Don Wildman

Suddenly, the one accepted truth, you know, that Noah saved us is gone or at least disappearing.

How was this absorbed?

How did it enter into the lexicon of American thinking?

What went on then?

And we can't underestimate the intelligence of these generations.

I mean, they were kind of connecting the dots.

It was the fact that so much of common belief was in their face that it was hard to challenge it.

But there must have been a lot of writing, a lot of thinking being done on this fact.

It all really intersects with the rise of the triumphalism in the United States, the rise of manifest destiny and all that sort of thing.

The idea that the North American continent had so much of evidence of this deep time in it, from the vast abundance of coal to the amount of dinosaur bones they eventually find out west especially, but they were all already up and down the East Coast as well.

This all contributes to this real feeling of like, we're special because we have a continent that's actually older than everyone else.

And that was real, right?

And the celebration of the landscape, as you're saying, these national parks.

But it goes back to even the Hudson River School painting where they're attaching the majesty of the land to a sort of theology of this place.

Yeah.

And it plays, of course, into the whole racial argument of American society.

If this place is so old, then it predates everything.

And so we belong here as much as anyone who we found here or who we brought here.

You know, it's it's this whole idea of white America attaching itself to this ideal.

But it also has to do with the South.