> >A couple of months ago, someone quoted a text saying that Protestant
> >fundamentalism wasn't always on the right, that it had been on the
left up
> >until the Scopes trial. This struck me as an interesting idea and I
> >decided to check it out. It turns not out in the end to be not
exactly
> >true. Fundamentalism wasn't really born until WWI, and it was
politically
> >conservative from the beginning. But I did stumble on a couple of
things
> >I found fascinating.
Speaking of the Scopes trial, below is an excerpt from HL Mencken's account of it that sounds refreshingly true of today's political climate. Just replace the phrases "the rustic judge" with "Bush," and "the chief prosecuting attorney" with "US Congress." The yokels are still running strong in this country and defining the tenor (if not the substance) of the political process.
PS. I love HL Mencken's anti-populism and anti-clericalism.
Wojtek
"The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti- evolution law and the simian imbecility under it. There hasn't been the slightest pretense to decorum. The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions. The chief prosecuting attorney, beginning like a competent lawyer and a man of self-respect, ended like a convert at a Billy Sunday revival. It fell to him, finally, to make a clear and astounding statement of theory of justice prevailing under fundamentalism. What he said, in brief, was that a man accused of infidelity had no rights whatever under Tennessee law...
Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton. But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law. There are other States that had better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates. " (HL Mencken)