Posthuman Blues

I visited a grocery store a couple weeks ago, and over the weekend I spent some time in a Wal-Mart "supercenter." I'd forgotten what depressing places these are. Is it just me or does Hy-Vee cater to would-be circus freaks? I saw some real specimens. The book selection at Wal-Mart is especially intriguing; there's a vast selection of Tim LaHaye titles, including (my personal favorite) "Are We Living In the End Times?," a companion volume to the sickeningly popular "Left Behind" series.

The "Left Behind" thing is primarily disturbing because of the blurring definitions between reality and entertainment. In the post-September 11 zeitgeist, isolating truth is just too difficult and confusing for most people. The military-industrial-entertainment complex's answer is to bind politically expedient myth and pre-digested "facts" into an unenlightening but market-friendly chimera. It's cheap, vulgar candy. But man, does it sell.

Physicist Bernard Haisch is working on a series of science fiction novels specifically designed to counter the appalling idiocy that fuels the "end times" craze: a seemingly workable exercise in meme-warfare. The trouble is, Haisch's premise is basically intelligent. As such, his fiction is effectively satire -- and satire's main demographic is the already-convinced. The "masses" (in this case, the drooling savants toting wooden crosses across town and handing out Chick tracts) will be bypassed completely. One glance at an intentional subversion of the cosmology cooked up by the likes of Bush, Robertson, Falwell and LaHaye and they'll scream "blasphemy." Fundamentalists hate scientists anyway -- unless they're the sort who cite "Piltdown Man" as "proof" that evolution is false.