Disastrous Accumulation
In the United States during the spring and summer of 2005, long-simmering debates over “intelligent design” came to a boiling point. Long a favorite of the Christian Right, which had never reconciled itself to some of the causal and temporal implications of modern biology and geology, intelligent design represents a revamped creationism, the antievolution belief that the world is too complicated to have been created in any way other than by the actions of a divine intelligent being. With court challenges looming, which if successful would potentially mandate that Kansas and Pennsylvania school districts teach supernatural doctrine in science classes; with President George W. Bush declaring in August 2005 that intelligent design ought to be taught; and with scientists mobilizing against such unwarranted political and religious intrusion into the science curriculum, this and the socalled avian u looked like the hot-button issues of the fall political season. But a funny thing happened on the way to the legal showdown over intelligent design. By the time the court cases were duly convened in December 2005 and Christian fundamentalist challenges scathingly rebuffed, the issue had faded considerably from public view. The opposition had successfully highlighted the insanity of teaching god on a par with natural process, but it received unanticipated, overwhelming, and crucial support from a wholly unscripted and unwanted source: Hurricane Katrina. If the intelligent design doctrine had any merit at all, it was diffcult to escape the conclusion that Katrina, which struck on August 29, and the consequent devastation of New Orleans and the north Gulf Coast at the cost of an estimated 1,570 lives must represent some kind of “intelligent meteorology.” The Indian Ocean tsunami of eight months earlier, with an estimated death toll of about 226,000, was still raw in the public imagination, and five weeks after Katrina the Pakistan and Kashmir earthquake killed 74,000. In the meantime, Hurricane Stan, though now largely blanked from memory in the United States, killed more people in Guatemala than Katrina did across the Gulf Coast. Intelligent design began to look less than intelligent and any design manifestly cruel. Cagier Christians backed away from embracing such a patent absurdity.
The appeal to divine intervention was not entirely abandoned, however. A story circulated in the wake of Katrina concerning the Christian fundamentalist, global capitalist, and televangelist Pat Robertson, who was a 1988 Republican presidential candidate and who more recently called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez—a recommendation that qualifies him as a potential terrorist under Britain’s new antiterrorist laws. Whether this multimillionaire and White House habitué really does believe that Hurricane Katrina expressed “God’s wrath” on the hometown of lesbian television celebrity Ellen DeGeneres is unclear, although such invocations of intelligent meteorology are a signature of Robertson’s modus operandi. About the comments of U.S. Representative Richard Baker of Baton Rouge there is no doubt, however. Stunning as it seems, this elected Louisiana offcial actually rejoiced at the death of working-class, usually aged African Americans in the oodwaters of Katrina: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” Baker commented as bloated bodies oated through New Orleans streets. “We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
[Image: "HURRICANE KATRINA" by au_tiger01]