From the department of Bloggy Frenzies We Missed While We Were Out: The Playlist has an excellent post on the music used within Ben Stein’s aforementioned intelligent design propaganda film, Expelled. It all started on Monday, when James Boyce posted a story on the Huffington Post titled, “Yoko Ono Sells Out John Lennon To Creationist Manufactroversy.” We assume that’s a contraction of “manufactured controversy”, even though as far as I’m aware, the film’s opponents have done a better job of promoting Expelled via fuss than the filmmakers themselves. Ack! Maybe i09 is right––maybe Expelled is actually a reverse-psychology conspiracy designed to bring down the intelligent design movement. Or maybe not.

Anyway, back to the point…

Boyce’s post was, in typical Huffington house style, brash, annoyingly self-rightous, and not sourced or fact checked (not that any of that is necessarily bad-–it *is* a blog, after all). But according to The Playlist, bloggers took it at face value, without questioning the expense that would be involved in placing songs by The Killers and John Lennon (and “Imagine”, no less!) in an independently distributed documentary produced for less than $5 million. Yoko Ono has so far remained silent on the issue, but moderators on The Killers’ official website have been posting to insist that the band never cleared their song for use in the movie.

What nobody seems to have mentioned, is how petty it seems for a politcally-biased blog to shame a contemporary band, with a long history of selling their songs to movies and commercials, for cashing in on a cause that the blogger doesn’t agree with. Shilling for shampoo is fine as long as your ironic mustache remains intact. Apparently, these days you only really lose your indie cred when you take money from right wing millionaires.

I can understand assigning some residual hippie integrity to “Imagine”––and, I mean, the idea of imagining there’s no heaven doesn’t even seem to align with intelligent design. But The Killers previously lent the same song that appears in Expelled to a key scene in Southland Tales, an apocalyptic satire in which copulating Hummers advertise a mystical alternative fuel that doubles as a mind control drug for soldiers fighting World War III (I think)––would it really be less responsible for them to align themselves with an anti-science argument put forth by a game show host? Wouldn’t that just sort of be balancing the scales?