American Idiot

Finally got around to watching Kinsey the other night. About all I'd heard about the movie was that there was a love scene between Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard. This was not exactly a selling point for me, as much of a fan of Sarsgaard's work as I am.

But knowing how American culture and media function (or rather, dysfunction), I had a sneaking suspicion that this sort of idiotic sensationalism was beside the entire point of the movie. And, of course, I was absolutely right. The scene in question was but a minute or so, and not gratuitously oogy to my resolutely zero (on the Kinsey scale) sensibilities. No surprise there; this country's cultural buttons are nothing if not entirely predictable and utterly mundane.

Now, I have no doubt that more culturally astute viewers have voluminous screeds in mind regarding the sexual politics and murky interpersonal relationships described in the movie. And if that is what interests you, I encourage you to seek out such critiques. For I have a political critique in mind, but not necessarily the sexual one that some might assume.

There is a scene, fairly early in the movie, in which Kinsey counsels a young couple with marital difficulties. The wife thinks she's "frigid". The husband seems to agree. Kinsey, in his bloodless, clinical fashion, asks if they've tried cunnilingus in the course of their bedroom frivolities.

After the requisite blushing and harrumphing, both husband and wife assert the notion that such an activity would cause problems with the wife's ability to conceive. Kinsey naturally assures them that that's nonsense. The husband reflexively disagrees, by way of forcing Kinsey into the position of proving a negative. ("How do you know it's not true?")

Kinsey could (and should) have quite easily replied that he himself had three children, and a rambunctious (by the standards of the day) sex life. Why he did not, I have no idea. But that's beside the point.

The point is that there is a clear line to draw here, from the puritanical misconceptions of the day over sexual mores, to the current ridiculous crap permeating Americans' understanding of even the most basic tenets of science and scientific method. Some things never change, and one of the primary things in that category is the ability of a politically-motivated elite to cynically use people's ignorance, to hornswoggle them into endorsing whatever bullshit they've chosen to foist on them at a given point in time.

Currently that bullshit is "intelligent design"; or more precisely, the notion that "both sides should be taught". There is an inherent tautology in that seemingly innocuous phrase, as if there really were two and only two sides to "the story" at hand. Such a notion completely discards centuries of established scientific inquiry and method, in the name of open-ended nonsense being presented as some sort of legitimate scholarship.

The people pushing this boobism nowadays, as well as the boobs mindlessly following it, are the same creatures who couldn't stand that Kinsey could innocently, scientifically, take the guilt -- and thus, the primary means of control -- out of sex. As such, "intelligent design" is merely a similar means to the same stupid end -- to corral a preponderance of Americans into an intellectual dead end, while the rest of the world rubbernecks at our cultural head-on collision with reality, with a combination of bemusement, pity, and contempt, while passing us by all the same.

The rest of the world already knows what we're about to find out the hard way -- the big fat dumb kid can only run so fast.