The topdog Jock/Football Captain/Rowing Blue/BMOC - they've always been around, even in Martin Henry Dawson's time in university a hundred years ago.
Similarly, the underdog Swot/Square/Boffin/Nerd/Geek .
They were certain to be members of the chess club back then as now (as Dawson certainly was).
They actually liked philosophy class and the classically dead languages (Dawson again).
They dutifully and cheerfully always passed their essays in on time, never skipped class, and when not in the library ( researching, not flirting) were in the high school band or orchestra, no doubt playing like the oboe or something equally, well, nerdy.
The socially adept jocks became natural up front politicians, running first for high school president and then American President.
Meanwhile the more studious, honest and charisma-challenged types were 'urged' to fill the tiring, detail-filled backroom jobs because someone has to step into the breech and it might as well be you - again.
It is hard today to imagine the pocket-protecting chemist ever being seen as the jock and the topdog, but between the wars this was so - chemistry was just so cool, so powerful.
A Swot's revenge indeed when the ultimate underdogs, basement penicillium slime and working class SBEs, turned tables on the topdog jock chemists near the end of WWII...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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