TD Facebook pals know that, from childhood, Ive been a dino-enthusiast. Imagine my surprise to discover, thanks to Asher Elbein of Salon, that I have this in common with Donald Koch, who supports paleontology and museum work on dinosaurs in a gigantic way and that dinosaurs have long been a hobby horse of great magnates of every sort and of oil tycoons in particular. Its a hell of crowd I turn out to have been running in all these years! Tom There are a few different facets to this wave of billionaire support for paleontology exhibits. Dinosaurs make for cool toys, an impulse that holds whether the toys are made of crudely painted plastic or elaborate resin casts. There’s nothing like a toothy skeleton — or a hall full of them — to sweeten the already tempting social benefits of philanthropy. But there’s one other important aspect to dinosaurs: They’re layered with symbolic weight. Dinosaurs are potent metaphors for many things, some of them contradictory: age, obsolescence, the childhood love of monsters. But more than anything, dinosaurs symbolize something invulnerable and earth-shaking. In the aftermath of the Dinosaur Renaissance, they have burnished that invulnerability with an aura of speed and power. To look up at a Tyrannosaurus rex now is to be struck with a visceral sense of evolution at its most irresistibly murderous: “survival of the fittest” writ very, very large. That ethos — that size, ferocity and dominance justify themselves — is one that free market ideology has embraced with an alarming zeal. It colors the love of dinosaurs that Koch and his fellow billionaires share. And if it seems reminiscent of another evolutionary philosophy — social Darwinism — that’s not an accident. salon/2014/07/28/the_rights_dinosaur_fetish_why_the_koch_brothers_are_obsessed_with_paleontology/
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 14:00:01 +0000
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