By Michael M. Thomas

September 11, 2005 | 8:00 p.m

Dogs that don’t bark in the night have always captured my attention, and I suppose the same can be said of voices in the whirlwind that speaketh not. In all of the static that has followed the terrible catastrophe in New Orleans, the finger-pointing, the imploration, the keening and rending of garments, the blame-ducking, the grief and recrimination equally felt and equally justified, the one player most central to all that has been, is and will be hasn’t been heard from.

I refer, of course, to God. Usually, when something like Katrina goes down, God is on every tongue, especially the tongues of those who are supposed to have been minding the watch fires. Here’s what I’m getting at: It’s all very well to blame what’s happened on poor planning, on Iraq budget-starving, on racism yea and racism nay, but anyone with the slightest sense of what’s been going on in this country since Reagan must realize that the root of the manifest tragedy of Katrina must have something to do with the singular American conviction that we are God’s people and He will look out for us. This would be especially true of New Orleans, backed up against primeval forces of nature possessing a destructive strength matched only by the San Andreas Fault. Especially true of this old Catholic city with its Mardi Gras traditions, where juju and Jesus—you might say—interbreed. A hurricane is a whirlwind (exponentiated), and whirlwinds are where, in the Bible, you find God’s presence and voice. But somehow, in the particular dire equation that is Katrina and her aftermath, God seems not to figure. How come? This administration is the most godly ever, to hear them talk. God is their guy, His mouth to Karl Rove’s ear—or so it would seem. Why has Washington not invoked the deity? I mean, if we accept the so-called theory of intelligent design, doesn’t Katrina fit in there somewhere? I mean, if America’s Manifest Godliness—its special status as Our Good Lord’s Most Favored Nation—is part of intelligent design, which has to assume that the supreme being/power’s interest doesn’t just stop with Creation, but includes maintenance under warranty, then what is He trying to tell us? That we’re off warranty? Perhaps for operating His vehicle under conditions for which it was never intended? For worshipping the calf of gold too ardently? For finally exhausting every last vestige of patience with our profligacy, corruption, indecency, inequity? It may just be, as I have frankly long suspected, that God hates bullshit as much as anyone, and we have finally worn His tolerance out by building a moral “culture” that holds that Lunch at Michael’s is more consequential to what our New England forebears called “the great business of living” than Supper at Emmaus. So, oh Lord in Heaven, what’s the deal? Are You at last fed up? You don’t have to say anything, just wink. I don’t blame Katrina on the bellicose twerp in the White House, with all his barstool pieties and sodbuster chirrups, but I am surprised that he didn’t call for a day of National Prayer right off. Mr. Rove’s doing, I suspect; the cold logic of the paunchy Machiavelli doubtless argued that if God is really on this administration’s side, as this administration has continuously contended that He is, then He wouldn’t beat up on them with Katrina just when everything else is going badly; even God doesn’t do that to His friends—unless they really piss Him off. Of course, the “God” I’m speaking of here is the One envisioned by Mr. Bush and friends: God as explicated by Max Weber, the God of $60 barrels of oil, the God of K Street, the God of rich friends with deep pockets, the God whose sacraments use snake oil instead of wine. A one-trick-pony deity Who begins where Alan Greenspan ends. Well, if we can’t believe in that God, Who then? A pretty good answer was suggested by A. E. Housman in “1887,” the first poem in A Shropshire Lad. It’s a poem that celebrates the 50-year reign of Queen Victoria, another sovereign empire-builder to whom God was generally thought to be partial. In the final stanza, Housman takes a broader view: Oh, God will save her, fear you not: Be you the men you’ve been, Get you the sons your fathers got, And God will save the Queen. Worth thinking about. Are you listening God? It’s us, America! Hey, I think He just hung up! Now what?