Yoko files suit against Expelled

Like a really good episode of Win Ben Stein’s Money, Yoko Ono is suing the producers of Expelled for the unauthorized use of John Lennon’s iconic ballad “Imagine” in the film.

Ono’s lawsuit claims the producers did not ask for permission either because they knew they couldn’t get it or because they did not want to pay for the rights. It objects to the way “Imagine” is listed in the film’s credits, saying it suggested to members of the news media and others that the song’s use had been approved.

“Internet ‘bloggers’ immediately began accusing Mrs. Lennon of ‘selling out’ by licensing the song to defendants,” says the complaint, filed this week. The lawsuit calls “Imagine” Lennon’s signature song, saying it “has become closely associated with and is synonymous with John Lennon.”

Ben Stein responds in with the same weak logic Expelled employs to reduce any complex system to its most simplistic explanation — oh, and be sure to find a way to blame Eve or some other woman for ruining everybody’s paradise:

“So Yoko Ono is suing over the brief constitutionally protected use of a song that wants us to ‘Imagine no possessions’?” he asked. “Maybe instead of wasting everyone’s time trying to silence a documentary she should give the song to the world for free.”

Instead of fessing up to intellectual property theft, the producers are recasting themselves as victims, and reinventing Lennon as a Neo-Darwinist — because… well, hey! why the hell not? Renaming things to suit their distorted purpose is what the creationists Intelligent Design advocates do:

“If you really listen to the lyrics of ‘Imagine’ then you realize that it represents everything that the Neo-Darwinists want. ‘Imagine there’s no Heaven ‚Ķ No hell below us ‚Ķ Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too‚Ķ’ That’s exactly what the Darwinist establishment wants to do: get rid of religion,” said Walt Ruloff, CEO of Premise Media. “And that’s what we point out when we play less than 15 seconds of the song and show some of the lyrics on screen.”

Want more of Stein’s highly-evolved sense of right and wrong?

Anyway, I couldn’t give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. It doesn’t earn any extra respect from me, because it’s not as if science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists were telling Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists were telling Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50 million people in order to further the revolution.

Honestly, although I have string feelings about why I think the I.D. issue ostensibly at the center of Expelled is nothing more than a ridiculous right-wing farce, the only reason the subject made it to pages of AwardsDaily is because of the inherent and and transparent dishonesty of the movie itself. The more we find out about the origins and evolution of this Expelled, the uglier it gets.