In the Hall of Knowledge

There is a common misconception afoot in America that we, Homo sapiens, are descended from the apes.  We are not.  It is actually much worse than that.  We are, in fact, descended from the rats.  Any tenth grade biology student, and now me, could tell you that, while we share a common ancestor with the apes, we are not directly descended from the simian family.  We are, however, directly descended from the rat ancestor known as Megazostrodon, which was the first prehistoric mammal.  Our great civilization basically started out as a group of dinosaur egg stealing, bark chewing, nocturnal rodents.  I am sorry if this offends you.  But science is science, unless of course you are running for president of the United States on the Republican ticket.  In that case science is innuendo.  An inconvenience that gets in the way of our egos.

But the story gets worse.  It is even more shocking than you might imagine.  I learned of our primordial ancestor in the Hall of Mammals at the Smithsonian Institute Museum of Natural History.  In Washington DC.  And it didn’t cost me a dime!  (At the time of admission anyway).  That’s right.  Public money, aka your  tax dollars, paid for this bit of conjectural information.  It is not quite clear to me where the Smithsonian gets its endowment, but I smell a rat, pardon the pun.  For five hours I wandered around the halls of this great repository of American natural history and I never paid an admission price, nor was I solicited to make a voluntary contribution.  There was the Hall of Ocean Life.  The Hall of Precambrian Fossils and the Hall of Postcambrian Fossils.  The Hall of Mammals and the Hall of Reptiles.  And of course the Hall of Man, with its focus on hominid (us) evolution.  But no where, no where, was there a Hall of Intelligent Design!  At any moment in my wanderings I expected to enter an awesome hall where, instead of a giant blue whale hanging from the ceiling, there would be a giant bearded man pointing down to Earth. And before his outstretched index finger would stand a naked hominid with no resemblance what so ever to Alley Oop our prototypical cave man.  Walk a few steps further and there, behind the glass, would stand the apple tree with the snake himself in a jar of formaldehyde, forked tongue extended, mocking us for the stupid choices humans make.  

This being the Natural  History Museum, the centerpiece of the Hall of Intelligent Design would have to be a splinter of wood from Noah’s Ark.  Displayed prominently in a 360 degree glass case with little interactive buttons to press.  Push one and learn how the great diversity of life on Earth was preserved on a boat during the Great Flood.  Push another and see how the boat might possibly have been built with slave labor providing the necessary man power.  And finally, as a tie in to the Hall of Marine Mammals, you would actually walk thru the belly of a ginormous  latex whale, like Jonah, on your way to the museum gift shop.  It would only be fair.

To compound this imbalance in portraying our American culture, the American History Museum, across the way, had entire galleries devoted to the frivolities of television and Hollywood.  There, ensconced in his very own case, was the original Kermit the Frog.  He wasn’t green by the way.  More of a shit brindle brown.   And from the moment one entered the museum you were bombarded by signs crowing about the newly acquired ruby slippers that magically teleported Dorothy back to Kansas in the Wizard of Oz. There was even a purple Dumbo car from the Dumbo Whirl-a gig ride in Disneyland.  Thank Providence that our founding fathers knew the difference between fun and faith.