We have arrived at a critical juncture in the 2008 campaign. With so many huge issues suddenly arriving in the same time and space — war, economy, politics — it’s possible they may all collapse and create a black hole that swallows up the entire galaxy.

At least the super-collider did not destroy the planet.

Or did it?

The possibility, which I happily steal from the great Douglas Adams’ “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” is that what some people feared about the super-collider actually did occur. The fear was that starting it would result in a cataclysmic physical event that would destroy the world, and possibly beyond.

here is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Can we say that did not happen? To use Adams’ whimsical idea, I think it’s possible that the super-collider did indeed end the world as we knew it. What we now inhabit is an alternate universe in which the super-collider did not break the world.

It just bent it.

So we have a war that some are pushing as a victory as a means to hide the truth that genetic cleansing was so effective in Iraq, the appearance of the surge working is more attractive to them.

We have people losing homes and jobs and no hope yet from the government to end their suffering.

We have our financial markets, a looking-glass world if there ever was one, allegedly melting down and threatening to take the entire economy with it. We need to install Treasury Secretary Paulsen as Benevolent Dictator of the Bailout, we are told, or risk the future of the nation.

We have John McCain running away from the first debate, his campaign sinking along with the economy. He knew all along an economic downturn would be bad for his chances at the White House. He just didn’t realize how bad the downturn would be, and so he’s fled the campaign scene to once again pretend he’s got the slightest clue about what’s going on and what is needed to fix things.

What we don’t have, it appears, is much chance to avoid a long, ugly future of families and businesses struggling simply to achieve basic security. The grotesque part of this, the part that makes me crazy with anger, is that it was entirely avoidable and entirely foreseeable.

This was not an accident. This was not an unintended outcome no one could have predicted. Spend billions on a pointless war, put the nation’s wealth into the greedy hands of a selfish few, enslave future generations in debt bondage to China and other lender nations, alienate Americans from one another and the rest of the world by making fear the primary political medium — well, what else was going to happen? Shangri-la?

For all we know, the super-collider did destroy the world and what we now call reality is the result. And you know what’s really scary about that?
This could be a better outcome. At least in this reality, it looks like Obama will become President and we’ll have, at last, an intelligent, rational person in the White House. If no one cranks up any other universe-altering science experiments.