Dr Martin Henry Dawson had basically but one single message to the wartime world of 1940 -1944.
It was that that a well known third or fourth rater (the penicillium slime found on our dank basement walls) nevertheless had at least one incredibly valuable capability.
For the despised penicillium fungus could make life-saving penicillin far, far, far better than the all the best human chemists in the world put together.
The means by which this message was revealed to the world was itself a subtle form of that same message.
This was because Dawson was himself a third or fourth rater as far as conventional human heroes go --- being far too diffident and deferential to his bosses, for just one thing.
But while Dawson would too easily bend and retreat, he also never really gave up, feeling himself duty bound to push forward - however ineptly - the world-changing insights his far-seeing eyes revealed.
Yes, his manner was alway timid but his thesis were often bold, often bold beyond measure.
That fact, coupled with his stolid determination to do what he felt was right, gave this nebbish doctor truly heroic qualities.
Without, at the same time, ever stop him from being well and truly nebbish.
A case of 'Clark Kent the hero' - not 'Superman the hero'...
Showing posts with label superman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label superman. Show all posts
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
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 ...
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 ...
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Noir's Children : the teenagers who MADE Mo go Po
Noir's Children (my particular birth cohort of 1940-1956) those of us born 'after the Fall of France but before the Rise of Elvis' - were virtually unique in being perfectly comfortable living inside TWO whales .
Those two whales being the Modernity (Mo) of our childhood and early teen years and the emerging Post Modernity (Po) of our late teen years and early adult years.
We still remain unique in this regard - we are old enough to remember believing in our elders' tattered Modernity but with minds not so rigidly formed we couldn't also take on the attributes of an emerging Post-Modernity - which was the only reality our younger siblings ever knew first hand.
My cohort did not just feel the transition from one era to another : we were that transition.
For it was our failure to carry on the ideas of Modernity as we matured that condemned Modernity to a slow sad certain death as our still-faithful elders died off, one by one.
Why our post WWII birth cohort - and not any earlier birth cohorts - came to reject the centuries-old Enlightenment Project is the subject of this blog and of my book projects .
And like many exciting things, it all begins in wartime Gotham - where the reigning American Super Hero was not the comic books' Superman, Batman or Captain America but rather a squat balding middle aged Dutch-Swiss-American called Carl Norden.
His invention , a bombsight that was claimed to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from three miles up - was going to end the war ( even end all wars) quickly, cheaply and with minimum loss of civilian lives.
As a result, the British and American governments of the day in 1940 saw no need for spending serious amounts of taxpayers' monies on either atomic bomb or penicillin development.
In their experts' eyes, the atomic bomb was serious overkill (literally) and life-saving penicillin, rather like old fashioned infantry riflemen, wasn't really going to be needed in a short modern war of minimum casualties.
The best laid plans .....
Those two whales being the Modernity (Mo) of our childhood and early teen years and the emerging Post Modernity (Po) of our late teen years and early adult years.
We still remain unique in this regard - we are old enough to remember believing in our elders' tattered Modernity but with minds not so rigidly formed we couldn't also take on the attributes of an emerging Post-Modernity - which was the only reality our younger siblings ever knew first hand.
My cohort did not just feel the transition from one era to another : we were that transition.
Modernity only died when it failed to reproduce itself in its young
For it was our failure to carry on the ideas of Modernity as we matured that condemned Modernity to a slow sad certain death as our still-faithful elders died off, one by one.
Why our post WWII birth cohort - and not any earlier birth cohorts - came to reject the centuries-old Enlightenment Project is the subject of this blog and of my book projects .
And like many exciting things, it all begins in wartime Gotham - where the reigning American Super Hero was not the comic books' Superman, Batman or Captain America but rather a squat balding middle aged Dutch-Swiss-American called Carl Norden.
His invention , a bombsight that was claimed to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from three miles up - was going to end the war ( even end all wars) quickly, cheaply and with minimum loss of civilian lives.
As a result, the British and American governments of the day in 1940 saw no need for spending serious amounts of taxpayers' monies on either atomic bomb or penicillin development.
In their experts' eyes, the atomic bomb was serious overkill (literally) and life-saving penicillin, rather like old fashioned infantry riflemen, wasn't really going to be needed in a short modern war of minimum casualties.
The best laid plans .....
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Deniers NEVER deny problems - merely deny that they can't be as easily solved as Superman jumps over buildings...
Take human-originated baneful climate change : climate deniers don't deny that it could exist, merely that if and when it emerges, it will be a quick job for Batman , Spiderman or Captain America to clear up.
Nobody who makes a living solving problems (and let's see , that includes all politicians, all business people, all experts & professionals, all generals, church leaders, on and on) ever denies that problems (their very bread and butter) don't exist.
Far from it -- they are far more likely to see problems where none exist (widespread satanic cults eating our babies anyone ?) or over-exaggerate those that do exist (just as police chiefs always seem to see a growing crime wave just before proposed budget cuts.)
The only thing that most deny is the problems can't be solved or solved relatively easily.
I use that weasel word 'relatively' because expert-problem-solvers-for-money always walk a thin line.
So their pitch to clients has always to be something like this : "your problem is worse than you thought (boo) but it is solvable (hurray) but it is going to cost you some money and time (boo) , but not a whole lot of time and money."
The key word is 'solvable' - lets leave it to the courts to resolve why too much time and too much cost and and too little success emerged from so many of such promises.
Solvable is a post birth of science term , because you still see relatively few religious leaders guaranteeing success : its all "God's ( or the gods') will be done".
So while scientists today appear to be on the side of the angels on combatting baneful climate change (with climate deniers the spawn of the devil) , we must pony up and admit the deniers are sustained intellectually by scientists - not by pre-science thought like that from the world's ancient religions .
That is why this newsletter will attack scientists far more than climate deniers, in my effort to help awake the world to possibly unstoppable climate change....
Nobody who makes a living solving problems (and let's see , that includes all politicians, all business people, all experts & professionals, all generals, church leaders, on and on) ever denies that problems (their very bread and butter) don't exist.
Far from it -- they are far more likely to see problems where none exist (widespread satanic cults eating our babies anyone ?) or over-exaggerate those that do exist (just as police chiefs always seem to see a growing crime wave just before proposed budget cuts.)
The only thing that most deny is the problems can't be solved or solved relatively easily.
I use that weasel word 'relatively' because expert-problem-solvers-for-money always walk a thin line.
So their pitch to clients has always to be something like this : "your problem is worse than you thought (boo) but it is solvable (hurray) but it is going to cost you some money and time (boo) , but not a whole lot of time and money."
The key word is 'solvable' - lets leave it to the courts to resolve why too much time and too much cost and and too little success emerged from so many of such promises.
Solvable is a post birth of science term , because you still see relatively few religious leaders guaranteeing success : its all "God's ( or the gods') will be done".
So while scientists today appear to be on the side of the angels on combatting baneful climate change (with climate deniers the spawn of the devil) , we must pony up and admit the deniers are sustained intellectually by scientists - not by pre-science thought like that from the world's ancient religions .
That is why this newsletter will attack scientists far more than climate deniers, in my effort to help awake the world to possibly unstoppable climate change....
Friday, October 24, 2014
New Yorker supermen in costumes before "Superman" : Fascists, the Bund and Popular Front organizations
New York City has always been filled, will always be filled , with organizations advocating changes that they see as reforms, to what they see as an ongoing malaise.
But in the 1920s and 1930s , some of these organizations took to putting on colourful costumes and uniforms and engaging in deliberately provocative street marches , as a leading part of their efforts to effect reform.
These colourful street efforts were most successful if they ended in violent clashes between rival reform groups , where the strongest fists won the field.
Because the resulting media publicity benefitted both winners and losers in the fist fight.
Some of these groups were on the Right - sympathetic to the Fascist or Nazi view of reality.
Others were part of the Popular Front, comprising a wide spectrum of Centre and Leftish opinion.
The Popular Front was important historically because it was one of the first political movements to claim that political creations based upon popular art and culture could be the singly most effective way to affect political and social change.
Besting even the political ballot box or the revolutionary bomb.
Against all this ferment, is it really any surprise that an individual in costume, using violence to do good, was created , in these same years, in the very downmarket (popular) cultural medium of the comic book ?
Superman's origins, I submit , lay not just in an reaction against the Silver Legion's ideology but also in a tacit acceptance by Siegel and Shuster that the League's use of colourful distinctive uniforms and street violence was seemingly the only effective way to effect reform.
But as fellow New Yorkers Dorothy Day or Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson insisted , there was another less violent way to change hearts and minds ...
But in the 1920s and 1930s , some of these organizations took to putting on colourful costumes and uniforms and engaging in deliberately provocative street marches , as a leading part of their efforts to effect reform.
These colourful street efforts were most successful if they ended in violent clashes between rival reform groups , where the strongest fists won the field.
Because the resulting media publicity benefitted both winners and losers in the fist fight.
Some of these groups were on the Right - sympathetic to the Fascist or Nazi view of reality.
Others were part of the Popular Front, comprising a wide spectrum of Centre and Leftish opinion.
The Popular Front was important historically because it was one of the first political movements to claim that political creations based upon popular art and culture could be the singly most effective way to affect political and social change.
Besting even the political ballot box or the revolutionary bomb.
Against all this ferment, is it really any surprise that an individual in costume, using violence to do good, was created , in these same years, in the very downmarket (popular) cultural medium of the comic book ?
Superman's origins, I submit , lay not just in an reaction against the Silver Legion's ideology but also in a tacit acceptance by Siegel and Shuster that the League's use of colourful distinctive uniforms and street violence was seemingly the only effective way to effect reform.
But as fellow New Yorkers Dorothy Day or Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson insisted , there was another less violent way to change hearts and minds ...
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Manhattan Natural : wartime Gotham's un-super heroes ...
At a time (WWII) when comic book superheroes , usually operating in a make-believe Manhattan, were saving the world every day and enthralling North American children and youth , lesser known but equally larger-than-life actual heroics were taking place in a real Manhattan.
But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .
If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.
They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.
They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek but now weak and crippled .
They never numbered more than a handful : misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.
They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".
Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.
'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .
Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...
But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .
If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.
They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.
They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek but now weak and crippled .
They never numbered more than a handful : misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.
They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".
Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.
'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .
Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...
Blog's background tiled image is of the oppressive walls of CUMC circa 1928
I am trying to think of visual ways to convey the sheer unexpectedness of the wartime triumph of Manhattan natural penicillin.
What tab-dropping novelist would ever dare suggest that the attempts to create artificial penicillin blossomed in Oxford University's leafy green setting while the successful effort to bring naturally grown penicillin to the world's dying would emerge from Gotham's concrete jungle ?
Even Superman and Spider Man might be taken back to think something as green as natural penicillin would actually bloom among Gotham City's concrete skyscrapers.
When we think of NYC 's biggest private sector employers we probably think first of finance's Wall Street, advertising's Madison Avenue, fashion's Seventh Avenue, or of broadway theatres, publishing and media headquarters.
But actually NYC's largest private sector employer is a hospital : the world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Center) with its thousands of high tech beds and its tens of thousands of daily outpatient visitors.
And so it was that one of 1940 Manhattan's most impressive concrete skylines wasn't set in Midtown at all.
Instead that vista was the sight of CUMC's massed hospital windows set into concrete, endlessly repeating row on row on row.
It certainly helped that Columbia Presbyterian had an inherently dramatic location (by design) -- boldly sited high on top of a hill of sheer rock in uppermost Manhattan.
In this unlikely setting, this high tech concrete jungle , this modernist temple to reductionist chemistry , Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team tried to set up 700 two litre flasks of natural penicillium spores - all in the face of passive resistance from CUMC's ever-forward-thinking administrators.
About the best way to kill penicillium is to jostle it from room to room to room and that is exactly what the administrators ensured would happen.
Every other professor seemed to have a higher priority than Dawson on the dean's list of potential labs , so that every vacant room he secured as a nursery for his green friends had to be quickly given up.
Finally , he got use of the tiny space beneath each student's seat in the hospital's big two storey teaching amphitheatre.
The warmth from the butt of each slumbering early morning male med student became like a brood hen to the delicate charges below.
(I am not making this stuff up !)
In typical New York City fashion, even the fire escapes were put to good use - used to let the arid pungent smell of penicillium juice waft out onto Broadway crowds rather than to offend the sensitive noses of the hospital's bosses.
A decidedly concrete jungle setting for an early post-modern attempt to return to a new relationship with Mother Nature.
To help convey the overwhelmingly oppressive sight of CUMC's walls , where even a top surgeon - let alone a humble patient or penicillium spore - is but a mere cog , I made a tile out of a tiny fragment from an old 1928 era photograph of CUMC.
That tile is now the oppressive concrete jungle backdrop to this blog.
I know I can do much better - possibly by smearing a spot of green penicillium in the center of each window ?
We'll see...
What tab-dropping novelist would ever dare suggest that the attempts to create artificial penicillin blossomed in Oxford University's leafy green setting while the successful effort to bring naturally grown penicillin to the world's dying would emerge from Gotham's concrete jungle ?
Even Superman and Spider Man might be taken back to think something as green as natural penicillin would actually bloom among Gotham City's concrete skyscrapers.
When we think of NYC 's biggest private sector employers we probably think first of finance's Wall Street, advertising's Madison Avenue, fashion's Seventh Avenue, or of broadway theatres, publishing and media headquarters.
But actually NYC's largest private sector employer is a hospital : the world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Center) with its thousands of high tech beds and its tens of thousands of daily outpatient visitors.
And so it was that one of 1940 Manhattan's most impressive concrete skylines wasn't set in Midtown at all.
Instead that vista was the sight of CUMC's massed hospital windows set into concrete, endlessly repeating row on row on row.
It certainly helped that Columbia Presbyterian had an inherently dramatic location (by design) -- boldly sited high on top of a hill of sheer rock in uppermost Manhattan.
In this unlikely setting, this high tech concrete jungle , this modernist temple to reductionist chemistry , Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team tried to set up 700 two litre flasks of natural penicillium spores - all in the face of passive resistance from CUMC's ever-forward-thinking administrators.
About the best way to kill penicillium is to jostle it from room to room to room and that is exactly what the administrators ensured would happen.
Every other professor seemed to have a higher priority than Dawson on the dean's list of potential labs , so that every vacant room he secured as a nursery for his green friends had to be quickly given up.
Finally , he got use of the tiny space beneath each student's seat in the hospital's big two storey teaching amphitheatre.
The warmth from the butt of each slumbering early morning male med student became like a brood hen to the delicate charges below.
(I am not making this stuff up !)
In typical New York City fashion, even the fire escapes were put to good use - used to let the arid pungent smell of penicillium juice waft out onto Broadway crowds rather than to offend the sensitive noses of the hospital's bosses.
A decidedly concrete jungle setting for an early post-modern attempt to return to a new relationship with Mother Nature.
To help convey the overwhelmingly oppressive sight of CUMC's walls , where even a top surgeon - let alone a humble patient or penicillium spore - is but a mere cog , I made a tile out of a tiny fragment from an old 1928 era photograph of CUMC.
That tile is now the oppressive concrete jungle backdrop to this blog.
I know I can do much better - possibly by smearing a spot of green penicillium in the center of each window ?
We'll see...
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