The following appeared today in my free weekly e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com, now into its 9th year of publication.

You can get it free any time.

Science is the political issue of our time.

It will surprise many to hear it's controversial. But to those with an historical perspective it's no surprise at all.

Every conflict in American history has caused many Americans, and initially most Americans, to take on the coloration of the enemy. We assume unnatural power in our adversaries, and subconsciously become like them, before learning once again that it's our differences with our enemies that gives us power.

• During the Cold War, the McCarthy movement (picture 1) took on the coloration of Communists in the name of Anti-Communism. One result was the Domino Theory, which so dominated our thinking during Vietnam we lost 58,000 soldiers, and the war.
• During the two World Wars, we discriminated against Germans (in World War I), then Japanese (in World War II) (picture 2) in an attempt to defeat them.
• During the Civil War many northerners became racists, as seen during the 1863 Draft Riot (picture 3) brought to the screen by the movie "Gangs of New York."

We've had smaller outbreaks of this over the years. Whether you're talking about the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, the brutal genocide against America's Indians in the 1880s, or our prejudices against Mexicans, Chinese, and Catholics over the decades, it's all a reflection of our fear that the other side may in fact be stronger, and of our desire to harness what we see as their worst instincts in order to defeat them.

Since 2001 most Americans have seen themselves engaged in a life-and-death struggle against a religious fanaticism, exemplified by Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Thus, millions of American Christians have themselves become religious bigots, fighting (and winning) their war against what they perceive as the secularization of American life.

They've been fortunate in that the Bush Administration shares, channels, and even promotes these prejudices. Whether it's through a "culture of life" that seeks to ban abortion and maintain life after someone has become a vegetable, the nonsense of "intelligent design," religious subsidies or a refusal to consider global warming, it's all of a piece.

The target of modern McCarthyism is, simply, the scientific method. Faith-based government reflects the idea that something about Muslim Fanaticism rings true, and only an equal Christian Fanaticism is adequate to confront it.

Of course, that's not the real struggle of our time. We are fighting the wrong war.

This was true in the Cold War as well. We fought over territory in Korea and Vietnam, ignoring the fact that the real battles were economic, cultural, and political.

Today we fight fire with fire against Al Qaeda and ignore the fact that the real threat is an economic one, and that it comes from East Asia, not the Middle East.

My own son is part of this. I think he should be learning Chinese. He has chosen to learn Arabic. It's short-term thinking.

But to even begin the struggle against our real enemy, a struggle both sides can actually win, we first need to battle against our inner demons, against a religious fanaticism that is the new McCarthyism.

The right political weapon is science. (The illustration is a piece of propaganda for the other side, showing religion and science as equally balanced.)

Science is the issue that links all our political struggles, but Democrats fear to grasp it.

That's OK, because young people increasingly "get it." My generation will not define the future any more than the New Deal defined the Nixon era.

But it is important to see what we can do to teach our children well so that they might overthrow the present irrelevance and create a new order that works for them.

We have many such tools, in the media and in the culture. The robot challenges of Dean Kamen and USFirst.org are a powerful weapon against ignorance. TV shows like Mythbusters, which teach the scientific method, are another weapon.

Most kids today are either being taught science or finding they wish they knew more about it. Anything you can do, in your community, to nurture this feeling will help.

This newsletter, my blog, and thousands more publications like them, are bricks in that wall of science that will, in time, wall off the ignorance of the present day and confine it to the past.

You can't see that future now, any more than the victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist could see the 1960s and 1970s. Underneath all the conformity of our time, our media, and our towns a rage is building, one that will rip away Bush-era conservativism like a veil when its internal contradictions become obvious.

That is in the process of happening. Be ready when it does.