Menton's Deconstruction of Inherit the Wind

http://www.gennet.org/facts/scopes.html ^ | David Menton

[rickdylan]

I saw something pretty shocking last night, and I don't really shock easily any more. This was David Menton's "Inherently Wind" which a number of people were watching over at the DC area McLean Bible Church last night.

I must have seen a few bits and pieces of Inherit the Wind on televion here and there but always found it boring and changed the channels. I had no real idea that this thing was a complete and total propaganda piece, or that large numbers of school kids were seeing this thing in social studies and English classes.

This play and two or three television productions and movies based on it go way beyond any question of evolution versus creation or Intelligent Design. They in fact portray Christians not much differently than nazi German propaganda pieces such as Der Ewige Jude portrayed Jews.

Jews at least comprehend that being portrayed in such a manner in mass media can have horrific consequences. There would in fact be major kinds of consequences for anybody attempting to portray Jews or blacks, much less muslims, in such a manner today but, up to now at least, Christians have always just sat there and taken it.

Menton clearly would like to change that and he's right. This is one of those cases in which the only safe assumption is the paranoid one. When somebody (Hollywood in this case) portrays a group of people in this manner in mass media, they clearly have bigger and worse things in mind for them.

Aside from that sort of question, Menton demonstrates that the Hollywood version of the Scopes trial and what actually transpired are two totally separate and dissimilar stories, the only points of similarity at all being a rough similarity of the names of several of the major participants.

Menton's basic statement can be viewed online in webpage form, but you won't really get the flavor of what he's talking about without watching the DVD which shows the relevant scenes from Inherit the Wind in context.

[LiteKeeper]

The producers clearly stated from the beginning that their main goal was to attack evangelical Christianity. Any resemblance between the story line in "Inherit the Wind" and the actual trial was coincidence. This has been an area of interest for me for quite a long time.

Thanks for the posting!

BTW - this movie has been made, if I remember correctly, five times! Besides innumerable renditions on high school and college campuses.

[rickdylan]

If somebody didn’t know better they might think being a majority in the country would protect Christians from any consequences of such a portrayal. That didn’t help the people at Waco much....

[jeddavis]

Michael Moore ever said anything about producing a version of Inherit the Wind?

[Turret Gunner A20]

Michael Moore couldn’t make an historically accurat movie about a trip to the toilet.