-Caveat Lector- Nostradamus tops the best sellers God is losing ground to the doomsayers Special report: terrorism in the US Mark Lawson Saturday September 15, 2001 The Guardian The events in America touch at almost every turn on technology: the benevolent and malevolent uses of our inventions. In the central catastrophe, one of man's proudest pieces of engineering was flown into another. And - for every warming story of the cell-phone or email system which allowed a call for help or reassurance to a loved one - there was the thought that these same communications almost certainly allowed the terrorists and their overlord to synchronise the cataclysm. Indeed, our frequent ambiguity about scientific development may be encapsulated in this question: is it better or worse that a person about to die on an aeroplane is able to make a goodbye call from the sky? Now - following events on global live television - we wait to see which of the potential nightmares available in military technology George Bush might call on. And yesterday one aspect of modern technology allowed us an extraordinary insight into the effect of these events on the American psyche. The online bookseller amazon. com runs a best-seller list, which is updated hourly. By yesterday evening, three of the top five titles were about or by the celebrated doomsayer Nostradumus, with The Complete Prophecies at number one. The other two were a history of the World Trade Centre by an architectural writer who can never have expected the twin towers to become history, and a volume about how to fight terrorism. We may feel this week that this book, if it were honest, would be short on specifics. Amazon's ability to give an instant tally of national reading, however, gives a new tool to cultural commentary: a sort of psychological opinion poll. It was to be expected that, when Princess Diana died, sales of books about her would increase but it never occurred to me that Tuesday's war on New York would provoke a similar reaction. What, after all, would be the subject of the books you would buy? For - unlike earlier, much smaller rehearsals for this news story, such as the deaths of President Kennedy and Diana - the dead were not the kind to have biographies of them written. But now we know from amazon that, just as they did with Diana, people have craved, as information or souvenir, works about the central celebrity involved: the Twin Towers. Fascinatingly, they have also in large numbers sought to make sense of this unimaginable event in the imagination of Nostradamus. It is a measure of the fear and derangement now at loose quite understandably in the American mind that people can find consolation in the idea that a 16th-century French astrologer, writing long before aeroplanes or skyscrapers existed, somehow knew the Manhattan holocaust was scheduled. This widespread reading of the seer touches, though, on the more general question of what can reassure and console at times like this. The Americans who turn towards Nostradamus arise from an instinctively religious society. As citizens of a largely secular culture, the British have never comprehended the extent to which America believes itself to be a nation blessed and directed by God but it cannot be properly understood without this perspective. George Bush, a born-again Christian who is reported to pray on the telephone most days with his Bible advisers, almost certainly believes this. For all the inflammatory rhetoric about Islam in America now, there are without doubt those in the Bush administration who believe in the concept of holy war from the Christian perspective. Part of the shock to America's self-image has been a sense of divine abandonment. The preachers in America's thousands of churches this Sunday face their greatest intellectual challenge: explaining where God was in the skies above the US on Tuesday. At times like this, you can see why Nostradamus - who simply warned in universally applicable terms of disasters from now until doom - might be an easier sell than God, who promised to care what happened to us. Those for whom neither God nor Nostradamus work turn for consolation to ritual. But, however President Bush discharges his role as commander-in-chief, there is a growing consensus that he is failing in a crucial part of a politician's job: the crisis ceremonial. He has so far found neither language nor body language. Improbably, after such failures in the Diana week, Buckingham Palace has been impeccable in this regard. Incorporating the American national anthem in the changing of the guard was a genuinely moving touch. Perhaps, finally, it is music which most reliably consoles. Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings was played yesterday in Washington Cathedral and tonight forms part of an emergency programme at the Last Night of the Proms. This piece has become an American equivalent of Verdi's Requiem since Oliver Stone chose it for the soundtrack of his Vietnam movie Platoon. Music doesn't seek to explain tragedy but simply to express and absorb it. There will be many tears tonight as an American, Leonard Slatkin, conducts it in the Albert Hall. Nothing can really work as consolation in this astonishingly bleak week but I'd back the Barber against the rhymed ravings of a French seer. 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