Blog in the time of cholera.

To some, this is a map to the Good Old Days.

There is nothing to add about the hell on Earth that is unfolding in Louisiana that would not be useless surplusage. These are just words. Words have rallied the scruffy angels that live in men to save the world, and they’ve conjured demons to burn books and witches and the stranger, but when the levee breaks, words are just so much ink, or just so many 1’s and 0’s spattered across a CRT.

The only thing to do, when the levee breaks, is run like hell. Led Zepplin, of all people, had it right:

Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you’ve got to move.

But consider that, in four, short years – the time it takes (or used to take) to get through High School -- you and I have been witness to the worst attack on US soil in history, one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history, arguably the worst Presidency in history, the bloodiest and most divisive war in two generations, and now what bids fair to be the worst American natural disaster ever.

So it might be worth sparing a few words to think about how cultures respond to shock and trauma, and why we are now almost nation of two separate species that can’t even share a language anymore.

A few weeks ago, a fan was in town and I met him and his friend for a couple of beers and some lunch. Lovely people, and a very strange experience for yours truly since “fan” and “me” aren’t two words I ever thought I’d find myself using in the same sentence.

So I was a little antsy, and had slightly over-caffinated myself, and they were running a little late. And the beginnings of things...they are a tricky business. As Holmes says, it is a capital offense to theorize in advance of the facts, but speculating monkeys that we are, it’s our nature to screw around and wonder. From infidelity to interplanetary travel, we are flogged into improbable futures by the haunting refrain of "What If..." so for goofs I sort of took my brain out of my skull and watched what it was doing.

I was running possible meeting-new-people scenarios one after another, vivid and at the speed of light. Everything from a couple of libidinous liberal lasses showing up to show me the time of my licentious life, to a pissed off skinhead coming to draw blood occurred to me, and a hundred variants in-between.

As I said, they were terrific people and I had a fine time (and even though I am singularly unimpressive in person, they enjoyed themselves as well), but the point being that it was genuinely funny to watch how almost uncontrollably frantic one part of me was to pierce to veil of Time and know how things turned out.

Science is the stately and codified grown-up version of that itchy, gotta-know "What If...” impulse. And even though it has given us everything that we have, and shaped all that we are -- even though that trait of curiosity is the deep-sunk caisson on which our entire species stands -- it nonetheless remains the most radical and revolutionary question of all.

It won't let us fucking rest.

Pushed relentlessly along by your overpowering need to know, the Universe itself just keeps getting bigger and older and weirder. I mean, no less of an authority than "That 70's Show"'s Red Foreman summed it up with the plaintive cry: "We were promised hovercrafts!"

The hovercrafts, the 3-day workweek, pleasure droids, lucite sandals and Redi-Fucking-Kilowatt....none of which showed up on time or problem-free. I know. I’ve worked on and off in technology, and ever since IBM began pimping their PC with Charlie Chaplin ads and implanted the idea that PC's should somehow be as simple to use as the box they came in, the life of the tech support cowboy has been a misery of ridiculous expectations from technologically illiterate users who can’t understand why it can’t be as easy as they saw on teevee.

Science does giveth, but also does it taketh away.

Or as the character of Henry Drummond puts it in “Inherit The Wind:

Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, "Alright, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance."

"Madam, you may vote, but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder-puff or your petticoat."

"Mr., you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

Darwin took us forward to a hilltop from where we could look back and see the way from which we came, but for this insight, and for this knowledge, we must abandon our faith in the pleasant poetry of Genesis.

There are no hovercraft heading this way...and the people who feel at some subliminal level that that is what they were promised are disappointed and heartbroken and in a state of high piss-off.

Why weren't they warned about Ascendant China? About India graduating a million engineers ever summer? And that the technology that digitizes the porn that takes some of the sting out of their baffled lives also meant that their creamy dream-jobs could be shipped 10,000 miles away and done for nickles on the dollar.

The future is already here, as Bill Gibson reminds us: It's just not evenly distributed.

And because of that -- because of the feeling that somehow we’ve been cheated aches away deep in the bones -- we react as if Science were the wife, and we'd just come home unannounced to find her staked out like a gazelle at a watering hole (image borrowed from Harlan Ellison's essay on the “Three Most Important Things in Life”) being gangbanged -- in manner both fleshy and plastic -- by the Markets, Globalization and the rise of the Asian Help Desk...and enjoying every minute of it.

The Future calls, like the siren hussy it is, and the Present is forever abandoning us for greener pastures and better orgasms.

Faster and faster it the wheel turns. We feel rejected. Replaced. And in large numbers -- large numbers -- our fellow citizens have just cracked the fuck up. Which is why the politics of the last three generations has been as much about drawing a bright line across the rising tide of the wild future and saying "This Far and No Farther” as it has been about anything else.

The future came roaring out of the collective unconscious of millions Americans on crisp, Fall morning in 2001. Random and massively violent and insecure; a tomorrow where the foundation stones of the Earth can be pulverized by ancient hate armed with the commonplace tools of everyday modern life.

Planes can level buildings. Boys with backpacks can kill dozens or hundreds, and shut down cities. This is what one possible future looks like, and it frightens people in the ancient, subterranean, animal places where dwells the fear of dying alone, or in fire, or in darkness.

It’s not the storm or the fire from the sky that people fear, it is the sense that it’s senseless. That the globe heaves and trembles for no reason at all but insensate physics.

It seems simply intolerable that so many should perish for causes without meaning, and Science the Betrayer takes the Fall for that too. Evil Science that brought us fusion weapons and airplane missiles. Impotent Science that can't stop a hurricane or a tsunami or terrorists or a child from starving to death in an abundant world just by the bad luck of the birth lottery.

Ans so millions say, "Fuck Science!" The Earth is 6,000 years young...and God sees every sparrow that falls...God can pop out miracles like Pez to make everything add up and balance out...and the universe is full of Signs and Portents and yummy, yummy Meaning.

Of course this is nonsense. Science saves lives every day. When it comes to Wrath of God storms, for example, weather satellites -- one, small spin-off of the space program -- have literally spared the lives of millions. As has weather modeling software running on supermachines. As has Doppler radar.

Science can't stop a hurricane, but it can warn millions that it's on the way, and in-built in the very DNA of Science is the evolutionary pressure to constantly adapt and improve. This is known as Progress, and the robust, optimistic view of the Future embedded in a Progressive view of the world -- the sense that things really can get better -- used to be one of our most important invisible exports.

It can’t stop the levee from breaking, but Science can give you a head start and tell you with way to run, whereas Fundamentalism offers only darkness.

A Dark Age of fear and superstition ruled by the bloody whims of men who claim to speak for God. Exacty what this nation was founded to oppose. A State where keeping people stupid and afraid is considered the Solution and not the Problem. Where no light of reason can be allowed, for fear it might illuminate the warts and cancers of the Ruling Class.

Science is what is at issue here, not a particular technology. Science – the use of meticulous observation, theorizing and then testing and refining or discarding theories as a way of comprehending the Universe – is what is at stake, because Science shines its light without fear or favor everywhere, and the “pleasant poetry of Genesis” just can’t stand that kind of scrutiny.

Science is the vehicle that carries us into the future that the question of “What If...” lays open to us, but it comes with a price, and it is against that future that the likes of the Taliban and Conservative Fundamentalist Christians stand shoulder-to-shoulder and make common cause.

It is against the very idea of the future that they both make war, and it is against the idea of Progress that they both turn the tools of Progress. One used the machinery of modern transportation to kill thousands and cripple the Heart of a great city. One uses the apparatus of modern telecommunication to sow hatred and ignorance among millions and cripple the Mind of a great nation.

There is a powerful need in the face of disaster to hunt for meaning in all the wrong places. I very much understand the pull of it, but I am satesfied that I see the hand of a loving Deity whenever I see men and women pulling together to help each other. I don't need a Killer God to make my theology balance out.

The path from the Christmas Tsunami to Hurricane Katrina to 9/11 is simply this: When your dogma demands that God become the author of mass murder for His own inscrutable purposes, it is only a matter of time before the hatefully righteous that claim to be on His Holy Buddy List start their own bloody race to the bottom in His Name.

And whether they are perverting the Bible or the Koran, their aims are always the same; to destroy your capacity to reason by assassinating Science, to spread the hate and fear that give them purpose and power to every corner of the Earth.

And to make you kneel.