The Catcher in the Rye

 In response to J.D. Salinger's recent passing, I thought I would recount my introduction to The Catcher in the Rye.

When I was in high school, probably a sophomore, Catcher in the Rye was required reading.  I hated it.  HATED it.  In fact, I simply didn't read it. I have no idea how I passed the test--probably got the Cliff Notes from the library the night before.  Years later, knowing I was a voracious reader, grandma gave me a box of old books she had. I stood in my bedroom with the box on one of my tall speakers pulling the books out, one by one.  For the most part they were Harlequin Romances and I had no interest in them, so I tossed them into the garbage can right next to me.  I saved maybe 2 or 3 of the books.  The very last book I pulled out was Catcher.  I remember thinking, "Ugh!  This thing?" But it was a 1961 edition when they still had notes and reviews printed on the back cover (not like the pure red or white copies they sell now, when books stand the test of time).  I read the first few pages of praising reviews and was just shocked by such amazing and stunning reviews from every respected publication!  So, still standing there, I opened the first page and started to read.  After a while, I found that I literally could not read anymore because my eyes couldn't see the pages.  I looked up from the book to find that it was actually dark outside.  I had been standing there reading, mesmerized for probably 2 hours.  I turned on the light, sat on the bed, and finished the book right then and there.  I was moved, possibly to the point of tears by that book.

Knowing how much my sister enjoyed reading, I immediately gave the book to her to read. It sat on her nightstand for days and I kept asking if she got to it yet, but she said you hadn't.  Finally, probably bugged by my constant pestering, she finally said, "You know what?  I've tried reading that book 10 times and I just can't get past the first 2 pages."  I was shocked.  When I asked why, she said, "because of the swearing."  At that second, I had a epiphany.  A gong went off in my head so loud I could almost hear it.  That was probably the very reason I couldn't read it in high school. I didn't even realize it.  I simply wasn't mature enough--too shocked or giddy every time I saw a swear word and I'd lose my concentration. 

I don't know when she finally picked it up and got through it, but I'm glad she did. It really is one of the best books I've ever read.  I must have read it at least 5 times.  Yes, I have the original 1961 edition.  It's so old and in such ragged condition, I keep it in my bookcase with a rubberband around it.  I pulled it out last night and looked at it again.  I have a newer, white covered copy that I read, but I'll never be able to toss that original edition I read that one afternoon.

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Now that Salinger is dead, my fear is that they're going to make a movie version of the book. Everyone for the past 40 years from Marlon Brando, Nicholson, DiCaprio, Toby Macguire, John Cusack, etc. had been trying to get a movie version of that book but after one of Salanger's other books was made into a movie and completely butchered and plot changed, he refused to have any other movies made.  If they make a movie of it, people will only watch the movie and never read the book.  Something will be lost in the translation.  So few people read these days anyway.  It scares me. (I could go on and on about this subject, but won't now.)  I just fear that a movie will just assure that Catcher in the Rye becomes a moldy, dusty classic that people will just watch instead of read.  Let's hope not.

A Visit to the Creation Museum

Last week, my friend and I took a road trip to Cincinnati and then to Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. The Creation Museum is not far from Cincinnati and we decided to take the short detour so we could see it. I decided it was probably worthwhile to recount what exactly the museum is like. So, here goes:

The Creation Museum is tucked away in Kentucky farmland reached by a circuitous road not far off the highway. The building itself is a fairly non-descript dark grey tinted glass and stone structure. It’s set back from the road some and I was surprised to see quite a few cars in the parking lot so early in the morning. Standing in front of the building is a tall bronze sculpture of a dinosaur skeleton looking out over the parking lot and the rolling farmland beyond. I reached to touch it and realized it was not bronze at all, but some type of plastic-like material. I knocked on it and it was hollow. I shrugged and dismissed it as an unfortunate result of cost cutting and we headed for the front door. All the doors of the building have a sign asking visitors to be courteous and respectful to others and to their ideas and beliefs. Bashing, name calling, ridiculing, etc. would not be tolerated by anyone. Fair enough, we thought. Below that, another sign read “No firearms allowed.” Now maybe a sign like that is the norm for Kentucky, but you certainly don’t see signs like that where I come from, and we were surprised by it. Why would someone even want to bring firearms in this particular building in the first place? In any case, comforted by the fact we wouldn’t be shot inside, we proceeded on in. We found ourselves in a large lobby/corridor where people queue up to get their tickets. The lobby is cool, clean, high ceilinged, and spacious with stone floors and a huge, rough cut curved stone wall. The wall is quite a massive and impressive feature when you first see it. Sunlight streams in on it from the huge glass windows on the other side of the room. A very pleasant space. Even though we got there quite early, just after 10:00, already there were a quite a few people lined up for tickets ahead of us. As we waited in line, I looked around at some of the other visitors and realized that I didn’t see one black person, nor Asian, Indian, or any other nationality other than Caucasians. I would say most of the visitors were well over the age of 50 and retired. The rest appeared to be Amish families or farmers, all seemingly living a frugal and simple lifestyle. This museum visit was certainly a special event for them and would certainly be quite pricey for them as well; we found the ticket prices expensive relative to other museums. In addition to the regular admission, we selected the optional “planetarium sky show” for yet an additional fee.

The first thing we did was to queue up for the sky show. Now, I’ve been to a lot of planetariums and I have to say that the presentation really explained well the size of our planet and sun with respect to our galaxy and the rest of the universe (if that’s even possible). It certainly was effective, conveyed in simple school-kid type terms. It compared the size of our relatively small sun with other stars in our galaxy and the vast distances between them. It also said all the stars are the same age. Some are hotter, some cooler, some larger, some smaller, but they were all created at the same time. This all was a bit confusing and I thought went contrary to mainstream science’s astronomical findings about the life cycle of a star. It also seemed strange that if the stars are millions of light years away, how could we see them if the light from them takes longer to reach Earth than the age of the universe itself? However, we knew to expect this kind of thinking and we took it for what it was: the viewpoint of the creator of the museum. We sat back and enjoyed the rest of the show.

After the show was over, we entered the main lobby of the museum. In it is a large diorama with some audio-animatronic (that is, robotic) children playing with a dinosaur or two. It certainly was a striking image. It gave the impression of simple naïve innocence, and it gave us a little laugh. There’s another theater that opens onto the lobby with a multi-media show we could have seen, but we chose to wait to the end of our visit to see it and forged ahead into the exhibit area. More about that show later.

The actual exhibit area of the museum is set up linearly. That is, you see the exhibits in a set predetermined order, telling a very specific story in a deliberate way, unlike the layout of some other museums where you pick and choose the exhibit halls you want to stroll through and see. A large display near the entrance to the exhibits explained that the entire museum is premised on the concept of “Seven C’s”: creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, cross and consummation. As you proceed though the museum, you see a placard indicating the next “C” as you enter each exhibit area. As we entered the introductory room, we were met with a diorama of an excavation site. All around are placards asking questions. How old is the Earth? How did humans come into being? Did dinosaurs live with men? What is evolution? We would find that as we worked through the museum, the answers to those questions would reveal themselves through very specific interpretations of certain passages of the Bible.

We moved on to the first room with a large plaque identifying the area as “Creation.” There’s no mention of the Big Bang theory or anything majestic about the first moment of the creation of the universe. Just that on the first ‘day,’ the universe was created. One serious difficulty I had was in this “creation” area of the museum. There isn’t much concern on how one reads the Bible or in what language it was originally written. There’s no nod to the notion that long ago, some people translated some words in the original Hebrew writing of Genesis that today, we find in fact, are not quite accurate. For example, the Hebrew word ‘yom,’ as it appears in Genesis, actually translates to ‘time’ and not ‘day.’ A lot of credibility of the content of the museum rides on that one word. It is in that pesky Greek-to-Latin-to-English (mis)reinterpretation, that the word ‘day’ is eventually introduced and admittedly, has caused a lot of confusion over the centuries. Also, there is no mention (that I saw of) of other significant lines from the Bible such as “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday” and “…that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” I would have thought those lines from the Bible to be important to display. But not so in this museum, for some reason. In fact, it appears as if most everything is presented in the simplest, most distilled form as one explains something to a child, hand-picking certain passages and avoiding completely others or any concepts that might bring the confusion of a secular reality to the story presented.

But really, all of this is all beside the point. The real crux of the Creation Museum and the whole theory of Creationism itself, boils down to mean that bad things couldn’t have happened on Earth before the “Fall” of Adam and Eve. Now, what are bad things? According to the museum, bad things are tangibles such as death and weeds and carnivores. Bad things are also venom and sickness and toxins. The Creationist believes, according to the museum, that those bad things simply could not have existed before Adam and Eve were punished, and today, we still suffer their punishment by living with and enduring those very same bad things. This is the heart of the Creationism theory. Everything else is built up and presented in such a way to support it.

We moved on to what I thought was the coolest part of the museum. A step into a time tunnel and we were in Eden! Really cleverly done, we strolled though a large diorama of the tropical Garden (on a set path, of course) and were watching a figure of Adam name all the animals. A penguin looks on as Adam names a lamb and a deer. A dinosaur looks on from across the path. As we rounded the corner on our way through “Eden,” the next scene showed the creation of Eve and finally, Eve being tempted by the serpent, preceding Original Sin and the “Fall.” In the next room, because of the corruption of Adam, we see Adam and Eve already cast out of Eden. They now feel compelled to wear clothes. We see their lives are very different as they learn to farm and work for their food. There is pain and hunger and discomfort. There are weeds. And then, as we moved on to the next scene, we see Cain slaying Abel. And we see why the world, as we know it today, is the way it is. Dinosaurs and humans became carnivores. Some chemicals changed and became poisons and toxins and venom. Death and diseases were now a part of Man’s existence. And Man’s corruption eventually leads to the catastrophe of the Flood.

My knowledge of Noah’s flood had first come from childhood stories. But today, after satellite images of Mt. Ararat purport to show evidence of the Ark, floods of TV shows (no pun intended) have aired that support and dispute, explain and theorize about the Flood story, all the way back to its Mesopotamian origins, 2600 years before the very first writing of Genesis. The museum goes into a lot of detail about the Flood based on the Bible stories we heard as kids. I was excited to learn more! First, we walked through mock-ups and figures depicting the construction of the ark. We saw a miniature model of the ark as animals file up a huge ramp and go inside—including the dinosaurs! Then we found out that the water from the Flood, which covered the entire Earth, didn’t come just from ‘40 days and 40 nights’ of rain. It came from volcanoes and underground fissures as well. I hadn’t heard that theory before at all—not from the Bible or TV! Tidal waves and rough seas destroyed ‘floating forests’ that existed in the seas before the Flood. All those floating forests were destroyed and sank to the bottom of the flood waters. Today, they account for the layering effect of huge amounts of coal in certain areas of the world which couldn’t otherwise be even remotely possible with the theory of a Young Earth. This was my first introduction to the theory of floating forests and I found it fascinating. Finally, the flood waters receded leaving a clean Earth and a fresh start for Noah’s family. So what happened to all that water? Well, that wasn’t explained in a lot of detail. Basically, because of all the volcanic activity after the flood, all the flood water evaporated and it all came down as snow, but only at the polar ice caps. I have to say, this was a little confusing for me and a clearer explanation would have been welcomed.

With this new beginning, we were introduced to the concept of the “evolution tree” as seen through the eyes of the Creationist, and as a counter to it, the introduction of the concept of the “creation orchard.” The more familiar “evolution tree” theory states that all creatures came from the same spark of life. One species can evolve into another such as dinosaurs evolving into birds, etc. The “creation orchard” theory says that God created different kinds of animals during Creation Week and after the flood, they evolved further into different diversified types of the same species, such as different kinds of dogs or different kinds of birds. It does not support the idea that dogs and birds could be a part of the same evolutionary ‘tree.’ Here is an example of how the Creation Orchard theory works: Let’s just take dogs for this example. God created dogs and in the 1500 years between Creation Week and Noah's flood, dogs evolved and diversified into a number of different kinds (or breeds.) However, Noah couldn’t take every single kind of dog into the ark, so he took only one kind. Let’s say, for the sake of this example, Noah took two toy poodles onto the ark—one male and one female. After the flood, the two poodles got off the ark and set off on their way into the sunset, and in the next 4500 years, they evolved into every single kind of dog we see today—from toy poodles to pit bulls and everything in between. We thought that was a lot of evolution for 4500 years—300 generations of dogs evolving into about 160 different kinds! That’s a completely new breed of dog every 2 generations or so!

Continuing on our museum tour, we saw Noah’s family and the animals leave the ark, and we moved into the next area of the museum entitled “Confusion.” In this area, we are shown that Noah’s sons each move to different areas of the world. One moves to Africa, one to Europe and one to the Middle East, thus creating different basic human types or nations. Next, we see the city of Babel (which incidentally means Gate of God). The Babylonians were the first great civilization on Earth and they wanted to create a tower that went straight up to heaven. But God wasn’t too thrilled with that idea, so He smote them down. But not in the usual way of lightning or plague or earthquake as was His custom. God confused the language of the workers! [What’s interestingly symbolic here is that, in this last display of heavenly power, God destroyed ‘the Word!’] The confusion of separate languages was cast upon Man, thereby further segregating people from each other and ultimately causing the racism, prejudice, and hatred towards those we don’t (or refuse to) understand which plagues us today.

And that really ends the museum’s story. A 10 minute film is shown in a small theater wrapping things up with the last 3 of the “C’s”: Christ, cross and consummation. We exited the theater right into an Egyptian themed café selling smoothies, brownies and other snacks. Perfect timing. Off the café is one last entertaining exhibit. It is called The Dinosaurs’ Den. Some great life-like models of dinosaurs are displayed along with some cool dinosaur-roaring sound effects. We learn the answers to a lot of questions about dinosaurs here. We learn that dinosaurs were created about 6,000 years ago (during Creation Week), at the same time as Man and all of the animals. We learn that dinosaurs and people did live together at the same time! And we learn that all dinosaurs were vegetarians (even our friend ‘T-Rex’)—until the “Fall” of Adam and Eve.

Back in the café, we were finally lead through a door, exiting the museum exhibit areas and leading directly into the gift shop. Where else? Not even the Creation Museum can resist the temptation of tourists with money in their pockets!

When we got back to the Main Lobby, we went into the theater to see the ‘Men in White’ presentation. I have to say, this was a pretty disturbing movie presentation. Sure, sure, the rocking seats and the spray of water in your face are unexpected and fun. But the content of the show itself was appalling. In it, two teenage “angels” dressed in white overalls with gym shoes float around flippantly and irreverently pooh-poohing the theory of evolution, and science in general, for that matter. They use a high school science classroom scene to do their dirty work as they pepper a wimpy, effeminate, stupid, and clumsy scientist/teacher with questions about how much salt is in the sea, and why do scientists make radioisotope dating mistakes, etc. They mock secular scientists portraying them all as oafish, self-righteous homosexuals and although I am not a scientist, I personally was offended by the crudeness and underlying hostility of the presentation. The irony of it all is that sign is on the front door of the museum asking people to be courteous and respectful to others and their ideas and that bashing, name calling, ridiculing, etc. would not be tolerated by anyone. I found it all hypocritical, leaving me questioning the credibility of the museum.

As we left the theater, we found ourselves back where we started at the large, massive, curved stone wall. As an architect, I really was impressed by the look of that wall and when I put my hand on it to feel the stone, to my utter surprise, it was actually ‘Dryvit’! (Dryvit, if you don’t know, is a brand name for Styrofoam that can be carved into any one of a thousand different shapes—columns, statues, bricks, and even natural stone in this case. The foam is covered with a thin layer of plaster and then painted to look like stone or metal or marble or a tree trunk or any other material you can imagine. You’ve seen Dryvit a thousand times, though you may not have even realized it.) For me, it almost seemed that this fake stone wall, in an ironic way, sort of represented the museum itself. The exhibits presented themselves to be stone, rock solid, irrefutable. Just like the stone wall. But when you looked at the wall, you realized that it’s just a set, a fake, appearing to be solid and immovable, but in fact is only Styrofoam and plaster—something you could punch a hole in.

We walked out of the museum, into the hot afternoon sun, past that crazy plastic dinosaur sentinel that looked like it was made from bronze. A meandering path though some lush and really beautiful gardens outside the museum beckoned to us. We strolled through the gardens that lead over some bridges and eventually to a petting zoo. As we walked though the gardens, I pondered the theory of Creationism and of Evolution and that there may be little chance to convince one side to ever believe the other—no matter how it’s packaged and presented. And really, is it even necessary to? Are we all so arrogant and proud to say that one idea, and one idea only, is the right one and that we actually presume to know everything about God’s plan completely and without question? And then display it definitively in a museum, saying 'this is IT folks'? Such arrogance! After all, what do we 'really' know?

Last night, I was watching TV and saw one of those cute Macintosh computer commercials come on. Everybody loves them. But if you like your PC, you're always going to like PC’s and no flashy Mac commercial is going to get you to give yours up. And if you’re a Mac fan, well, you’re never really going to want to switch to a PC unless someone twists your arm, bullying and forcing you into it. It occurred to me that trying to get someone to switch from one to the other is like, well, trying to convince a Creationist that Evolution is the way things really started. It ain’t gonna happen. Best to get on with life and live it the best we can with our feet firmly planted on the ground… no matter how old that ground really is.

Peace.