In today's
New York Times, it's revealed that the Bush White House assigned a 24-year old press officer (and former Bush-Cheney campaign worker) to vet NASA publications. The officer, a Mr. Deutsch, demanded that references to the "Big Bang" in a set of webpages about Albert Einstein, intended for middle school students, be changed to "Big Bang theory". His rationale?
' The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion,"'... '"It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator. This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
So we now have zealous young disciples of Ralph Reed being pushed on NASA with instructions to take the science out of one of the United States' top science agencies. The White House response to inquiries? "Science is respected and protected and highly valued by the administration." A lie to defend a lie: for, very obviously, the Bush administration does not value science, not in itself as a quest for truth and knowledge.
We have learned a lot from astronomy about the history of our cosmos, details that tie in with the history of life on Earth. The Creationists are no longer content just with attacking biology; they have now set their sights on astronomy as well. The end goal of the Bush Administration seems to be to render American perfectly ignorant about everything we need to know to prosper in the 21st century.
Is it credible that, 147 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, we should still be having this non-debate? Even if you don't particularly care about biology or astronomy, this should concern you. What the Republican Party is trying to do, and for a large section of the public successfully has done, is to wipe out all traces of critical thought. Facts are replaced with "he said, she said"; this opens the door to making decisions based on pure propaganda, rather than examination of the facts. As a political strategy, it makes sense -- varieties of this technique were used by Mussolini and Hitler, after all. But we live in a world which continually faces us with hard realities which ultimately we cannot ignore in favor of wishful thinking.
We need above all not to be mere propagandists for an arbitrary set of ideas: we need to base ourselves and our ideas firmly upon fact and reality. If we have an ideology, it should be that truth is better than lies, and that there is something deeply wrong about deceiving people. And we need to live that in our lives, and bring that message to other people.
We need a political system in which people accept facts and argue over how one should act based upon them; not a system in which one party espouses lies and another espouses half-lies. We can start by giving no countenance to the most bold and brazen lies about our own Earth and its history.