This red state/blue state thing isn’t new.

We simply have more weapons in the fight to color-code our world now. Computers spit out funky, three-dimensional maps. Bombastic talk show hosts analyze them.

But the division is decades old. Consider the current Lewiston-Auburn Community Little Theatre presentation of “Inherit the Wind.”

Based on a successful Broadway play and an Academy Award-nominated film, the production is a fictionalized account of the Scopes monkey trial. The defendant was a Tennessee teacher accused of teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in a public school.

John T. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 in 1925. Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee told the tale on Broadway in 1955, and Spencer Tracy starred in an Oscar-nominated film five years later.

These days, the drama, or ones like it, is rebirthed in a made-for-TV movie or on a local stage when faithful folk and secularists collide.

In other words, perpetually.

So eager to share

Fighting about how we got here is an allegory for everything we dispute today. Only the courtroom has, um, evolved into the arena of public opinion, and evolution shares the stand with gay marriage, abortion and preventive war.

Most of us have opinions about each of those issues, ones that we love to share. And most of us sound equally intolerant when airing those convictions, eager to dislodge the splinter from our neighbor’s eye without seeing the 2-by-4 in our own.

That’s not a fresh phenomenon, either.

No offense to director Richard Martin and his players, whose interpretation of “Inherit the Wind” is sure to be entertaining, passionate and provocative. But the original writers wielded an obvious agenda.

In the film adaptation, prosecuting attorney Matthew Harrison Brady – played by Tracy and patterned after three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan – is a blissfully ignorant buffoon with no background in science.

“I am more interested in the Rock of Ages,” he says, “than I am in the age of rocks.”

Other peripheral characters are painted as zealots. Many critics of the movie and play (Note: If your life is devoted exclusively to stamping out art, please borrow someone else’s life) say the fiery Reverend Brown character didn’t exist. Nor do they believe the minister had a conflicted daughter or that she conveniently was dating Scopes at the time.

Pushing purple’

Eighty years have passed since Scopes, and the humanists won the battle in the classroom. While Darwin’s postulates are taught as virtual fact without fear of reprisal, school administrators now worry about a crackdown if someone interprets a Christmas tree as a “religious symbol.”

Out in the real world, however, the split runs right down the middle. Always has.

We didn’t need a presidential election to show us or a pundit to explain it. We have our own memories or history books to remind us of McCarthyism, of Vietnam, of recreational drugs and free love, of Reaganomics, of Bill and Monica.

One camp whacks us over the head with the Ten Commandments. Another espouses fewer absolutes.

The truth, whether you accept the Gospel or natural selection, is somewhere in between.

There are four more presentations of “Inherit the Wind” at Great Falls School in Auburn. If you can’t catch today’s 2 p.m. matinee, there’s another one Sunday, Jan. 16. Also, a pair of 8 p.m. shows on Jan. 14 and 15. The box office number is 783-0958.

The Sandy River Players at the University of Maine in Farmington are also staging this production at Alumni Theater, with the first show scheduled Jan. 13. For information, call the school at 778-7000.

Or you could spend those weekends defending the honor of your blue state or raising your blood pressure trying to paint it red.

I’d rather be accused of pushing purple.

Kalle Oakes is the Sun Journal’s columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].