ONE OF THE advantages of living in our nation’s capital is visiting world class museums at no charge. It’s your tax dollars at work, particularly for residents, and we don’t have to wash cars and sell wrapping paper for the school band to get here. Nor do we walk in groups wearing matching shirts with beleaguered adults anxiously counting heads and hoping to get back on the bus with the same number that got off, give or take.
Bless their hearts, these impressionable young people, choosing to spend their vacations in the fetid swamp of Washington, D.C., despite their parents’ fearful warnings. They move in self-conscious clusters, drinking our water despite the intestinal risks endemic to foreign lands and unaware of the local swamp creatures like myself slithering around them. We would be invisible but for our anachronistic clothing that does not say “[name of school] ROCKS!”
The most popular of all museums these days is the Museum of Natural History, with its redesigned dinosaur exhibit tracing life on Earth back to its very beginning. I was awed during my recent visit, and not just by my newfound agility to dodge double strollers blocking the bathrooms. The interactive displays are stunning, with state-of-the-art technology that brings ancient epochs to life. So absorbing were the graphics that it took me several minutes staring at one fascinating display before I realized it was a thermostat.
The museum is brimming with archaeological concepts that are new to me, probably because they weren’t on television when I was a kid. (If it wasn’t on Gilligan’s Island, how could I know about it?) For example, did you know there were multiple extinction events in the Earth’s history? I thought the meteor that crashed off the coastline of Mexico was the only one, given that it killed off the dinosaurs and left only small mammals, hardier flora, and one flavor of Doritos to evolve in the darkness. But five other catastrophic events altered the life of this planet. (Six, if you count the intellectual extinction Fox News has inflicted upon of millions of Americans.)
SURPRISINGLY, TWO IMPORTANT evolutionary theories were not included in the exhibit. One is that humans lived alongside dinosaurs, a notion insisted on by biblical literalists who believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old. The dinosaur bones assembled in realistic scenarios were impressive, but would have been more theologically sound had they included human skeletons nearby. The humans could have been posed using dinosaurs as gentle beasts of burden or even as domesticated pets for their children. The humans would be eaten, of course, but who said Bible science would be pretty? (Another lost opportunity: A pair of triceratops watching a departing Noah’s Ark. So sad.)
The second theory the Smithsonian somehow ignored—my personal favorite, although Darwin died before he could confirm it—is that an ancient race of aliens planted its DNA in the fertile protoplasm of a young Earth. Rudy Giuliani emerged as an early result of that experiment, rising from the muck of antediluvian Africa. But when the prototype exhibited few recognizable human characteristics, it was ordered deactivated and used for spare parts.
Somehow it survived, eventually mutating into various subspecies of Kardashians and “Dancing with the Stars” contestants, which continue to confound archaeologists to this day.
So sad.
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