Tis' The Season

Returning from wintry travels to warm(er) Los Angeles and basking in the presence of friends and family, I began to feel the first twinges of Holiday Cheer - a certain warmth peculiar to Christmas which lights us up like ornaments and fills us with goodwill to all.

It didn't last long.

It flickered out when I turned on the TV and looked for something seasonal to fit my mood. I checked out Showtime, since they often have something suitable - at least reruns of 'The Santa Clause', which is a guilty pleasure and cheesy fun. But no, all I found on the Showtime channel was a purported documentary narrated by Ben Stein called, 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'.

The info-blurb for the flick stated it was all about how scientists who dared to write anything positive about intelligent design were kicked out of their jobs, denied tenure, or lost funding. Having once been almost-a-scientist myself, and believing in the free discourse of ideas no matter how crackpot, I thought 'hey, this could be interesting'.

But I was wrong. It wasn't long before the show devolved from a discussion of intellectual exclusion to an outright rant against 'Darwinism' complete with scenes of Stein staring down a marble statue of Darwin and footage of Nazi atrocities and Stalinist marches flitting across the screen.

Even after walking the snowy streets of Montreal - including the 'Rue Saint-Nicholas', I couldn't muster enough jolliness and joy to man a psychic defense against the brutality of that slash and burn 'journalism'. The images were blunt force trauma to my Christmas Spirit.

You see, to Stein (who co-wrote the film) presumably godless Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' doctrine led directly to the extermination of the Holocaust and the mass repression of millions in the following Cold War. Never mind that humans will find a way to do bad things no matter what they believe in - or don't. Stein ignored the Inquisition, the Crusades, and every Catholic Vs Protestant bloodbath for the past 500 years - not to mention the religious fundamentalist-terrorists who've been beheading and bombing about the Middle East (and New York).

In the film's end, Stein addresses an audience (kind of a bored-looking group, actually) about the evils of putting up intellectual walls - with the scene juxtaposed with shots of Ronald Reagan standing near the Berlin Wall and taking about that wall and what it meant. Heavy-handed and overwrought, yes, but the discussion of blocking inquiry and thought has its merits and was what the film should have been about all along. Too bad then, that Stein detoured into pure anti-evolution propaganda, and so nastily, with such flawed and selective logic it would make an excellent negative exhibit for any class on logic and rhetoric. Stein might have had something important to say, but lost his way as surely as that monotonic teacher he portrayed in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' ('Darwin? Darwin? ... Darwin?')

And back to my original peeve - it wasn't even seasonal! Unless you believe that knocking evolution is synonymous with promoting religion and therefore meets the criteria of celebrating the season. Well, it doesn't in my book, partner.

So excuse me, but I'm going back to the remote and searching for any version of 'A Christmas Carol' - God help me, I'll even take 'Santa Clause 3' ...