The superhero World's Fair, 1939-1940 : the American monomyth personified

New York City has held only two World's Fairs, both very famous, one in 1939-1940 and one in 1964-1965.

Naturally both have been much dissected.

However I have never seen them exposed for displaying America's deeply ingrained 'go-it-alone' and 'we're above communal law and democracy' superhero-superpower attitude to a T.

After a convention signed in 1928, the world's states all agreed that a bureau based in Paris would ensure there weren't costly and competitive nationalistic train-wrecks in the planning and timing of highly expensive international World's Fairs.

All the world's nations belong to the bureau with a few exceptions : currently, for example, the Caliphate of ISIS and the Caliphates of Canada and the US are not members.

Among the rules all nations - or almost all - have agreed to adhere to : a maximum of one World's Fair per nation per ten years, fairs only to be held for six months, no rents to be charged to the exhibiters.

These rules are designed to protect smaller nations and smaller cities from the world class cities of the biggest nations dominating world fairs, thereby gaining all the hegemonic publicity and tourist dollars resulting .

New York City, America is the biggest world city in the biggest superpower nation.

And its behavior with world fairs shows the value and the limits to such world wide agreements : for NYC's elites didn't feel bound by any such petty rules, even if reached after a globally communal and democratic discussion.

Scholars Jewett and Lawrence have long suggested that American has refined itself a variant on Joseph Campbell's supposedly universal myth of the Hero with a Thousand Faces ; one they call the American Monomyth.

This hero does not, a la Campbell's thesis, venture out from our normal world into a supernatural world, win his spurs and return with a 'boon' for his community.

You've already seen their variant a billion or so times on American TV, in movies and in western novels and comic books etc.

In it, the formerly harmonious community is itself in grave danger - as much (in the superhero's mind) from its democratically minded willingness to publicly discuss and debate solutions while a crisis looms, as from the crisis itself.

Sometimes, he reasons, you must break the law to save the law - so he singlehandedly breaks the law and defeats the foe.

Then he quietly leaves the community to fight another loner's extralegal battle for truth and justice.

Superman fits this bill - as does George W Bush.

But so too, do the two NYC World's Fairs.

They rejected the Bureau rule that because America had just held a World's Fair in a one of its smaller cities that New York and America would have to wait its turn ten years away.

They rejected the limit of six month fairs designed to avoid the biggest cities sucking up all the tourist dollars - the two NYC fairs were each two years affairs.

They rejected the Bureau rule that no exhibiter was to be charged rent - designed to ensure the smallest nations could afford to send an exhibit.

They charged rent and this resulted in the most noted exhibits being not those of the big nations - let alone those of the tiny nations - but rather those of rich and powerful corporations.

The 1940 fair is often remembered because of the recent debut of Superman and of the first fan-driven Sci Fi convention, one held in the same place and time.

Ironic that the Fair itself was, in its own confidently arrogant way, as much a 'superhero', in the negative sense of the term, as anything the comicbook boys could dream up ...

"Climate Hubrists" : deniers of any limits to human ability to control reality

I separate Holocaust deniers from Climate Change deniers, I really do.

Most Holocaust deniers deny that the event ever happened - and continue to deny that, even in their heart of hearts.

But Climate Change deniers only pretend in public that they believe human-originated harmful Climate Change isn't happening and won't happen.

What they really and not so secretly believe - in their particular heart of hearts - is that Man can easily solve any bad climate change, or indeed any other global disaster that might happen, as fast and as easily as any comic book Super Hero might.



The denier/hubrists don't really read the bible and they don't really read many books.

Climate 'hubrists' a more accurate term than 'deniers'

But if you do the arithmetic, you will see that all active "climate change deniers" (I prefer to call them "Climate Hubrists") under the age of eighty-five had to grow up reading super hero comic books.

Those super hero ideas and conceits (along with Fox TV News, Talk Radio and the commentators on the sports channels) have in practise become the common intellectual currency of our age for people of an anti-intellectual cast, replacing things like the Sears Roebuck catalogue and the King James Bible.

Why else would Googling Climate Change and Manhattan Project produce 1.5 million results ?

A new Manhattan Project can't stop any global environmental crisis : in fact the old one produced - via worldwide strontium 90 fallout from local testing - the very first man-made global environmental disaster we ever knew.

But millions - and probably ultimately billions of people world wide - still take it as a comforting solution to our current climate change crisis.

It is a pity then that the names Robert Jewett , John Sheldon Lawrence and H Bruce Franklin are not better known among those combating the climate deniers/hubrists.

I recommend to all of us who are wondering why we are losing the public battle of opinion over the existence (or not) of harmful human climate change to spend some time reading , in combination, Jewett's & Lawrence's many books and articles on the "American (superhero) Monomyth", together with Franklin's classic "War Stars", about the enduring belief in a single superweapon ending all wars.

(Geo-engineering, in this context, might be regarded as the latest high tech superweapon - this time against incoming weather rather than incoming aliens.)

Instead of looking to wartime Manhattan's nuclear Project, we need rather to look to wartime Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project for a pathway showing how when we work with Mother Nature, enduring good things happen.

Work with Nature instead of against her  ? Unimaginable to denier/hubrists.

Because the only thing the deniers ever really deny is any limits to the human ability to control physical reality --- and that reads as Hubris in my book....

Real life 1940s comic book 'superhero' : Jewish nebbish Robert Oppenheimer and his plan to 'do good' with secret atomic powers

Move over Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and let a real 1940s Jewish nebbish take the Superman wheel !

Gotham City-born Robert Oppenheimer secretly cloaked a bloodthirsty propensity to inflict supreme violence 'to do good' behind a rather mousy public exterior.

But his words at the top level meetings that determined when and where the first A-bombs were to be dropped reveal a man fully in grip of the traditional American monomyth of redemptive violence 'to do good' (pace John Sheldon Lawrence & Robert Jewett) via a war-ending superweapon (pace H Bruce Franklin).

Lawrence, Jewett and Franklin repeatedly document that these myths gripped both factual and fictional America , both Americas feeding off each other.

It is easy to caricature right wing Republican-leaning  Leslie Groves and Vannevar Bush as war-mongers , intent only on 'doing bad'.

Much less easy than trying to account for left-leaning Oppenheimer's propensity to kill hundreds of thousands of women and children to 'do good'.

The case of Oppenheimer forces us to confront the power of these enduring American shibboleths (the monomyth of justified extra-legal violence to 'do good' and America's right to the unique possession of a secret war-ending superweapon) in the mainstream of ordinary American thought ....

Nazis manning 88mm gun might be eugenic but its shells were not - democratically wounding 1A soldier and 4F civilian alike

Deadly group A strep bacteria (GAS) will tolerantly and democratically carry off all sorts of injured and wounded individuals : Aryan, Jewish, 4F ,1A , fit, unfit , warrior or civilian.

It knows and accepts no hierarchy of worthiness but like any incoming artillery shell it kills and maims in perfect equal opportunity randomness.

Remember all this when the true wartime story of penicillin-for-all is made into a typical Hollywood fantasy.

Under Hollywood's blinkered gaze, wartime penicillin would have to have been manufactured by 1A handsome , virile/virulent , WASP military doctors with chiseled chins.

Their moral conflict driving the plot would be this : should they interrupt their vital violent combat work , just to rescue some weedy swarthy 4F civilians on the Home front who are once again revealed as too inept to resist fatal bacterial infections like GAS on their own ?

In reality , it was of course totally all the other way around.

In fact it was weedy 4F stay-at-home unfits who created the wartime penicillin that saved the lives of hunky virile 1As dying helplessly from bacteria-infected wounds from random 88mm shell fragments.

A plot so subversive of the established American literary cultural and political order that Jesus and the Gospel authors could probably write it in their sleep.

But equally so it is a plot that would be far beyond what the most supposedly 'radical' graphic novelist or Indie film director could ever write.

They - to date - have only unconsciously reproduced the traditional authoritarian rejections of democratic debate over values.

They have only unconsciously continued to hype the ageless American monomyth of regenerative violence that by-passes democratic debate ,compromise and tolerance , albeit a monomyth now cloaked in the hippest of counterculture colours...