Trials Of The Monkey: An Accidental Memoir (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
[re-post from my old blog]Through a strange serendipity (is there any other kind?), I started reading Trials of the Monkey at about the same time as I was watching the Nova show Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. In Judgment Day, the author of Trials, is interviewed. An avowed atheist and great-great-grandson of Darwin himself, Matthew Chapman is now a successful screenwriter, living in New York City.He was feeling closed in by the rat race that is Hollywood and began casting about for something else to do. As the annual recreation of the famous Scopes Trial was coming up, he decided to write a book about current views in that area of Tennessee. So he embarked on a bus journey there, and began writing his book.Which quickly evolved (nyuk nyuk) into an autobiographical sketch, leading to the subtitle of the book - An Accidental Memoir. This surprised him as much as his editor, but it leads to a very interesting description of his growing up in England as the son of a very colorful parents, including his mother, an alcoholic great granddaughter of Darwin. Through some very colorful vignettes, Chapman describes his childhood, complete with his unnatural fixation on girls from an early age, which leads to his expulsion from several schools. His is a brutally honest book, often painting himself with almost painful glee as a very warped child!Interspersed with these autobiographical chapters are the descriptions of his first trip to Dayton, Tennessee, a few months before the trial recreation. As someone who has lived most of his life in the nearly secular (at least, relatively speaking) Northeast US, I found the description of Dayton, with its 45 churches for a population of about 6,000 and its never ending series of religious billboards, to be particularly scary. There are some pretty funny (yet eerie) chapters of him poking about into tent revivals, interviewing the head creation "scientist" at the local Bryan College and other outrageous examples of religion gone wild that I just never have to deal with here.Chapman also gives an excellent overview of the Scopes Trial itself, complete with thumbnail biographies of the three main contestants - Scopes, Bryan and Darrow. He also gleefully quotes HL Mencken all over the place:Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even the town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough... Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.There is one chapter ("Spelunking with the Christians") that has to be one of the funniest chapters I have read in a very long time. I haven't laughed so hard reading a book since my first reading of A Confederacy of Dunces. I had tears running down my cheeks, as his description of the ride over to the cave in a van full of devout Christian teenagers, lead by his "favorite Creationist" was so full of acid descriptions. And the actual cave trip...I expected a big yawning mouth with a souvenir shop to one side. I thought we'd plod dutifully within, along well-defined paths until it was almost dark - and then turn around an exit, going "Boy, was that something or what?" [ed. note- that's been my cave experiences] But clearly this is to be an experience of an altogether different order and magnitude. It's a slit! The entrance to the cave is a ragged horizontal slit, like a mouth clumsily hacked into a pumpkin at Halloween. Even more alarming, it's at ground level. Doughty Christians insert themselves into it with difficulty, slither down in steep descent - and disappear. This is not for tourists. This nasty, malevolent gash which at its highest is no more than three feet, can only be an invitation to something worse. There's no souvenir shop and not a single reassuring sign saying 'Mind Your Head' or 'Don't Touch The Stalactites'. It's a real cave, one of those narrow, lethal warrens into which children fall and emerge alive only when the TV movie lies about it a year later. It's a perfect cave for adrenaline deficient professional spelunkers with miners' helmets, ropes and pitons. It's not a cave for a gang of infantile Christians and a middle-aged atheist with a panic attack.And it just gets funnier. There's a bit of a twist at the end, but it wraps up nicely and he seems to have been better off having written the book. Combined with Judgement Day (and some of the grotesque polls that have come about, like how many people still prefer creationism to evolution), it was a real eyeopener and made me quite sad for the state of education here. One thing that really struck home was the remarkable similarities between the Scopes Trial and the Dover Trial. Here it is, over 80 years later, and the evolution side still has to bring on scientists to point out just how solid and beautiful a theory evolution truly is. Nearly the exact same testimony, showing the power of evolution and how, over the intervening years, it has become even more of a bedrock theory, was brought out for the Dover Trial. And still, perhaps due in part to the guilty finding at the Scope Trial, education is so lacking in some areas they just have never been exposed to the grace of evolution. Sad and disheartening.But read this book. Trials of the Monkey is incredibly funny and enlightening. Chapman's story is a little less so, as he seems like a odd duck (a fact of which he seems to find truly ironic, given his heredity!). But solid writing and wonderful insights have me penciled in for his next book, which is on the Dover trials.
What do You think about Trials Of The Monkey: An Accidental Memoir (2002)?
Matthew Chapman is the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He's also a screenwriter and director of some note — at least to his lights. He's also an avowed atheist who decided to investigate the site of the famous "monkey trial," the infamous battle between religion and science in Dayton, Tennessee immortalized in the wonderful film Inherit the Wind. The book becomes a combination historical narrative/ memoir/personal voyage. He explains his interest in the Scopes trial this way: After a bus driver explains he belongs to the Pentecostal Church, where people speak in tongues and "fall over backwards" — 'It's amazin,' I ain't never seen one git hurt' — using that as incontrovertible evidence of the existence of God, Chapman is compelled to observe that "It requires so little proof on the one hand and so much on the other. People will inform you that Jesus was born of an angel-impregnated virgin and walked on water 'because it's in the Bible,' but think nothing of telling you with a sniff of contempt that evolution is 'just a theory, ain't no proof.' The inherent unfairness of this double standard is one of the things that attracts me to the Scopes Trial." There are books about the Scopes trial that provide much more detail of how George Rappleyea, a Dayton resident, wanted to take advantage of the controversy surrounding passage of the Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of evolution, by hosting a trial in Dayton, a town that had suffered a severe economic downturn after a local mine closed. Inherit the Wind provides a good feel for the climate (pun intended) of the trial and community, but simplifies tremendously. The defense and prosecution each had four to five lawyers and one of the famous speeches for the defense was actually given by Dudley Malone rather than by Charles Darrow, one of my heroes — but those are minor quibbles. Chapman, an open-minded, good-humored fellow, recounts his delinquent childhood and his musings about life in general as he visits with the Bryan College professor who teaches "proof" of creation and with a local minister, attending his church. He confronts his preconceptions of the South, his "neurotic city-dweller" northernness — fearing the banjo-toting violent, redneck with the gun rack in the truck. What he finds most disturbing, however is the pervasive religiosity. "I feel adrift. It makes me uneasy. What I find disturbing is not so much the belief in God, but the habit of credulity which it engenders. If they can believe in God --who never shows his face — simply because it makes them feel good, what else might they be persuaded to believe in? What's the difference between religious evangelism and political propaganda? Might one prepare you for the other? Was it not credulity as much as 'evil' which made the attempted extermination of the Jews possible?Chapman goes on a field trip with some of the Bryan College geology students to visit a cave that their professor explains has evidence of the creationist theory of creation. On the way back in the van, he engages in a discussion with the students about hell, and they reveal a certainty that those who do not accept Jesus as their personal savior will be consigned to an everlasting hell. "I'm not saying these kids are Nazis — I like them, in fact — but . . . believing in a literal hell, a burning lake, an inferno of unimaginable suffering, they accept with equanimity that seven-eighths of the world, including me, will end up in it. Forever. . . "Either they don't really believe this or in fact there is something Nazi-like about them: their Final Solution is one of extraordinary scope and brutality; a holocaust of souls which makes the Führer's merely physical extermination of the Jews seem positively amateur. 'Our Father' is far more ambitious: he's going for the eternal destruction of not just Jews, but Hindus, Homos, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and presumably Scientologists and others on the lunatic fringe. Seven-eighths of the people He creates, He then destroys. The only place you get worse odds is the abattoir. The girl I'm looking at as I'm thinking this is an accounting major. How on earth can she become an accountant? Then what? A mother? Little League? A nice home? One of those vans with a sliding door down the side? Knowing what she knows, how can she even contemplate this? How could you enjoy the comforts of a suburban life knowing that your God is going to flambé just about everyone you meet? But there she sits, as optimistic and contented as any teenager I ever met."
—Eric_W
