The Book of Route 66

Link sent in by Nate.

Those wacky creationists will do anything to build their cultural status as an American pre-historic supremicists. They've begun to buy all of our Dinosaurs.

Yes. Those roadside attractions, those anatomically absurd concrete dinosaurs built in the 50s and 60s as tourist traps have begun to fill a new niche market. No longer will bucket-hatted and suspendered Dad take family photos in front of the Dinosaurs, later used in Pee Wee Herman films. The Dinos are being bought up, reconditioned, and rebuilt, complete with huge sprawling creationist museums disputing the accepted history of dinosaurs and telling it how it really was:

Dinny's new owners, pointing to the Book of Genesis, contend that most dinosaurs arrived on Earth the same day as Adam and Eve, some 6,000 years ago, and later marched two by two onto Noah's Ark. The gift shop at the attraction, called the Cabazon Dinosaurs, sells toy dinosaurs whose labels warn, "Don't swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution."

The Cabazon Dinosaurs join at least half a dozen other roadside attractions nationwide that use the giant reptiles' popularity in seeking to win converts to creationism. And more are on the way.

"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

"They're used to teach people that there's no God, and they're used to brainwash people," he said. "Evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs. That's their star."

None of the AntiCentenarians are prehistoric experts of any stripe, so we'll hold off from arguing that the belief that it takes less than, oh, say, 10 million years of heat and compression to fossilize a bone naturally, or that this alone raises questions as to how dinosaurs were found on the ark. We also won't raise the other problems with this theory, such as the well-accepted understanding that the ark was travelling in great thunderstorms, which would have inevitably shorted out Noah's electrified dino containment zones, and would have released the tyrannosaurs and the velociraptors, leaving very few survivors. Those things were smarter, you see, than what we've credited them with.

The idea that Dinos and Man walked together is not new, of course. It is, at least somewhat, ridiculous.

There is a cultural analysis piece out there, somewhere, haunting the fogged-up long-term memory cells - I think I might have heard it on NPR - where a dinosaur expert also is a cultural critic discussing what we can learn about the culture in the United States at any given time by how they treated and taught Dinosaurs. In the 80's, for instance, the primary focus in the dinosaur world was the Tyrannosaur- depicted as king, as nostalgic patriarch, ruthless, brutal, domineering and bloodthirsty, and a little bit dumb. He ruled the land. This reflected a kind of 80's ultra-consumerism and hunt for power in the US- a kind of Cold War King, if you will.

In the 90's, with Michael Chrichton's subtle revisionism, the focus moved to the Velociraptor. The Tyrannosaur, now primarily dumb, a loner, more a scavenger than a killer, was a cool-kid of the past. In the age of Information, the Raptor was king- small, slight, geeky and ruthlessly smart. He was a beast who worked in teams, who solved puzzles, who was as smart as we, and killed for the joy of it.

And it seems as though the Contemporary Age of the Dinosaur, the Culture War Dinosaur, is immensely wealthy, a concret statue resurrected and restored from the 60s [oh, those bygone days] and reformed as a forgivable Christian. Our T-Rex is bloodthirsty but repentant; our velociraptor is a concrete lamb of God. The Millenial Dinosaur is reclaimed from the streets- a kind of upgraded trailor trash dino, a kind of trap: pull the tourists in, but do not let them free unless they repent their sinful prehistoric demons.