The Manhattan Project for the small

Gather 'round kiddies, as teacher tells you how America burned a hundred thousand children to a crisp, along with their mommies and daddies and grandmas.

Oh wait ---------- darn !! ------ there's a subtitle !

Ah hem.

Now children , have you ever been so sick that you have to go to the doctor ? Well sometimes children are so very sick that the doctor even comes to their house - and at top speed to.

Modernity: the 500 Year Reich

In retrospect, all of the promise of the New York's World Fair (1939-1940) turned out to be just the sad brief apogee of Late Modernity, indeed of all Modernity itself.

It hardly started out that way.

Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.

Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .

But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.

In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.

Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.

And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.

What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?

Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....

"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944

How Omaha got its "P"

It was never supposed to have to come to this: the smart money - and Big Science - had long promised that (a) high tech strategic bombing would force the Germans out of the war without any need of an invasion and that (b) the Allies would have lots of cheap, pure, high tech synthetic penicillin.


But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.

 So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of  low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.

Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".

Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...

This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.

 A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.

D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.

But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.

Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.

 They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......

1943 : Schindler's list versus America's non-list

wartime HOLOCAUST reports ignored by public

1993 : Fifty years after adult America first learned about the killing of millions of  European Jews - and did nothing about it - a new adult America was ready to turn a film about efforts to save some of those Jews into a massive movie hit.

Why not ?

 After all the vast bulk of those millions of film goers were under the age of 55* in 1993. In 1943, they were either tiny children or not even alive when their parents and grandparents first knew about the mass killing ---- but did nothing.

Their conscience, unlike those of their parents and grandparents, was perfectly clear and they felt free to watch the movie without severe attacks of regret and guilt.

If you were ten or older in June 1942, Schindler's List probably made you at least a bit uneasy....

But few Americans ( or Canadians or Britons, etc ) over the age of 55 in 1993 were so lucky.

They were old enough to remember the promises of Modernity before the events of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Katyn Forest brought all those certitudes into question.

Modernity suffered a mortal body blow during WWII , in 1945 in particular.

But with most people over the age of 15 in 1945 in some way implicated in supporting the values of Modernity that had led to these events, only time and the deaths it produced, were likely to see Modernity seriously challenged .

The youngest people of Modernity were just starting to leave the workforce in 1993 and so Modernity's people were finally losing their hold on the reins of power.

Reduced it but did not eliminate it : as owners, authors, columnists, scholars, voters, they still did have a considerable but ever diminishing ability to impede a new hegemony, if no longer able to direct the old hegemony.

Today in late 2012, almost 20 years after the release of the movie, anyone under 75 is likely to watch Schindler's List without the twinge of personal conscience.

Pre-war Modernity still has its billions of fans - but they are not  there at the time, so they can only admire from second hand and I believe its hold on their emotions is thus correspondingly far less strong......

* I think anyone born in 1937 or 1938 or late , ie under the age of about 7 or 8 in the Fall of 1945  is unlikely to have read the wartime daily papers or follow the nightly wartime radio news, with their steady if very low key presentation of reports detailing reported mass killings of Jews and others.

By way of pointed contrast, young Philip Roth born in early 1933 and later a famous novelist, does remember those reports very well.

The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era

MY high school teachers ran WWII !

It is striking how just old the leaders of WWII were: not just politicians, but also the generals, bureaucrats, CEOs, professors and editors. Anyone who was anybody was usually far older than today's leaders is in equivalent positions.

Most were born in the 1870s and 1880s and so got their last science education in the 1890s, from high school teachers who themselves got their last science education at a high school at the end of the Early Victorian era !

So : the Science of the late 1840s used to guide the world of the early 1940s.

The leaders of WWII , Modernists to the core, had a firm faith grounded on a distinct impression that the First Law of Thermodynamics and Lyell's Law of Uniformitarianism was the Alpha and Omega of scientific knowledge ----- for all time.

When your high school science teacher tells you the universe is eternally unchangeable, why bother to drop by to be posted on the latest updates in basic science . There aren't going to be any , there can't be any.

Just take a bit of time to keep up on the latest wonderful new technological offerings.

Now do the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalingrad seem more understandable ?

DAWSON & RADIOACTIVITY : conceived on the same day (Nov 8 1895) ?

   Dr Martin Henry Dawson was born on August 6th 1896 and was conceived about 9 months earlier.
    Early November 1895, in all likelihood.
    About the very same time ,in fact, when Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered X-Rays (November 8th 1895).
    This event, in turn, led almost immediately (less than three months later) to the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity - perhaps the single most astounding discovery in science in the 19th century.

    Spontaneous (and random and unpredictable) radioactivity, it was determined after much effort, was merely the visible sign of an even more astounding natural event: atoms of one element in the process of becoming atoms of another element.
   Alchemy's magic of transmutation, brought to life.
   Think of it : what can that familiar chemist's word - elemental - possibly mean if not 'fundamental' and 'indivisible' and 'stable' ?
   Now all that had seemed universal and eternal and stable was revealed to be but a passing fancy.
   And it happened, not as Science said all Reality happened, IE in a deterministic way, but rather merely upon Mother Nature's whim !
   The certitudes of two thousand years of science, philosophy and mathematics trembled.
   Most people successfully ignored radioactivity's strange implications for how all Mankind understood Reality to focus instead on its superficial charms.
 Until that morning in Hiroshima, on August 6th 1945, (which would have been - strange coincidence - Dawson's 49th birthday) when 'all this strange radioactivity stuff'  reared up and destroyed an entire metropolitan city,  with but a single bomb.
   Now the entire world sat up and finally paid full notice - almost 50 years to the day from the original discovery.
    A few - too few - even sat down that summer day to really ponder the philosophic implications of radioactivity's spontaneity and thus ipon its ability to destroy our sense of how we had thought the Universe worked.
  Pity that : because this was an ability far beyond even its now proven powers to destroy life and matter.
   Dr Dawson's lifework was not  at allabout radioactivity - but as it happened his life spanned radioactivity's critical first years almost exactly : something that makes things much easier for the biographer of Dawson or of Radioactivity.
    Yet Dawson was involved in 'transmutation', as it happens, in fact involved in a fundamentally critical way.
   But not radioactivity's transmutation of matter and energy (the stuff of Physics and Chemistry) but rather in DNA's transmutation of life and organization (the stuff of Biology).
   The only beings that can as yet (humanity is working on it) transmutate DNA and hence Life are the microbes - and the lives of microbes was Dawson's lifework.
   The research that led to the discovery of what Dawson called  'bacterial transformation' (of DNA) began like the story of radioactivity in the mid-1890s.
 Questions began to be asked about cases of bacterial variations so extreme as to sound more like the spontaneous creation of new species and a mere variation on a given theme.
   But in orthodox biology circles that was a big no-no:  had not Darwin himself said the creation of a new species would take millions of years to emerge, not an hour or two ?
   The most unsettling implications of Dawson's work - like radioactivity's most profound implications - were successfully ignored then - in fact, still are.
   If 1945 was the year of Auschwitz , the A-bomb and of Penicillin, it was also the year of transformative DNA as well  : annus mirabilis indeed ...

MODERNITY FALLS 1945

   There is no consensus on the name for the Era we are presently living - the era after the Era of Modernity. But all agree that it began in 1945.

   That means that every single one of us has has spent the majority of our lives living in this "Era-Without-A-Name".

  Rather embarrassing that : perhaps it will be left to our ancestors to name this era retrospectively.

   Then billions will perhaps know us as Commensalities, when we never heard the word while alive, let alone ever thought of ourselves that way.

   A child whose birthday everyone knows , but who no one is willing to christen, is an unusual child indeed.

  Why then the nigh-universal consensus that this post modernity era we are living in all began in 1945?

   It was not as if nothing else happened in 1945, so it had some plenty of time on its hands to dream up post-modernity.

  1945 was the year the world finally ending its worst conflict : WWII.

   With the occupation of enemy lands long hidden from the world, reports of horrible things were finally confirmed by the Allied armies : the concentration camps and death camps.

  Soon the upcoming Nuremberg Trials would reveal that death camps like Auschwitz also held plenty of evidence of unbelievably cruel medical experiments on innocent human children.

  Gas Chambers or Doctor Mengele, all worked together to advance the ultimate intentions of Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   All worked to create the perfect Master Race, even if that meant that those judged non-master races had to pay the ultimate penalty to make it all happen. 

  Meanwhile in August 1945, the Americans dropped single bombs, from single planes,  yet big enough to wiped out big cities - cities like Hiroshima.
   Hitherto, thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of bombs ( and a perfect storm of weather) had been needed to wipe out a city.

  Since the Americans alone had thousands of these big planes ,B-29s, (planes able as well to fly half way around the world) that meant we suddenly faced a world where the next big war might mean all cities everywhere facing annihilation.

   Meanwhile the ineffectiveness of any defense against the German V-2 rockets reminded us that while we might be able to shoot down the B-29s before they reached our cities, soon even that option would be closed off.

   So Newtonian Physics was also in its final phase : no longer content on measuring the transit of planets, it had moved up to destroying planets instead.

   Hiroshima, Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Warsaw - city after city shattered  with depressing ease.

   Equal depressing was the thought that Auschwitz was merely the culmination of six years of killing in the name of Genetics.

  But also in 1945, World War II was credited (wrongly) for bringing at least a bit of good news.
   In a race against time, tiny simple stupid Microbes had beaten the best of the world's chemists (The1940s Masters of the Universe) to produce natural penicillin when Mankind failed to make synthetic penicillin.
    What today is an enormous industry, bio or micro technology, never looked back.

 By contrast, Daltonian Chemistry, hitherto the Queen of Science particularly in Industry, started a long slow slide into invisibility.  

   The jewels of  the Era of Modernity were these three: Newtonian Physics, Daltonian Chemistry and Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   With all three in ruins by the end of 1945, Modernity 's Fall was all but available....

Earthlings versus the Sky Gods : 1945 and "THE FALL OF MODERNITY"

   Everyone agrees that Post-Modernity began after 1945 and that thus, in some muted --- pastel --- fashion, Modernity must also have began its slow decline in that same momentous year.
   Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
   So 1945, Year of Revolution.
   Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
  No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass  protests or barricaded streets.
   For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
  Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
   In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
  Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
  Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
   At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
   Or a mushroom - your taste......

Contra Chris Mooney , SCIENCE & REPUBLICANS once exchanged bodily fluids quite happily ...

Michael Marshall

In the 1930s, when FDR and the Democrats were racking up their impressive majorities ,about the only place the twosome couldn't catch flies was in college towns ---- they voted Republican.

Yep.

Science - conservative Modernist/Progressive Science - was very popular with the not-yet-angry-wealthy-white-guys back then.

For it had demonstrated, from the example of Nature, that it was natural and inevitable for the big and the powerful to vanquish the small and the weak - and those red letter passages in the New Testament be damned.

(I mean had this Jesus guy ever even so much as run a single lab experiment ??)

Conservatism is the business of relishing certitudes in an uncertain world and Science, Modernist Science, sure delivered some beauts.

But after 1945, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, scientists - the younger ones particularly - started having their doubts and by the late 1970s they were coming on to replace the dying and retiring modernists in science's positions of power.

The certitudes of modernist science had actually been proven wrong almost as soon as they were publicly uttered but these failings were downplayed and buried--- until the post war post modern generation found the courage to speak up.

As scientists showed the world to be even more uncertain than any lay person imagined possible, the conservative personality left the ship of science in droves.

What college town today votes Republican? - the idea seems absurd.

In which case, Chris Mooney is right and I am wrong.

But look it up - they did once.

In spades....

Invasion of the SKY GODS : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

"Earthlings versus the invasion of the SKY GODS" sounds like a 1950s Sci Fi movie made out of some Robert Heinlein story.

Suitable only for the teen fare at the make-out pit at the local drive-in.

It certainly doesn't sound like any useful way to sum up WWII.

But recall how the Nazis dug up and revived the old myths about the Sky Gods and made the Swastika, often a symbol of sky gods like Thor, the master symbol of their belief system.

Remember that both Japan and Germany clearly thought of themselves as overmen, ruling the undermen.

(Ubermensch and untermensch.)

The communist parties, all over the world, also thought of themselves as a group of ubermensch SKY GODS, guiding with a bloody-firm hand the working class untermensch ,as they set about together to liquidate the middle and upper classes to bring about a new utopia.

Recollect that both the Germans and the Japanese went to war on a little petro and a whole lot of faith : their non-logistics systems can only be described as 'pie in the sky' or 'blue sky' thinking.

And even a cursory memory of WWII newsreel type imagery should remind us how often both chose to portray themselves as eagles on high swooping down on their enemy in Stukas or Zeros.

Earthlings ?

Well I admit the word, in its current meaning, wasn't even used till 1949 - by the very un-earthling sci fi writer Robert Heinlein - mostly because it was a word describing a concept not yet invented until after WWII, Auschwitz and Hiroshima .

All of us modern/civilized/urban humans suddenly seeing ourselves as small ,weak and vulnerable.

In other words, suddenly feeling post-modern and commensal with the rest of Earth.

But clearly the values Martin Henry Dawson fought for and the way he chose to fight for them, is a forerunner of Heilein's earthlings.

A 4F sized factory, run by 4F doctors with 4F fungi to save 4F patients against the efforts of A1 world interested in only saving the genetic A1s of the world .

Because there were as many SKY GODS in Manhattan as in Berlin or Toyko or Moscow....

NORDEN Modernity versus GEOSMIN Commensality

Michael Marshall

Do you remember the most famous scene in THE THIRD MAN movie?

(It is usually on somebody's top ten films of all time list.)

The villain HARRY LIME ,standing in for the Devil , takes the naive narrator HOLLY MARTINS to the top of Vienna's famous Ferris Wheel.

 Lime tells Martins that from this height, all the people in the world look ant-sized and that's all they're worth - ants to be crushed.

 'So Martins, why get all upset about a few kiddies dying from my adulterated penicillin --- just look the other way and go with the flow.'

(Harry Lime's diluted penicillin fails to save children with MENINGITIS whose lives could have been readily saved  - but only if enough Penicillin "G" is injected into them right away.

The fact that Pfizer chief "John L"  Smith's daughter had earlier died of meningitis that Martin Henry Dawson said his naturally grown penicillin could have cured, was probably the number one,two and three reasons we got WWII penicillin before D-Day ---- and not two years later.)

But in the movie, Martins, rather like Jesus, doesn't accept the 'high level' bribe and later on sets up Lime for his doom.

I often think of Harry Lime whenever I think of the men peering into the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT in some Allied bomber, coolly preparing to exact collective punishment on some enemy or occupied civilian population from 15,000 feet.

At that height, people aren't even ant-sized - they are bacteria or fungi sized - invisible.

Japanese microbes at Hiroshima.

When these people burn to death from your bombs, you don't hear their screams or smell their burning flesh.

Murder - Pierre-Simon Laplace style - from a remote outsider/ observer's position, coolly peering through the glass before pushing the button.

Like the way they did it as Auschwitz as well.

The overmen killing off the undermen , like ants under one's feet.

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON had his war too, but it was not a few hours spent at 15,000 feet above the ground --- he lived it from a position 5 feet below the ground, for months at a time - in a WWI trench.

Here the always present smell of the Earth was mixed with the smell of dead men and dead horses, feces and old mustard 'gas' .

You couldn't help hearing men from the raiding parties scream out their last on the barbed wire of No Man's Land or avoid seeing conrade's headless bodies still upright beside you - while their heads flew off to serve as a projectile to kill some other poor sod.

Here you saw Nature close up and raw - sunrise creeping up, sunset going down - rain, wind, midday heat - all the elements of the weather chilled your bones and soaked your clothes.

The most famous artwork from that war was a humble cartoon - it has two Tommies in a crude foxhole, trying to survive an intense bombardment.

One guy isn't happy about their chances in that particular hole - but the other says in effect, look around, shells exploding everywhere above ground - yes we're like rats in a hole in the earth, but its secure from all but a direct hit so, "if you know a better 'ole - go to it !"

We're like that today - we're stuck here on a crumbling Earth and some guy has the bright idea that life would be better if NASA flew all of us off to Mars or something.

I hope I speak for you when I say, "go ahead sonny - if you think you know a better 'ole, then go to it - I am staying here and muddling through".

I can smell the Earth and I like it - and its all we've got.

Commensality in the Trenches ????

It multiplied in the trenches - your mates - and the rats - were as close as girlfriends back home - and body lice were so plentiful that they literally changed the color of your skin by their massed presence there.

And above all you could smell your ever present commensal companions, the fungi and bacteria, in the soil all around you.

You know that smell of freshly turned soil we sometimes smell after a rain ?

 We also can smell it on grapes/wine or in  beets or in the flesh of catfish.

Some love it, call it 'earthy' ; others hate it and call it 'musty/moldy'.

But all humans can smell it - at levels as few as a few parts per trillion.

For some reason it is a critical smell to our survival.

Here is maybe one reason why:

When an infantryman hugs the earth, literally, trying to survive, he knows that of all his tools for survival it is his entrenching shovel and a few feet of soil around him that is a better protector of his personal safety than his side's tanks, artillery or bombers.

He loves the smell of the soil that his shovel has freshly turned over.

That smell is called GEOSMIN : think of it as geos min ,literally meaning 'earth smell'.

It is produced, mostly, by bacteria that live together with fungus in the soil.

 They look and act a lot like fungus but aren't.

In fact the fungi probably copied them not the other way around.

We tend to lump both together and call them mold - and this is not too inaccurate - because they both do much the same thing from a lay person's point of view.

Those bacteria are the streptomyces - the soil lovers that directly produce much of the world's antibiotics - and produce most of the rest indirectly - by transferring the crucial genes to make penicillin to the penicillium fungus about 370 million years ago.

The soil fungus and the streptomyces bacteria grow by joining together as filamentous multi-celled super organisms.

Not exactly like a human multi-celled organism - these guys, particularly the bacteria, remain semi-independent in the sense that all continue to reproduce themselves by cloning.

So a trillion bacteria or fungus cells in a teaspoon each with potentially different DNA - because they are designed to be unstable genetically - producing many similar but slightly different offspring.

Even the fungus offspring don't always combine their DNA sexually like we do , instead they sometimes exchange some of their DNA with each other - horizontally - as well as with other non-fungus beings near by.

The filamentous (thread-like) nature of these soil creatures - dozens of feet of incredibly tiny threads of life in each tiny colony - allows them to find nutrients in every nook and cranny in a nutrient poor world .

The competing filamentous strands of bacteria and fungi mean they lie together in extensive,intimate, personal contact - allowing both to make the most of the very rare opportunities to exchange DNA between the seeming wide divide between the animal kingdom (fungus) and the bacteria kingdom.

(Wide if you believe Darwin and his fans - but I don't.)

Dawson worked hard at Bacterial Transformation (aka horizontal gene transfer) (aka recombinant DNA), from 1928 to 1933 at least, long before the rest of science ever did.

 But I doubt that even he knew for sure that the penicillin he worked with from 1940 to 1945 was the result of  some earlier Bacterial Transformation experiments ----done by the microbes themselves !

But he might have suspected something - he knew that Selman Waksman at nearby Rutgers University had already shown that these soil bacteria produced a lot of antibiotic materials while it was rare to see antibiotics from fungus in general - except for the fungi closest in lifestyle to the soil bacteria.

Commensality between fungus and bacteria in the soil gave us penicillin.

No, I stand corrected.

It was Dawson's openness to those moldy musty smells, from his World War One trench experiences 25 years earlier, that brought penicillin out of the trench and into the hospital ward.

I mean that not as a metaphor but as reality : penicillium and streptomyces are found in the earth, literally in the trenches.

And just as the earth once acted as a barrier to shell fragments and saved many an infantryman's life during WWI, now trench earth bacteria and fungus gave us antibiotics to again save the infantryman in WWII , if he was hit by a shell fragment.

Dawson saw the war and the world down at ground level, at the level of the MOS 745 - the bog ordinary Grunt,GI or Tommy,  not from some Olympian Height of indifference.

 And this is why he gave his life, so some bog ordinary 4F patients and 4F grunts could live....

The healthiest, most terrified Generation in history

michael marshall

If you were a child between July 1945 and October 1963, you were literally part of the "BOOM" generation.

"BOOM" as in the large loud bang made when an above-ground atomic bomb test went off somewhere and yet more fallout drifted down in your morning glass of milk.

(And studies have now confirmed that the more of that life-giving, much-advertised, fresh milk you drank in the 1950s, the better your chances become to die of cancer today.)

But we thought then, not of a slow death by cancer when we were old, but of our entire world all expiring one sunny day, whenever the West and the East chose to go CODE RED.

Terrified we were, yes - but also very healthy - thanks to all those "antibiotics-before-bacterial-resistance".

O Manhattan ! , island home of  both the manhattan project and natural penicillin, you sure have a lot to answer for....

FALLOUT means all Life dies at a COmmon table

Michael Marshall

"The fallout from the volcano Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 led to "The Year without Summer" across the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, in which hundreds of thousands died on the diseases of hunger."

"The fallout from the last Soviet H-Bomb test series led to increases in cancers all around the world."

"The fallout from the brutalities of the Germans upon ' just a bunch of Polacks' (culminating in the horrors of AUSCHWITZ), ultimately led to the deaths of the sons of many of those same  Isolationist parents, years later and half a non-isolated world away....

Few of us are likely to misunderstand these three sentences, even though the word fallout was first used, in its modern sense, only in 1949.

We now accept that a volcano or pandemic half a world away can reach out and bite us anywhere in the world - even in the heart of Isolationism - the American Heartland of the Mid-West.

We learned this first in 1945 at HIROSHIMA, when it became clear that either a rocket or a large bomber could travel half way around the world and drop a city leveling bomb on us.

We learned it even better by 1954, than none of us could live 'safe' in the countryside --- death would just come to us a little later - from radioactive dust drifting down from the sky from bombs a continent away.

And over and over, if a war happens in a part of the world judged vital by some superpower or other, we know sooner or later our kids will be called upon to get in there and die.

We now accept what Modernist Man did not -- that the world is just one big 'common table' and that we can dine together around it --- or all die together around it.

So people - which side are you on ?

Still believing in MOdernity, that Man is far above nature and we can do nothing to it - or it to us - that a little High Tech Science can't solve ?

Or do you now accept that we live , fully embedded ,inside Nature and Nature's limits, that we now live in "The Age of Commensality" ?

This is this century's global ideological divide ......

AUSCHWITZ & HIROSHIMA : the PLAN "B"s of MOdernity

Michael Marshall

Give credit where credit is due : MARTIN HENRY DAWSON planned, at the start of his war, to prove up his concept  that SBE can be permanently cured by the systemic (internal) use of naturally grown penicillin .

He fully accomplished this goal and in the process kick-started the wartime production of the world's best known, best loved, medicine.

He worked closely with some of the weakest members of the Family of Life, tiny unicelled fungi , to save the lives of some of the weakest members of the Family of Man : COmmensality at it its pioneering 1940s best.

But neither the Axis nor the Allied planned at the start of their wars to bring forth the delights of Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

Hitler had always wanted all the Jews out of Europe,yes, but expelled rather than all being killed in German factories of death.

But gassing them all became Job #1 for him when his PLAN A, Operation Barbarossa, failed in the winter of 1941-1942 because Russian mud proved a better soldier than German automotive skills.

 Killing all the Jews he could get his hands on became a sort of consolation prize, a PLAN B, when Hitler failed totally in his main, his real, objective --- taking and holding European Russia.

Similarly for FDR - he of the famous proclamation decrying the killing and burning to death of civilians in the comparatively small bombing raids of early WWII.

He and his scientists had a much better idea :
careful, precise, humane aiming via the top secret NORDEN BOMB SIGHT, accurate enough to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet", it was said.

Designed precisely to destroy just the military target and  ensure no collateral damages among the nearby civilians.

But his Plan A was a total belly flop disaster.

Soon America was onto PLAN B.

Soon American bombers were trying very hard to burn out entire metropolitan cities , burning up everyone from granddaughter to grandmother, in the hopes the flames might also lick at the contents of the factories hidden somewhere inside that metropole.

Toyko, Dresden, Hiroshima --- a 100,000 dead and burnt, "just like that", in each city, in just one raid.

Hiroshima and Auschwitz were MOdernity's failures alright - morally - nearly everyone agrees on that.

But may I propose they were also MOdernity's technological
failures ---Plan B consolation prizes exalted by wartime propaganda as if they had been Plan A all along.

But we,we historians seventy years on, know better - don't we ?

With Hiroshima and Auschwitz as MOdernity's tarnished PLAN B consolation prizes and the unexpected triumph of natural penicillin's  PLAN A over MOdernity's failure to produce the much promised  synthetic penicillin, little wonder that COmmensality's star was on the rise in late1945.....

NON-RENEWABLE MODERNITY: R.I.P. 1873-1973

It was the Age of the Fossils ;  it was the Age of the Moderns.

Non-Renewable Fossil Fuel powered Modernity and when the Fossils ran out the door, so did Modern Man.

Modernity, severely wounded in its own self-inflicted disaster of WWII , finally died during the Energy Crisis of 1973.

Modernity just ran out of steam and just ran out of energy : at least it ran out of endless amounts of nearly free energy - the given that Modernists seemingly took for granted.

Still isn't it a little jarring, maybe even a little ironic , n'est pas ?

This unexpected yoking together of Modern Modernity and Ancient Fossils: oil and water, chalk and cheese.

Well it seems that way to me, but the Modernists (cum Climate Change Deniers) are notorious for having no sense of the ironic.

Maybe they figure that's a job best left for the PO-MO crowd.

Non-Renewal Modernity had a best before due date and 1973 said it was well past due.

This era's energy  will not just be renewable energy, it will also be highly dispersed and highly decentralized - it will be as SMALL as Modernity was characteristically concentrated & BIG.

The r-selected will inherit the K-selected Earth, so to speak.

I hope, soon ,to read some books that place Modernity's (economic) demise with the Fossils' departure in the Fall of 1973.

 That would be a pleasant break from all those authors that simply repeat the old wheeze that Modernity died (morally) in the hellfires of Hiroshima and Auschwitz in 1945....