It’s
funny what Americans say when talking to pollsters. A recent poll shows that
two-thirds of Americans think creationism should be taught alongside evolution.
What’s even funnier are the poll results the media choose to ignore. The same
poll found that a majority of Americans favor government-guaranteed health
insurance. And nearly 70 percent favor “more generous government assistance to
the poor,” according to the poll, conducted by PewResearchCenter.

I’ll
bet you only heard the disturbing creationism statistic, right? That’s because
it’s big news, I guess. But having lived through the public flaying of Hillary
Clinton when she tried to organize guaranteed health care, it’s big news to me
that most Americans favor it. Why, then, don’t we elect pols
who can implement health care for all?

And
the bit about a majority in favor of helping the poor? That’s big news to me,
too. I thought — based on all the tax-slashing Republicans we keep voting
into office — that we didn’t give a rat’s ass about
people who receive tax-funded government aid with housing, food, and, there it
is again: insurance.

Do the polls lie? We generally don’tcare about the poor until something —
like Katrina — raises their suffering to the level of spectacle. “How very poor the poor are!” we cry. We stare, we
gape. Admit it. It’s almost pornographic. Wait, no: It’s poornographic.

First,
the foreplay: a weary man wades in sludge; a woman bounces two listless babies.
The tension builds. A body slumps in a wheelchair. They’re dying now. We reach
into our pockets and grab. Yes. We throw money. More! More! Then, the release.
The money shot: airlifted mothers reunite with children — Yes. Yes. —
weeping men drive 10 hours to hug their rescued cats — YES! YESSS!

What will we do with our purported desire
to help the disadvantaged while we wait for the next tsunami, Katrina, or Rita?
Thank goodness there’s Three Wishes, NBC’s
faith-inspired reality series starring Christian singer Amy Grant. Each week
the show fulfills the wishes of, the ads say, deserving people when whoosh! Grant swoops down, Clarence-like.

“Deserving”?
Is that some white, middle-class code word? I don’t see what this has to do
with faith. Three Wishes is just
soft-porn, titillating us until the next big spectacle, be it a natural
disaster or manmade one.

Can
the media address poverty responsibly and hold the public’s attention? I can’t.
Once, in this column, I compared the cost of living for a woman with kids to
what women actually earn. There’s a massive gap. But I didn’t get through to
everyone. One guy said that while reading the column he’d become “lost in all
those numbers.” He advised me to stick to writing about sex.

If only poverty were sexy! I’d have such an easy job. Some people
have it all figured out. Take Dateline
Hollywood, whose satirical piece xxxx;
which successfully floated a hoax that brought sex — that is, sexual
preference — into the Katrina debate, which was, when you think about it, the
only thing that was missing. A joke story had Pat “Who Would Jesus
Assassinate?” Robertson saying Katrina was God’s punishment, for having a
lesbian, Ellen DeGeneres, host the Emmys.

Not so farfetched when you consider Robertson’s other
pronouncements about God’s motives, which brings me back to Creationism. The Pew poll revealed that
creationism — traveling in drag now, with the illusion of science stuffed
into its bra, as Intelligent Design — is welcomed into classrooms by people
who don’t even believe in it. Even the smarty-pants Darwinian secular humanists
say, “What the heck; this is America. Let ’em
all in.” Americans are pragmatic. We say tomato, we say tomahto, let’s call the
whole thing God.

I
raised my kids with creationism. And with Raven, the Native American trickster
who stole the sun and put it in the sky. And with Gaia and Uranus and their
monstrous children. I tried to read them the Norse creation story about a magic
cow who licked the god Buri
into existence, but we had to stop. We were laughing too hard.

When
I got done with my kids, their little heads were spinning. But that was the
point. The wonder of life, and the desire to explain it, is universal. Even as
we accept the Big Bang theory, the bacteria that farted
the atmosphere, the fish that crawled out of the sea like those amphibious Duck
Tours except without tourists, and our chimpanzee forebears — even as we
accept all that, we still wonder about who we are, how we got here.

When
one of my kids was 7, he said, “How do I know what is real? Maybe everything I
see is just in my mind. How do I know I’m even real?”

I
brought out the Elizabeth Bishop poem In
the Waiting Room, where, as a 7-year-old, Bishop has a similar mind-blowing
notion. The poem recalls how, while reading a National Geographic magazine in a dentist’s waiting room, Bishop
became unglued by the exotic things she saw, “A dead man slung on a pole” and
“Babies with pointed heads/wound round and round with string.” She wondered
about herself, about her connection to others. “How had I come to be here/like
them…?” She had “the sensation of falling off/the round, turning world/into
cold, blue-black space.”

It
is this sensation — this fear of blue-black space — that drives us to
invent our story over and over again. If Amy Grant offers me three wishes, I’ll
wish for schools to address the universality of wonder and fear along with
evolution. Skip the creation stories.

To
see the real wishes Grant is granting, search on “three wishes.” Be careful.
The first website most search engines find is 3wishes.com, a sexy lingerie site
where the clothes of low-wage occupations — maid, cab driver, laborer — are transformed into outfits of desire. Finally,
poverty made sexy.

*
The original version of this article portrayed the Robertson quote as fact
rather than the satire that it was.

This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2005.