Page 10 - The Myth and the Moment

Morning

eschatologist, then what? Back to the feeble mutterances of Nobel
Prize-winners: we have no need of religion any more, you see, since
we invented statistics. It’s rather more in our own image than
superheroes were: superficially complex, reliable in minor matters,
mendacious even when truthful. Einstein never bought quantum
mechanics, though; he believed to the end in the Ultimate
Watchmaker. You haff not looked deep enough; I vill do so; I am an
old man, vith notting before me but der truth at der bottom of a vell.
He wanted to see what guided the hand that invisibly rolled the dice.
Too bad he saw the dice, eh? The world craps out. Jahwohl!
But statistics: proof is dead, not a god whose impossible attributes
never even put it in the viability sweepstakes. And natural law down
the drain, as well (sorry, Herr Doktor Einstein). The winner: gross
predictability, the fiction of hard edges maintained by myopia. Every
man his own judge of the probability of The End: if, and if so, when;
how the war will start; when it will finish. Objective? Of course not,
but that is where we take leave of science and strike up a
conversation with psychology and art. In other words, emotion
instead of reason. Everybody—except the Armageddon seekers—is
afraid of nuclear wipeout at some point in their conscious moments,
but how they react to that fear follows the twists and turns of
individual character. You can deny it, bury it beneath the trivia and
traumas of daily living; you can discount it, banking on deterrence or
victory in the showdown; you can acknowledge it, donating time and
money to diminutive disarmament movements. Or, you could be me.
Yes, the Nate Evangelino response to impending doom. Must be
those Superman comics of my childhood: the infant Kal-El zooming
away in an art-deco rocket ship from planet Krypton just as it
explodes. And that, in turn, goes back to the Bible and the Epic of
Gilgamesh, no doubt: what did Jahweh tell Noah? Did he say, ‘It’s up
to you, little man, whether or not to believe that I, Old Nobodaddy
High Aloft, am going to make it rain for forty days and nights.’ No.
‘Get out your umbrellas and dig storm drains.’ No; that would have
been too cruel, even for the Old Testament. ‘If you pray hard enough
and sacrifice sufficiently, I will change my mind about flooding the
Earth.’ No way. Nope, he told his chosen person to build an ark and
ride it out; put himself in suspended animation; wake up in the

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