Houston, we have a problem.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee took time off from leaving angry, obscene messages for underlings to give children a science lesson earlier this week.
“Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” she told students at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston. “And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?”
She went on to educate the students on the “energy” emitted by the moon, called it a “planet,” and offered the sudden proximity of the satellite with Earth to explain the cause of Monday’s solar eclipse.
“The sun is a mighty powerful heat,” she noted, “but it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.”
In the 15-term congresswoman’s defense, she never referred to Neil Armstrong as the first man to walk on the sun or theorized about the casein properties of the moon. And it’s not like anyone in Houston knows anything about space, anyway.
Sunny Hostin surmised on The View of the solar eclipse, last Friday’s northeast’s earthquake, and the emergence of trillions of cicadas, “All those things together would maybe lead one to believe that either climate change exists or something is really going on.”
Voices of science and reason Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar interrupted to set Hostin straight.
At the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, an activist-in-residence covering her face with sunglasses and a bandana and wearing gloves, a hat, and camouflage, instructed first-year medical students to pray to “the ancestors” and thank “mama Earth.” Lisa Gray-Garcia, who describes herself as formerly homeless and incarcerated, labeled Los Angeles “occupied” land,” called “private property” a “crapitalist lie,” and referred to European Americans as “settlers.” According to the Washington Free Beacon, she led chats during the mandatory class of “Free, Free Palestine” and called medicine “white science.”
Physicians, heal thyself?
One ventures an unscientific guess that at least one of the three — Jackson Lee, Hostin, or Gray-Garcia — displays an “In this house, we believe in science” sign on her front lawn. So do those who regard guys wearing Sonny Crockett’s stubble and Holly Golightly’s dress as women and imagine bacteria found on the fourth planet as “life on Mars” but deny that a fully formed baby inside her mother amounts to human life.
Christopher Columbus famously hoodwinked the natives into doing his bidding by telling them God planned to inflame the moon with his “wrath” out of his displeasure with them. The Jamaican islanders reacted to the eclipse that the scientific-minded Columbus anticipated by showering provisions upon the explorer and his men.
Jackson Lee, Hostin, Gray-Garcia, and the like see themselves as advanced, cutting-edge, and liberated from the benightedness of the past. They really demonstrate that beliefs we imagine as primitive thrive in 2024. One embarrassing difference separates then from now. Today, hubris rather than humility strangely accompanies ignorance.
The trio appears more akin to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who pointed to the earthquake and the eclipse to warn that “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” than to anyone wearing a lab coat, pressed against a microscope, or who knows that a Petri dish does not refer to German cuisine.
From leafy and tweedy universities, the botoxed and manicured on screens, and the marble halls of Congress, an unga-bunga quality pervades.
To loosely paraphrase Arch Oboler, It is earlier than you think.
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