Gravity: Just Another Pesky Regulation to Repeal

Isaac Newton, you fraud! (Portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1689)

The catalogue of offensive Republican statements in my last post depressed me so much that I thought I’d take today to highlight a handful of lighter, albeit still ridiculous, remarks from conservatives. Attacks on reproductive rights just make me angry, but I can at least attempt a sense of humor about general ignorance. For all the attention paid lately to the so-called “war on women,” the war on science is equally as fierce and possibly even more moronic.

Mitt Romney earned riotous laughter from the climate-change deniers filling the Tampa Bay Times Forum arena when he proclaimed, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

What’s the implication here — that families in New Orleans won’t benefit from not having their houses swamped by floodwater from increasingly frequent hurricanes? That everyone’s children won’t appreciate inheriting a planet stricken by droughts and famine? That people whose beachfront property will be underwater in 20 years don’t need any help from a President Romney? As Steve Benen writes at his MSNBC blog, Romney’s promise is “great news for those of us who don’t have families on this planet.” Benen also points out that Romney is in no position to poke fun at Obama’s grandiose speeches. At a campaign event in Jacksonville this weekend, the Republican nominee revealed his own delusions of grandeur:

We’re going to take America back. The future demands it. The future is out there for us to take it. Our kids deserve it. You deserve it. The nation deserves it. Peace on the planet depends on it.

And here’s Benen: “Wait, what? Peace on earth is dependent on electing the Romney-Ryan ticket?” Well, of course. Don’t you know this is the most important election since 1860?!

Along the same lines, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas has an opinion piece on Politico that argues against renewable energy tax credits. He name-checks Solyndra, of course, as if having 3.6 of clean energy loans default (which is less than a third of the 12.85 percent default rate predicted by the White House) proves that the government has no place trying to keep fossil-fuel emissions from destroying the environment. The most nonsensical part of the entire op-ed:

There’s been a steady drumbeat recently from those seeking an extension of the wind production tax credit. For many reasons, including some that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has carefully highlighted in his opposition, this is a bad idea.

First, an extension continues this unsettling policy trend in which citizens are asked to bear all the risks and gain none of the rewards.

Yeah, breathing clean air, having uncontaminated drinking water, investing in a future that doesn’t rely on the whims of Saudi Arabian oil production — no rewards at all! Didn’t someone much wiser than myself once ask, What’s the matter with Kansas?

Then there’s Kentucky, where GOP lawmakers talk a good game about education reform but fall short when it actually comes to, you know, educating kids. Three years after fighting to align state testing protocols with national standards, Republicans are backtracking. The problem? Someone actually read the national standards, which include language about the importance of teaching evolution to college-bound high-schoolers. As McClatchy reports, Sen. David Givens is disturbed: “I would hope that creationism is presented as a theory in the classroom, in a science classroom, alongside evolution.” But that’s nothing compared to this gem from Rep. Ben Waide:

The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up.

Ah. Then I’m sure Waide would agree with the following: The theory of gravity is a theory, and essentially the theory of gravity is not science – Newton made it up.

“Discover,” “make up” — hey, it’s all the same to Waide. In his world, humans never discovered electricity; they just made it up. Fire wasn’t discovered; it was handed to early man by Prometheus, or perhaps just created when God separated the heavens from the earth. Someone buy this man a Merriam-Webster’s, because he is apparently confusing “theory” with “wild stab in the dark.” The scary thing is, I have a feeling that Waide would have no problem asserting the absolute veracity of Jesus turning water to wine or bringing Lazarus back from the dead.

Where is Jon Huntsman when you need him? In response to Rick Perry’s own “just a theory” line, the Republican also-ran famously tweeted last August, “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

And, yes. They called him crazy.

Making the Past Present

“Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land” (NYT, 7/26/11)

“Spirits of the South Pole” (NYT Magazine, 7/21/11)

“A Whiff of History” (Boston Globe, 7/17/11)

Three recent articles delve into new ways of exploring history. None of them are exactly Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine, but once the stacks of books have been written about battle tactics and 18th-century politics, I suppose researchers start looking everywhere for new material. Those dissertations won’t write themselves, you know.

As part of its occasional “Humanities 2.0” series, the Times explains how digital mapping software — think Google Earth and GPS devices — helps historians recreate the minutiae of the past. Want to know exactly what General Lee could see as he surveyed the battlefield at Gettsyburg? It’s cliche, but yes, there’s an app for that. The new field is called “spatial humanities,” and it leverages technology to provide a new look at historical events in much the same way that some scientists are applying pattern recognition software and computerized authorship verification to quantify literary criticism. Some of the supposedly revolutionary uses of technology seem like things that could have been done by less flashy methods fifty years ago; indeed, one wonders if there is anything unique about the research beyond its pretty graphs, and if the embrace of technology is anything other than jumping on the iEverything bandwagon. By mapping the spread of witchcraft charges across Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials, historian Benjamin Ray noticed that ““It looked like a kind of epidemic, almost a disease.” The article goes on to say that, “after adding church affiliation to the map, he saw there was also a correlation between church membership and the accusers, which reflected a rift in the village over support for the minister.” There is nothing new about such a conclusion, and Ray hardly had to employ snappy mapping software to reach it. Disagreements over the ministry of Reverend Parris have long been implicated in the outbreak of witch hysteria in Salem Village.

Of even less practical import is the research detailed in a Boston Globe article entitled “A Whiff of History.” Reporter Courtney Humphries marvels that, “despite [scent’s] primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history.” We look at museum dioramas of wagon trains and listen to scratchy recordings of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, “but our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.” True, but our ignorance of the way history smelled hardly constitutes a gaping hole in our knowledge of the past. Science has allowed perfumers to capture previously-ephemeral scents, but do we need to recreate the precise aroma of Sinclair Lewis’ hog factory to know that lots of pigs produce a big stink? Historians are replicating old perfumes based on written descriptions, much as brewers are attempting to recreate the taste of the whiskey left at the pole by Sir Ernest Shackleton. At least the whiskey enthusiasts, described in a recent article in the NYT Sunday Magazine, are up front about their desire to turn a profit. Science may be a nice side effect, but it’s hardly the motivation behind the fact that, “for $160 or so, collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one.” By contrast, the scientists interviewed for the Boston Globe article speak of the historical significance of recreating an ancient Egyptian perfume or the stench of a Viking village. It’s a relief when one researcher, who is working on the Viking project, points out that a smell, even one engineered to match an ancient aroma, is nothing without context. “The smell of a Viking latrine may disgust us,” Humphries writes, “but it doesn’t tell us how the Vikings experienced it.” Furthermore, she continues, smells carry different connotations in different groups of people:

[F]or instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers. If we don’t understand these meanings, we’re just smelling the past as we would now – not as people did at the time.

It’s a caveat worth remembering. Bringing technology into the humanities department can produce interesting results, but “interesting” is not the same as “meaningful.” The best history teacher I ever had — the one who introduced me to Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine — was as computer-savvy as the average eighty-year-old. In class, we watched film strips, the kind that featured droning narration over a series of still pictures that advanced with a click-whirr sound of a projector straight out of the 1960s. There weren’t even dry-erase boards in the room; this was a man who preferred old-style chalk. And yet — without the aid of digital maps or Smell-o-Vision technology, that teacher could bring history to life because he understood that the past is not a foreign country: it is a slightly off-kilter version of today, a world that is nothing if not a dirty, confusing and ultimately fascinating story.