This was a scam on so many levels that the woman who orchestrated it and the Fox “News” hosts who amplified it seemed to lose track of which marginal groups they were trying to direct their hatred at:
Seven homeless men have come forward to say they were part of a group of men recruited at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to act as veterans that had been displaced from a Newburgh hotel in order for a non-profit organization to perpetrate a fraud on the public.
People who say this despise homeless servicemen as much as they despise refugees.
The men told Mid-Hudson News on Thursday night that they were part of a group of 15 men that were supposed to pretend they were veterans that had been kicked out of the Crossroads Hotel in the Town of Newburgh last Friday, in advance of the arrival of migrants brought up from New York City.
No actual veterans were displaced from the hotel, which was also not housing any actual migrants. The homeless men recruited for the scam weren’t told what they would be doing, but exposed the scheme once they found out that the supposed “Veteran’s Charity” wasn’t interested in finding, let alone assisting, any actual veterans, and also wasn’t even going to pay any of them the $100 bucks they were promised.
The survey found that 40% of white evangelicals think vaccinating children against preventable disease ought to be optional — a big outlier among most religious groups. Because “pro-life,” I guess.
The Pew researchers who conducted the survey aren’t sure if this increase in vaccine denialism is due to something particular or distinctive about white evangelicalism or if it’s mostly a product of the vast increase in vaccine denialism among white Republicans in general. Because, you see, the very best Pew researchers are also no longer able to determine whether there is anything that is particular or distinctive about white evangelicalism or if the whole religious tradition exists now only as a product of white Republicanism in general.
I wonder if we might be able to make a more persuasive case for public health among white evangelicals if we reframed this in terms of “church growth strategy.” Talk about how Vacation Bible School attendance might be higher if we make sure the unchurcbed kids in the neighborhood aren’t dying of polio or the measles.
White evangelical/Republican anti-vaxx nuttery picked up steam during the pandemic, but it goes back years before that. Anti-vaxxer nonsense became a partisan issue during the Obama administration because, well, vaccines are health care, and if the Black President was for health care, then the White Party and White Church was obliged to be against it. (See this post from 2015: “Republicans divided on germ theory of disease and the monstrous legacy of Dr. Jonas Salk.”)
• American evangelicals love to follow archaeological news from “the Holy Land,” celebrating every dig or artifact that confirms the historical existence of anything mentioned in the Bible. There’s a whole cottage industry supporting this obsession, from journals like Biblical Archaeology Review to “ministries” and “mission trips” that conduct archaeological tourism throughout Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.
This “flute” might have been more of a hunting call — a bone instrument designed to let ancient hunters mimic the sound of kestrels or sparrowhawks:
“The instruments are among the oldest in the world and, according to the researchers, represent the first to be found in the Levant, the region that fostered the first stages of the Neolithic Revolution approximately 12,000 years ago,” writes Discover’s Sam Walters. They’re creations of the Natufian civilization, which “bridged the difference between the foraging of the Paleolithic period and the agriculture of the Neolithic,” and which was “the first to adopt a sedentary lifestyle in the Levant.”
“Natufian” is not a word you’re allowed to use in Biblical Archaeology Review. It’s a word — like “Sterkfontein” — that will get a tenured professor fired from Wheaton. The words “Paleolithic” and “Neolithic” will also get you in trouble.
The problem here isn’t just with the 20th-century folklore-turned-dogma of young-Earth creationism, although that’s part of it. Creationists insist that the universe is only about 7,000 years old, so a 12,000-year-old flute created by people who lived at that time is a Thing Forbidden To Be Acknowledged.
But it’s not just the Stone Age that poses a problem for the illiterate “literalists” employing the pretend-we-don’t-have-a-hermeneutic hermeneutics of white America. Anything pre-Bronze Age is bound to create troubling Scary Thoughts and must therefore be dismissed or denied. This flute isn’t so much a Genesis 1-3 problem as it is a Genesis 4 problem. That’s where we read about the children of Lamech:
Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah. Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron.
This is sacred prehistory written in the fifth or sixth century BCE by people with no memory of and no access to any record of a time before people “forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron.” So they wrote their sacred prehistory to account for the invention of these things back at the very dawn of time, rather than fairly recent technological developments that preceded them by just a few centuries.
That’s not a big problem in the genre of sacred prehistory — in the kind of Just-So Stories that every literary cue tells you you’re reading in Genesis. But it would be a huge, shattering, insurmountable problem in the very recently invented and unsustainable genre of inerrant literal plenary-verbal history. So for people who insist — against all literary and archaeological evidence — that this genre is what they’re reading in Genesis, the story above about the 12,000-year-old flute recently discovered north of Galilee is terrifying rather than just really cool.
• Once again the tree service guys are working here on my block and so once again I’ve had this song stuck in my head all day (the lyrics to which supply the title of this post):
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