Are We Alone? S. , 50:30
Humorous, Informational, Thoughtful
For many Americans Sunday is church-day, couch-potato-watch-sports-on-TV day, a day for God and vegging out.
For members of the SETI Institute the seventh day of the week means question marks and scientific inquiry requiring the willing suspension of Belief.
This hour-long sequence of chats about the notion that ignorance is bliss is amusing. Light-hearted as it sounds, it seriously probes what I detect is the increasing bias against education and science in the United States. Although the piece doesn't touch on the issues of Evolution and Intelligent Design, host/producer Seth Shostak might well have included this hot-button debate, which curiously has not made the roster of major platform issues so far this election year.
PDs might look askance at a show that flies in the face of pop culture, "American Idol," and video games. But hey, what could be more ready-made for public radio than a show that questions our dumbed-down, revved-up, beer-and-gas-guzzling, book-and-classical-music-opposed, no-brainer, commercial-radio culture?
One good thing about this piece: it's divisible into four parts, each of which could be excerpted. From Phil Plait's skeptical look at two kooky guys worried about Cern's universe-unlocking Large Hadron Collider, to Susan Jacoby's brilliant comments about "The Age of American Unreason," to a gaggle of laughable stories about mysterious presences that a Hollywood actress (name withheld) seriously believes are ghosts, to Stalin's persecution and murder of one of the Soviet Union's top geneticists -- this expose of bony-headed twits is must-hear material during a year when the term "elitist" refers to any person with a college degree who doesn't swig booze or kowtow to boobs. Following Phil Plait's first segment, there's even a mini-quiz show that mocks our deplorable lack of knowledge about such things as who was our first president.
Fegedaboudit, superstition-mongerers, fulminating fanatics, died-in-the-wool intellectual suicide bombers: "Skeptical Sunday" extols a whole nuther view of us all as homo sapiens.
James Reiss
Wilmette, IL
May 20, 2008
Keeping ourselves in the dark.
