Under the Microscope

Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal… This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
- William Faulkner, from Lion in the Garden, 1968.

by Glynn Wilson

I logged into my Facebook account today and was struck by a photo of three women on a beach. Not famous women mind you, but looking like someone famous on those blue chairs to go with the ocean and the sky with matching umbrellas, sporting sunglasses and cocktails, like Hollywood actors of old.

After a month on Facebook, I’m wondering if the rich and famous hate the paparazzi so much, why do complete nobodies take pictures of themselves and post them in the public domain?

Could it be that the rich and famous would not have minded the paparazzi BEFORE they were rich and famous?

Maybe that’s the point. Or maybe there are more interesting questions, some without answers.

If it’s true that humans possess a natural drive to seek answers and really know what’s going on, why then do they often turn to all the wrong places to find out?

Gallup has found that 18 percent of Americans still think the sun revolves around the earth, as opposed to the other way around, which is close to the margin of error of corresponding with President George W. Bush’s final approval rating of 22 percent.

Now I’m not saying that all of Bush’s holdout supporters don’t realize the earth revolves around the sun. But let’s say for the sake of argument that a large percentage of this group is the same.

Now for the next piece of the equation, you have to understand how newspapers work. They are sometimes great sources of information and for narratives of what’s going on in our culture. Yet they are rarely definitive.

The Washington Post Sunday magazine carried a somewhat fascinating news feature today about a kid from Baltimore who got famous for making funny faces in YouTube videos.

Going Viral as a Path to Fame

It starts off as a typical newspaper feature about a person and deals with a modern technological innovation and the phenomenon of fame. Buried deep in the story is a bit of social science research attempting to explain the phenomena of political blogging. What is missing is a further search for the source of the blogosphere map, which leads to Harvard and one of the first big studies of blogging, journalism and the impact on society.

But before you go off reading up on those things, let’s take it a step further and to a question we can answer.

One of the most asked questions today is based on this statement, true or not.

“The urge to be famous has always been a part of human nature. But it’s become worse than ever in our modern society? Why?”

To begin to find out why, I remembered something from a college Psychology class and began to Google updates to the theory of a human drive for immortality in all it’s forms.

There’s actually a grand theory of it all now, and here’s the best quick thing I could find on how the quest for fame complies with the immortality drive I learned about in that Psychology class.

The Immortality Drive plays itself out through three urges: (1) the urge to achieve immortality by extending your physical life and its impact on the world as much as you can, (2) the urge to distract yourself from thinking about the fact you are physically going to die and may not have a spiritual afterlife or reincarnation awaiting you, and (3) the urge to ensure spiritual immortality after physical expiration.

This researcher says the reason fame obsession has gotten worse has to do with how secular our society has become.

As each generation become less religious, the sincere belief in an afterlife also probably decreases, meaning that people have to focus on alternative ways of satisfying their drive for immortality. This causes us to focus more of our energy on wealth accumulation, power, status and of course fame. Fame is an easy way to at least ensure your name and image will endure forever, even if your body won’t.

Another reason for the increased fame obsession, according to this report, is the advancement of technology.

Imagine the days before there was an international media. Before the invention of the telegraph, information could not travel faster or farther than people. And before the invention of the railroad and steam engine, people had severe limitations in how far and fast they could travel. What technology has done is increase the speed with which information travels and the geographic range that information can reach. Fame was much harder for the average person to achieve. You had to do something grand, good or bad, and you had to have some sort of talent. You had to be a war hero, a conqueror, a great politician, an infamous serial killer, etc. Now with television, radio, the 24-hour news cycle, reality shows, the internet and viral videos, 15 minutes of fame is easier than ever to achieve for the average person.

The third reason for this increased fame obsession is the rising narcissism, which this researcher says comes from our modern culture’s self-esteem focused style of parenting. I’m not sure I agree with all of that, but the underlying theory seems solid.

The immortality drive is the major driving force behind human nature.

Fame is the most enduring and potent form of immortality humans can actually achieve, but because it used to be so hard for the average person to achieve people channeled their energy into satisfying the drive for immortality in other ways. But now, thanks to increased secularism, improvements in technology and media choices, less barriers to fame and a stark rise in narcissism, fame seems more achievable than ever to the average Joe, which has driven our obsession with it to new heights.

For those who don’t have the wherewithal to get at this immortality any other way, there is also “immortality by proxy,” where individuals talk about the importance of being “part of something” this is “larger than themselves,” like a person, event, or movement.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just Not Quite Yet in Alabamaland…

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

You know conservative talk radio must by dying when attack machine shock jocks toss insults at us smart people in their desperate attempt to get anyone to pay attention to them.

Most of the country is yawning and putting their kid pictures on Facebook and have confidence that the administration of President Barack Obama is getting the country back on track after eight years of devastatingly crass, commercial capitalism about ran the country into the ground under George W. Bush.

The talking heads must put assholes like Dick Cheney on TV to show they are “fair and balanced,” but the country is not buying it. Conservatism as a political philosophy is as dead as the Confederacy and the National Republican Party is left with nothing but the remnants of the Old South to support it.

The polls clearly back this up, but don’t tell that to the idiots left crying in the wilderness on talk radio in places like Alabamaland, where the “Democrats are socialists” mantra just keeps on going, and going, and going, like the Energizer Bunny headed for the edge of a cliff. No one with half a brain buys that stupid shit.

But as we take the time to view images of the coffins of veterans killed in Iraq on this Memorial Day, images the Bush administration didn’t want you to see, it seems far more interesting to talk about some issues where the world is not so black and white as the right wingers think, like the issue of guns in our national parks.

I know this will come as a complete shock to my conservative enemies, but I’m kind of glad the gun amendment made it into the credit card bill passed by Congress before the Memorial Day recess.

For starters, Obama has said he will sign it, so that should put an end to the mantra of conservatives on talk radio that Obama is out to destroy the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by taking way the National Rifle Association’s guns. It won’t end the talk, I know, because the idiots on talk radio will say just about anything to keep that rabid, Republican base listening, even if they are dwindling in numbers and dying off at a rapid pace.

Why am I all for allowing guns in national parks? Well, because I always carry a loaded shotgun around with me when I go van camping, even in national parks.

It’s not that I will ever need to use it, but I figure there’s always the chance that some crazy, right-wing, redneck might take exception to my endorsement of our first black president and decide I deserve the first bullet in the new, all white American Revolution. Call me paranoid, but that’s what they tell me in the death threats I get via e-mail.

Besides, what you may not find out from listening to talk radio is that Bush had already signed a policy allowing loaded guns in our national parks. If the Democrats in Congress really had their way and were not worried about being targeted by the NRA in their re-election campaigns in 2010, the policy would have been repealed. But when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) couldn’t help himself from attaching a totally unrelated rider to that credit card regulation bill that would allow individuals to carry rifles, shotguns and semi-automatic weapons in national parks, the Democrats caved and went home for the holiday.

Laws are made for honest people. Criminals would have violated this law with impunity anyway.

Check this post from Buzzflash:

I’ll carry my pistol in National Parks no matter what happens with this. The 2nd Amendment IS my concealed weapons permit. It’s nice to see some Dems getting on the pro-gun/constitution wagon. Of course 2010 is an election year and by looking @ gun & ammo sales most politicians who are anti-2nd A might get their ass handed to them.

Uh, huh. Right. My 16-gauge is loaded, nutjob, and I know how to use it.

Then, there’s always the issue of other more natural threats to personal safety when camping in the wilderness, more natural than rednecks, that is.

On a recent camping trip to Tennessee, the bears were still mostly in hibernation and the wolves normally stay far away from people. But you know, just in case…

On a recent camping trip to the Gulf Coast, they say panthers have been sighted in Gulf State Park. Perhaps it’s someone’s vivid imagination.

My question: Would a National Geographic photographer ever go looking for photos of dangerous animals without being armed? I’m not sure about that so I think I will ask. When I find out, I will post the answer in the comments.

But before I end this and get on with Sunday breakfast, I feel compelled to take one more shot at a different brand of conservative that seems to be on the rise.

Don’t think for a second that talk radio is the only place left in the U.S. where media managers are out of touch with Americans. The Tuscalooosa News just hired a conservative columnist to try and save that newspaper, one of the two remaining New York Times properties in the state.

I doubt it will work, since Robert DeWitt is about the most boring guy I have ever seen in print. Best I can tell from a Google search, his prior experience mostly consisted of writing about fishing. Now there’s an exciting sport.

If he wants to fire up the base, he might want to check out the fastest growing sport in the world, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. They say it’s now bigger than Nascar. I know, that’s hard to believe.

But after walking into a redneck bar in suburbia to have some barbecue last night and watching a crowd of people go crazy over guys rolling around on the ground on top of each other beating each other’s brains out — without padding mind you — I know that anything is truly possible in America. Rome didn’t have much on us as an empire, including the taste for blood.

Fortunately, the kind of people who go for that sort of violence as sport apparently don’t know how to find their way to the polls to vote. They would support Sarah Palin for president in a heartbeat, perhaps, but we say bring her on. There are enough people in America now who understand what is at stake and they proved in 2008 that they will turn out to vote.

The so-called conservative revolution is over. Get over it. I know I am.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Here is a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don’t worry be happy
In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy…
– A Bobby McFerrin song

The rain is coming down steadily in The Ham. But that’s OK. I’m dry in The Bunker and it’s good for the garden anyway.

Don’t worry. Be happy…

Some of my Facebook friends think I should join the crowd with the snappy, happy news, like Mike Royer, Pam Huff, Southern Living and the Newhouse boys, who of course write their columns four days before the paper comes out anyway…

And Dog knows I want to, since Bush is gone back to Texas and The Obama is in the White House and all’s right with the world, right?

Not so fast.

According to New York Times columnist Frank Rich, Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush, and neither can we until we get some unfinished business out of the way.

What prompted me to think about this today was an exchange I had this week on Facebook, the newest, most trendy, don’t worry be happy social networking Website, where I swear the programmer geeks who created it should adopt the Bobby McFerrin song as their theme song.

What they won’t tell you is that George H. W. Bush tried to use the song in the 1988 U.S. presidential election campaign until McFerrin, who was a Democrat, objected and the campaign desisted.

Oh, how soon we forget.

But don’t worry. Be happy…

While I love Google myself, if I were teaching again I would tell my students you can’t depend on Google for everything.

Here’s an example that fits right into today’s theme.

For some reason, my biggest critics on the Web tend to be engineers. Now back when I was pursuing a research academic career, one of my main professors used to make fun of engineers by calling them jarheads. Why? Because among pure research scientists, engineers are sneered at because they are involved in the so-called “practical science.”

But like a lot of things during the Bush years, that meaning got distorted when the movie Jarhead came out in 2005, depicting a company of marines calling themselves jarheads.

Not surprisingly, the sound track to the movie contained the song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Now there is a host of communications research which shows a certain and fairly large segment of the public likes this snappy, happy news, which is why local television news broadcasters started smiling and laughing at each other on TV starting in the early 1980s. Prior to that, network TV news broadcasts were usually somber, straight news affairs. Anyone here old enough to remember Huntley-Brinkley?

Now, the silly local broadcasters will smile at the camera, even when they are reporting that several marines died in Iraq today. The jarheads…

Newspapers started picking up on this a number of years ago, which is one of the reasons that’s what you get when you pick up a Newhouse paper like the Birmingham News. Even when they are delivering bad news, the tone is still snappy and happy.

I had the opportunity to do some reporting for one of the Newhouse papers considered to be the best in the chain when I worked for a time in Washington, D.C., back in 2004 and 2005. I did some free-lancing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but the deal went sour when the DC bureau editor wanted me to produce some snappy, happy news about the latest campaign finance reports about members of Congress from Ohio, including Dennis Kucinich.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t see much humor in campaign finance reports. I stayed up very late one night analyzing the reports and wrote a story which I thought did them justice. But the editor was terribly distraught when he read my report. The paper used the AP story instead of mine. Why? Because the editor said, and I swear I’m not making this up, “We don’t want analysis. We just want something short and snappy and funny…”

Right. Sorry, but that’s not why I got into journalism.

For a local example from today’s Newhouse news, take this piece of so-called business reporting. It’s actually a pretty interesting tale about Richard Scrushy and his country band Dallas County Line, but to those of us who know the whole story, there are several things missing.

Where is the criticism of the Bush appointed prosecutor? And where is the admission that the Birmingham News made a fortune on advertising from Scrushy’s Healthsouth, before the editors and publisher lost money on HealthSouth stock along with everybody else in Mountain Brook who were taken in by it?

If you want to see some real, substantive reporting about the Siegelman-Scrushy cases, this week you have to turn to the Huffington Post, where a guy I know named Andrew Kreig has a report under the headline (my headline anyway):

Siegelman Deserves New Trial Due to Judge Grudge

I met Mr. Kreig in Atlanta on the day of the appeal hearing in Atlanta. He showed up with a binder full of printouts of all my stories on the Siegelman-Scrushy cases, and we had an interesting lunch talking about it all. His report is the result of his substantive investigation over a number of months, and it is a piece of investigative journalism worth catching.

Be forewarned, though. It’s not snappy, or particularly happy.

Of course the Alabama bureau of the Associated Press came out with an almost celebratory piece of reporting this week, saying what we already reported would most likely be the case before the all Republican panel of judges who heard Siegelman’s case on the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Siegelman, Scrushy Lose Bid for Full Court Review

The Newhouse reporter in Washington managed to break this little sentence of news this week at al.com, based on a leak, of course, from you know who: Obama to Replace Alice Martin With Joyce Vance?

And this came a little while later on a liberal blog: Bush U.S. Attorneys To Be Replaced in ‘Next Couple of Weeks’

Now that’s happy news.

But these items are not.

Politics As Usual On Siegelman Appeal?

Prosecutors Want Longer Sentence for Siegelman?

So sorry to be the harbinger of bad news today, but I hope you will agree that we delivered it in a snappy, happy way.

Don’t worry. Be Happy.

The world’s going to end in 2012 anyway.

Right…

Only snappy, happy news, please…

Like any news organization, we are interested in the views of our readers.

So while we sip java, listen to the debate on ABC’s “This Week” and try to decide between a “snappy, happy” Sunday column like the Newhouse boys, verses a substantive one that might depress some people.

The underlying question is this: Is it the role of a journalist to re-enforce people’s prejudices and give them what they WANT, or do we have a responsibility to challenge people and tell them what they NEED TO KNOW?

We know where the corporate press comes down…

What do you think?

Where’s the symbol for quiet?

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

The first rose-breasted grosbeak of the 2009 bird migration season shows up on the backyard feeder this morning as I sip a cup of hazelnut brew and contemplate the state of the world coming up on a decade into the new millennium.

I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence. Where has the decade gone? Looking back on it now, it seemed to fly by. But there were times when the traumatic events of the past seven years especially made time drag almost to an excruciating halt.

Change is a funny thing. Sometimes it makes time fly. Sometimes it almost seems to stop. As Einstein concluded, of course, time is relative.

Sometimes those of us with an analytical, sociological bent look for symbols to gauge where we are in the big scheme of things.

Now I’m not much of a shopper, being a man and all. But according to my unimpeachable sources, there is one symbol that is almost omnipresent these days, and the presence of it on everything from purses to belts to shoes and even lingerie, if analyzed, must tell us something about where we are as a people. I’m told you can’t go into a shopping mall without seeing it everywhere you look, which means the peace sign has gone mainstream.

Fifty Years of the Peace Symbol

I’m sort of surprised the programmer geeks over at Facebook haven’t figured this out yet and come up with an application to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the peace symbol. It just goes to show you that programmers are not necessarily the smartest people on the planet like they think they are. The richest maybe, but so what. They can’t write this.

It is ironic that with the rampant consumerism in the post-9/11 era of Bush, which might be referred to as the era of “…just go shopping,” that the peace sign survives at all. But no one is shopping anymore in the Bush recession, and we did take back the country by electing The Obama in November, 2008. So it is clear that a majority of Americans were ready for change.

If they are anything like me and most of my friends, including my Facebook friends, they are ready for a little peace — and a whole boat load of quiet.

As time goes by and I sit and watch the birds on a peaceful spring morning, the images of 9/11 no longer dance in my head. The horrific scenes of the Hurricane Katrina flood no longer invade my dreams. While Obama may not be moving fast enough for the left to get the troops out of Iraq, surely we are marching in a better direction in the Middle East. Pakistan and Afghanistan will continue to be major international problems, but down here in Alabamaland, it is not so much a daily concern.

Heck, even the Birmingham Waterworks has apparently decided to give up on its two decade long quest to dam the Locust Fork River, a piece of news that has not even heralded in one single newspaper or TV story. If you found out about it at all, you found out about it here in a little blog post about the Forever Wild program, which of course should be extended when it is set to expire in 2012.

So it is possible now to turn our attention to more mundane concerns, like growing a garden and watching the birds. In short, I just don’t feel like fighting anymore. On a daily basis, I just want peace.

I’ve never gotten in on the trend to get a tattoo, but if I were to consider desecrating my body in that way, or maybe I should say decorating, there is no doubt what symbol I would choose. Maybe I’ll just go shopping this afternoon for a peace sign bumper sticker for the Chevy van. Peace.

Now, if only someone would come up with a sign for quiet … and tell my redneck neighbors about it. Goddamn suburbanites : )

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Turns 150

Glynn Wilson

The famous Rhea County Courthouse, where the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial took place

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

DAYTON, Tenn. — Forty-three years after the death of British naturalist Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is being celebrated far and wide this year, a few men were sitting around in a Rexall drug store across from the now famous courthouse in this rural Southern town talking politics, science and religion.

In contrast to most of the official accounts of how the so-called “trial of the century” and the “Scopes monkey trial” got started, this was the genesis for an idea for a trial to test the legality of teaching evolution versus creationism in the public schools: A conversation over Coca-Colas at a soda fountain counter. (There’s no official indication whether whiskey was involved).

Glynn Wilson

A photograph of the drug store where the idea for the Scopes Trial was hatched

You won’t even find this account on the Wikipedia page about the trial, although the evidence is presented in the museum in the basement of the courthouse, and knowledgeable locals know the story.

The way the word got out happened as it often does, with a leak to a newspaper reporter, in this case the old Chattanooga Times. The old paper published by Adolph Ochs, who had purchased the New York Times in 1898 and started the world’s first “objective” newspaper, ran a brief about the idea of a trial.

That was picked up by the Associated Press and ran in newspapers across the country, bringing the idea to the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union. The group had offered to finance a test case against the Butler Act, a Tennessee law passed in 1925 making it illegal for any state-funded public school teacher to deny the literal Biblical account of human origins from Genesis and to teach Darwin’s evolution through natural selection in its place.

From there, local officials, who ran with the idea of a trial to promote the town and boost tourism in the area, pushed the idea. It worked in the end, in a way. The town has tourism to this day because of the trial. Although like they do at people all over the red South, people come to gawk at them as a joke way more than something to be taken seriously. No matter.

If you take the trip to Dayton and talk to some of the people, they will just try to save your immortal soul anyway if you give them half a chance. If you talk to some of the people in the know who work in the courthouse every day, you will find a few who know the real story, but far more who still believe more in the creation myth than the science that became world famous in part because of the “trial of the 20th century” in their town.

Glynn Wilson

John Fine, a clerk in the Rhea County Courthouse

According to John Fine, a clerk who has worked in the historic courthouse much of his adult life, there are way more people from England and Australia who come to town interested in the history than the people who live their entire lives in Rhea County. He said the people of the area are aware of the history mainly due to news coverage of the annual re-enactment of the trial each June. But he acknowledged that they don’t seem to know or care that much about the international significance of the event — or to be much more knowledgeable about science as a result of the exposure.

“The vast majority of people here are very much still in support of creationism, and that would include me,” he said in an interview.

Nearby Bryan College, a so-called Christian liberal arts college, was founded in 1930 in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes trial specifically to conduct research on the alleged “theory” of creationism and to teach it at the college level. It was named after the great populist politician William Jennings Bryan, who died in Dayton five days after an emotional performance prosecuting high school teacher John Scopes.

Famous attorney Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes, may have lost the trial in the eyes of the jury, but not in the eyes of the world. There is little doubt the trial had a lasting impact on American culture.

As an icon of the triumph of science over religion, the Scopes trial would enter into the American imagination primarily through the somewhat cynical reporting of H.L. Mencken, who covered the trial not so objectively for the Baltimore Sun.

It could be argued that while religious people still seize on the trial victory as a win for god over science, what has endured from the Scopes trial is basically the agenda of civil liberties advocates and one of the most basic tenants of American democracy. That is, state legislatures should stay out of the business of regulating religion. It is not their place under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to limit freedom of scientific inquiry, based on the method of forming hypotheses from the observation of empirical data to the formulation of scientific theories. Also, a legal, secular democratic society should respect the value of academic freedom and not allow the creation of laws that undermine the very idea of self-governance itself.

The vast majority of scientists now agree that Darwin’s work building the theory of evolution was one of the most critical in all of science. On this 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, it would be nice if more of the people in Dayton — and America at large — would become educated on this fact.

Isn’t it about time we stopped playing guessing games with the origin of the universe based on a religious screed written almost 1,500 years before science proved that the earth revolves around the sun?

Glynn Wilson

A view from inside the famous courtroom where the Scopes Trial was held, including the original jury seats

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

A couple of weeks ago, when not one single Republican took up our new President Barack Obama’s call for “bipartisanship” to vote for his stimulus package to aid the faltering economy — a measure backed by virtually every economist in the land as a needed step to avert a far worse economic collapse — a reader on an e-mail list asked: “Why is cable media spinning this as a failure for Obama?”

My answer?

“Because they are the corporate media,” I wrote. “That’s why we are building a replacement here at the Locust Fork News-Journal.”

Obviously, more of an explanation is in order.

Read the rest of this entry »

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

The history of the Civil War has never really interested me that much compared to the American Revolution. Neither has the Great Man theory of history interested me nearly as much as the study of science and nature.

But just like in life we can’t ultimately escape death or taxes, I can’t seem to get through life as an American or a Southerner without facing the baggage left over from the Civil War — and the man-centric view of history.

I would rather be camping out in the Great Smoky Mountains photographing birds in the wild.

But since Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis has thrust this race for governor upon us a year and a half ahead of time, like a lot of men before him whose ambitions drove the agendas of their state or nation, it is impossible NOT to spend some time thinking about these things.

Proponents of the Great Man theory of history say the best way to explain things is by studying the stories of political and military heroes, influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or “Machiavellianism,” used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact, at least according to this brief sketch of the theory in the online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. (No, this is not my only source. I read more about it than I care to elaborate on during almost a decade as a grad student and teaching journalism at the university level. I link to this basic source here for those who may want to begin exploring the subject further on the Web.)

So for example, to understand the Civil War, a scholar might study the life and role of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, or even Joshua Chamberlain or William C. Oates.

The Great Man theory is associated most often with 19th-century commentator and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” reflecting his belief that heroes shape history through both their personal attributes and divine inspiration.

One of the most vitriolic critics of Carlyle’s formulation of the Great Man theory was Herbert Spencer, who believed that attributing historical events to the decisions of individuals was a hopelessly primitive, childish, and unscientific. He said the men Carlyle called “great men” were merely products of their social environments. He once wrote that, “you must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown…. Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”

Of course he is best known for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which he did in Principles of Biology in 1864, during the last year of the Civil War, after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which was published 150 years ago this year. Spencer tried to extend the hard science view of evolution through natural selection into the social sciences of sociology and ethics, and he had some impact, although many of the theories derived from that line of thought have been discredited, most notably “social darwinism.”

I will be writing more about those things later on in the year. For today, however, I find myself thinking about the movie Gods and Generals, which I watched for the first time last night on late night cable.

The first in a trilogy based on the books of Jeff Shaar and funded by Ted Turner of CNN fame, the story is very much a study of the great men of the war, including the Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, played by Robert Duvall, who is from Virginia and claims to be distant kin.

In an interview on CNN, Duvall said the gods in the story are the Southern generals, “because they were pretty much superior to the generals of the North.” The “generals” are the Northern generals. The film was criticized for straying from the book and for being too favorable to the Southern side, with grandiose scenes showing Jackson and others praying for god to bless them before battle and such.

To me a more interesting story, and one dealt with to some extent in the next book and movie, Killer Angels, focuses on the hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, Col. Joshua Chamberlain, whose valiant defense of Little Round Top became the focus of many published stories over the years.

Chamberlain was an interesting and gracious philosophy professor from Maine thrust into the war like many others at the time. His leadership of the 20th Maine’s bayonet charge that routed the 15th Alabama regiment, wearing their famous yellowhammer patch, led by Col. William C. Oates, may have been the key moment in the war that saved the Union on that gray afternoon of July 2, 1863.

“At that crisis, I ordered the bayonet,” Chamberlain wrote later. “The word was enough.”

After the war, Chamberlain went back to teaching in Maine. Oates went into politics and served as governor of Alabama from 1894 to 1896. He resigned from Congress in 1894 and ran for governor in a contest that became infamous for its “double-dealing, dirty politics, and corrupt bargains,” according to histories written of the time.

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It’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I can’t wait for 2009.

When the ball drops and the calendar changes at one minute after midnight this Wednesday evening, Thursday morning, I’ve got a feeling the world is going to take a dramatic turn in a better direction. I could be wrong, but I say change is good.

If what I’m thinking turns out to come true, 2009 may be the year the human species turns it all around and starts living up to a smarter, more positive destiny. Maybe we can begin to escape the yoke of ignorance and religious dogma once and for all.

For starters, there will be a massive celebration among intellectuals on January 20, the day when George W. Bush boards that presidential helicopter with his dog Barney and leaves the White House lawn forever to head back to that fake ranch in Crawford, Texas.

On the same day, of course, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. He will arrive in Washington, D.C., on a train, after riding a two-year campaign of “hope.” We will be drinking more than one toast to his victory on this New Year’s Eve, full of hope that he will be able to fulfill his promises.

The mainstream, corporate-news media will treat every proposal he offers with a fake skepticism, questioning whether he can really make a difference. But here in Webland, we are going to reserve judgment and keep hope alive.

In addition to coverage of the new world under Obama, we will be spending a good bit of time and space in 2009 celebrating a couple of noteworthy anniversaries.

You will not be able to escape coverage of these events, so you may as well learn about them here first, since few American news organizations have turned the page to these issues, yet.

For the next year, it will be hard to turn on the TV and not see something about the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The year 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of his myth-shattering book, On the Origin of the Species.

A column in the British newspaper The Guardian has the first story we’ve seen on this yet, and even acknowledges a fact you won’t see reported by any American news organization, since the religious backlash to Darwin is still powerful after 150 years.

According to the British author, it is reported that Darwin “is one of the three great intellectuals of the 19th century who shaped modernity, along with Marx and Freud.”

That would be Karl Marx, the social theorist who is attacked by the ignorant on a daily basis in the U.S. because of his association with socialism, and Sigmund Freud, who pioneered explorations of the mind known as psychoanalysis.

All three of these men had a profound impact on the 20th century, as much for their influence on other thinkers as for the ideas they published themselves. That’s what the uneducated masses and the anti-intellectual news media don’t get.

Glynn Wilson

I captured the legendary blue mist of the Smoky Mountains on film one day in 2000. This is not just fog. It emanates from the pine trees there and is the reason the Cherokee people called it “the land of the blue mist.” European settlers came up with the translation “the Smoky Mountains.”

I spent a good deal of time in Tennessee in the late 1990s studying Darwin myself in a science-communications doctoral program, so you can bet we will be following these stories all year with a great deal of relish.

And speaking of Tennessee, the year 2009 will also mark the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which means, of course, that several camping trips to one of my favorite places on Earth will be in order this year.

According to one of the first stories out on this subject in the Scripps newspaper in Knoxville, the mountains have been home for my ancestors the Cherokee for centuries, and for researchers, “the park is an 810-square-mile laboratory containing more life forms than any other comparable location on Earth.”

Of course there is still a serious question as to whether my home state of Alabama is quite ready to join the rest of the country in this new world, since there are some who are still trying to fight the final battles of the Civil War here.

Even my old friend and the best columnist still working for an Alabama newspaper, Tommy Stevenson, just had to fall for it the other day by putting up a blog post suggesting that the Ten Commandments Judge, Roy Moore, may run for governor in 2010.

OK, we know a majority of the population of Alabama might very well vote for this religious zealot and authoritarian personality, long before they would vote for the black guy, Artur Davis. So if Alabama wants to continue being the laughing stock of the nation, go ahead people. Vote for the dumbass.

If you want to live in the past, keep reading those print editions of newspapers where they still think Karl Rove is a genius and former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was guilty.

Meanwhile, we’ll be spending more time this year in another Southern state, Tennessee, camping out in the Great Smoky Mountains and thinking about the accomplishments of Darwin and his predecessors in science. Come along for the ride if you’re interested. There will be amazing photography to go along with the stories, budget willing.

Here’s to hoping you have a happy New Year in 2009.