The Funk of The Monkey Trial on The 20th Century

The Scopes (aka The Monkey) trial was a heavyweight media event looking for a place to happen. Two heavyweight lawyers would step into the ring to punch out the issue new-fangled teaching evolving like a high plains blizzard across the nation. In once corner for the ACLU was Clarence Darrow, and in the other a tired William Jennings Bryan, a little like Valuta or Muhammad Ali fighting one last battle too many.

Image via Wikipedia

Darrow and Bryan eyeball one another in above photo

We do not wish to ape the conventional evolved opinion that the intellectual matter of creation versus evolution was a t.k.o for the evolution pinkos, godless communists and immoral hordes of golfing followers seeking liberation to sin without reproach. If Babe Ruth had been followed by the paparazzi of today we shudder to imagine the sordid tales that might have emerged, yet we enjoy baseball and the National Enquirer even so. No,  this trial was a wide spot on the horse paths changing to asphalt freeways and global warming technology. Zero-dimensional membranes emerged as virtual particles from a pre-big bang vacuum were beyond the ken of the kelp  harvesting health fanatics of the era. Americans of the scopes era were content with pizza made at home, porch swings on hot rural summer days and personal fans instead of BMWs, Pizza Huts sophisticated beyond understanding of the kerosene lamp crowd– what nuclear incineration of the parking lot that would become Earth awaited these futurists seeking to devolve their place in the world to the moral equivalence of amoeba?

Well, not to provide sour grapes because evolution seems to be the case even if it is in a theistic context. Humanity has trouble understanding how it is that quarks might be produced from spirit at some odd cancelling out of the omniscience of God from everyplace. We wonder what Plotinus the neo-Platonist did of why God created a reduced version of reality that is a Universe at all? Let us return to that Tennessee trial in that state fallen from nature and lost to developers…

The trial had a horde of reporters descend like manna from heaven on Dayton Tennessee economically speaking. Spectators hitched up their buggies to attend the spectacle. Speakeasy’s emptied their guts of secret boozers. It was a show trial stimulated by an ACLU advertisement that it would be willing to provide free legal services to anyone willing to challenge the Feb. 1925 legal statue that made it illegal to teach evolution theory in Tennessee public schools. It was an era before the televised trial. It is inconceivable that a trial on technical scientific issue versus public education would today be conducted on television. That sort of event is reserved for media stars like O.J. Simpson deemed worthy of broadcast coverage. In 1925 people were hard up for news however, and the debacle of the stock market crash and great depression was yet four year inn the future. Photographers and scriveners for the major media were howling for a story. It was a brave new world full of eugenics idea in America-even a radiation containing bottled water named Radithor was sold to the elite tennis set. The time to punch the clock on the old man was too obvious. The time was right for the American elites vs. God.