, the Creation Museum is based on a shrewd realization that dinosaurs are hot, all children love them, everybody yearns to drag the family through a dinosaur theme park (we learned nothing from Jurassic Park!) and it is easy-peasey to combine this all with your basic ultra- simplicisssimus olde Creationism to form a synthesis of Old Tyme Religion and Old Tyme Pseudoscience of a sort not seen since the 1860s, when Soapy Wilberforce
	---Tyrannosaur amuck in Museum, consumes many ---- visitors.  Final score:  tyrannosaur 243  fundies 0. ---______________________________________________
and his boon companions were crusading to slay the dreadful Dragon Darwin. One of many Creation Museum slogans is: “We’re taking dinosaurs back,” as if avid creationists ever owned them as anything except “dragon’s bones” or “the giants of yore” mentioned in the Good Book.