Friday, August 22, 2008

Looking at Dinosaurs

Everyone loves dinosaurs.  You show me a four year old, a middle-aged crank, and even an old fogey and the one thing they have in common is a love of dinosaurs.  Now, why?  As explanations go, the best I’ve heard is that dinosaurs are big, scary, and dead.  The dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago are particularly astonishing, and I’ve happily given in to my little boy’s endless fascination with these beasts.  We’ve gone many times this summer to look at Sue, the T-Rex that greets you at the door, and her many cousins.  One of the things I find most endearing about the Field Museum is its absolute, take-no-prisoners approach to the subject of evolution.  Every single item in this vast museum screams it.  Whether I’m looking at some tiny fragment of an immense skeleton or some stuffed bird, you can hear the entire museum saying to you, “this thing existed because of natural selection.  Here in the Field Museum, we deal in the world of science and the ancient paw or eye socket or absolutely bizarre snout you’re looking at right now developed over millions of years because of this thing called evolution, and it is the reason why they look that way and, further, why we now exist in the shape we do.  Now go look at the next thing.” I am reminded here of that great quotation by Henry David Thoreau, who once observed, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” Oh, one more thing about the Field Museum: they have a Corner Bakery with decent coffee.  The whole day is a perfect staycation.

I also saw some dinosaurs the other day, but of a very different sort.  A friend and I went to the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart—that’s “recreational vehicles” for you neophytes—neatly located at the intersection of Executive Parkway and Reagan Court.  Here I wandered around the historic and brand new RVs that millions of Americans have driven across this great land of ours.  There was a 1916 “telescoping apartment” built onto a Model T that gives new meaning to the phrase sleeping snugly, a super-mod one from the 1960s that had an Etch-a-Sketch on its couch, and a new state of the art RV that had not one but two flat screen tvs and very comfy chairs to watch them in.  Now, I freely confess that I am not one of those Americans who yearns to have one of these babies.  In fact, the idea of living in an oversized tin can while it is stinking hot or freezing cold outside strikes me as positively mad, but to each their own.

Despite their charms, given the price of gas these days, the whole RV thing isn’t doing too well.  Simply driving to the museum one passes dozens of businesses that are tied to the RV industry and I imagine these places are hurting right now.  And these industries employ thousands of people.  To give you but one small example, I have a friend who is a film maker and he was recently laid-off from a company that makes promotional videos for the RV industry.  They aren’t making too many movies these days on the glories of RV’ing, so his services just weren’t needed anymore.  And so here we are in 2008, and our local economy is hitched to an industry that is making something we simply don’t need.  We don’t need more slow-moving behemoths that get 5 miles to the gallon and clog our roads.  We don’t need movable houses that have microwave ovens and granite counter tops in them.  What we need is the exact opposite: we need to be at the forefront of creating green technologies.  We need to be working with Detroit in making an electric car.  We need more businesses like the bank on Edison Road that generates its own electricity by a windmill.  And so we have a choice: with each passing year we can pretend the world around us isn’t changing or we can adapt.  We can act like dim-witted dinosaurs or we can marshal our energies and evolve with the new world that is going to greet our children and grandchildren.  What’s it gonna be?

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on August 22, 2008
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