Young reader, responding badly : why my book is really about the 1950s, though set in the 1940s...

After the end of WWII, some Big People began to write a self-congratulatory and dishonest 'La historia oficial' of wartime penicillin.

Other Big People, in government, media and in universities, read it and got it, totally.

And why not ? It certainly reflected their take on Reality.

So they spread the official version ever outward, out to the very ordinary public and even out to little children.

But most of us know how any story we tell can get distorted in the understanding of some who hear it - no matter how short and simple the story.

Academics have developed some quite elaborate theories to account for this : reader response , they call it.

My book is about how the official version story of penicillin quickly got badly distorted among a key audience : the baby boomers.

The visual imagery of the story of wartime penicillin has never changed in the seventy years from 1945 till today.

Always the same steady progress from early photos of young women, dressed like nursemaids, tenderly attending small milk bottles of some foul green mess to the final photos of middle aged men in white coats pensively turning knobs while glancing at dials, before massive arrays of heavily built, gleaming stainless steel or white painted chemical towers.

Indeed the photos of the outside of some of the 1945 era penicillin plants are totally indistinguishable from the many small oil refineries of that era.

Visit me some time and I'll test you on whether or not you can tell a small capacity 1945 oil refinery photo from a large capacity 1945 penicillin plant.

My bet is you'll get it wrong.

In fact, the inconvenient truth all those photos of massive man-made opaque production towers was designed to deny, was that the actual production of penicillin remained - unexpectedly - the same from start to finish.

Despite a multi-nation effort almost as big as the Manhattan atomic project, the smartest chemists in the Universe failed to produce any commercial penicillin and so inside 1945's big steel tanks were the same small microbes making penicillin just as they had inside 1940's small flasks and milk bottles.

And somehow we little people got it.

Despite the official story.

We got that creatures as small and as powerless as us, the bog common ordinary kitchen molds, were making the stuff that was saving so many of us baby baby boomers from the premature deaths our parents and grandparents had faced.

And that WWII wasn't just about Big Bombs from Big Civilizations but also about small lifesavers from small nature.

Even at age seven and eight, we were buying into the nascent idea that diversifying humanity's portfolio to include as much human and biological diversity from the small and powerless side of the world as possible was a very good thing indeed...

1956 - turning point in the Long Fifties decade

Many historians feel the Fifties actually ran from the late 1940s to the early 1960s : a 'Long Fifties' running roughly from 1947 to 1964.

The more astute ones admit that it also changed character, sharply and abruptly, midway around 1956-1957.

Fears of adult cancers and childhood mutations from invisible global nuclear fallout from peacetime nuclear testing and nuclear plant accidents suddenly emerged full blown in March 1956.

Fallout from US nuclear test CASTLE BRAVO had just killed a Japanese fisherman thousands of miles away - the resulting publicity became the opening chapter in today's vast environmental movement.

In 1957 Sputnik arrive, literally out of the blue, and told the world that a H-Bomb could now kill millions-in-minutes in a metropolitan city like London or Tokyo, with almost no warning and with known no air defence able to stop this 'death by intercontinental nuclear missile'.

Now instead of the world being one global village thanks to Fifties technology, it was now a global Hiroshima ... thanks to Fifties technology.

Both events saw instant cultural traction as dozens of popular sci fi movies emerged with nuclear mutated monsters and end of the world plots.

Mid point Baby Boomers

I mention all this because I am a mid point baby boomer - I wasn't born in 1941 or 1966 but in 1951, so my first good strong continuous memories only begin in 1957.

So the Golly Gee technology-optimistic early 1950s was more visible to me as a historical material artifact - from books written well before 1956-1957 - than something I actually heard adults around me saying by 1957.

We error if we don't approach the Long Fifties as a complex transitional decade rather than some uncomplicated conservative golden age of mom, apple pie and white picket fences.

Let's stop Dicking with Jane ....

Conflicting Images of Fifties Science - as recalled by a child

As a little kid back then, I have only two memories of Fifties Science --- two images only.

Back in that totally totalizing era, it is hard to imagine Science being allowed to display such wildly conflicting public images.

But it did - a sign perhaps of what was going to break out into the open in the 1960s and 1970s, when Science divided into Dunlap & McCright's feuding Production and Impact scientists.

Synthetics

One image came from our textbooks, Hollywood movies and countless beyond countless ads in our parents' glossy magazines.

It was of gleaming porcelain white laboratories - bright lit, clean and dry - with stern faced men in white lab coats carefully adjusting walls of shining stainless steel dials - or peering intently at the well-behaved contents of spotlessly clean beakers and test tubes.

I swear to God you could safely eat off all of it - the floor, the walls, the dials, the lab coats, the beakers, even the men's smoothly-shaved strong chins.

The constant cut line below was usually about 'living better synthetically' : whether chemically or atomically it mattered little.

Slime

The other image could not have been more opposite.

But this was an image we children had to conjure up in our own minds from what our teacher verbally told us.

Penicillin, she said, had along with more and more wonderful new child-saving medicines - had first come from a stinky smelly scraping off the dark wet concrete wall of a dank basement.

The other new antibiotics had also come from the most obscure and benighted corners of the world - as far away from those world class city white laboratories as life on earth could be.

We tried hard to imagine children like us being saved by slime plucked out of Mediterranean sewage discharges or by white fungus threads dug out of soil from the damp musky floors of decaying South American rain forest jungles.

Irony

And then had to reconcile all that child life saving from dirty slime against our vivid movie images of military Gas and Plutonium synthetically produced from behind the closely guarded walls of those gleaming white clean laboratories.

We were much too young to have developed a keen sense of irony , but still....

Baby Boomer kids a conflicted generation ?

Wouldn't you be ?

Boomers - at age (50-75) of highest voter turnout - now will dominate elections

Boomers - born after 1941 and before 1966 - will all be 50 to 75 in presidential election year 2016 - and those are precisely the peak years for highest voter turnout.

Forget what the marketing gurus are saying about the numbers of customers in each age cohort - be it The Greatest Generation or The Millennials.

Only 'votes in the ballot box' count on election night - and the very young and very old might buy a lot of drugs ---- but neither tends to vote very much.

Boomers : dominant voter bloc

This dominant voting bloc could choose to elect governments determined to slowing human carbon output in the atmosphere.

Or they could, once again, put in office government leaders committed to tossing ever more carbon dioxide into the heavens, all in the name of ever faster 'growth'.

Boomer voters will decide election night results for the next few decades ---- right up to the presumed climate change tipping point.

But unlike their growth-oriented parents or their survival-oriented children, the boomers - as a group - are genuinely conflicted and divided.

All the result of growing up as the Transitional Generation between modernity and postmodernity....

One MORE Great Thing : Boomers' March for the Climate

"I ain't gonna march no more" should never become the boomers' song- no matter how old and retiring we feel.

Because whenever we marched we eventually got some halfway hopeful results: marching for racial civil rights, against the Vietnam war, to ban the bomb, for women and gay rights, for the environment.

We were the generation destined to do Great Things and by and large we succeeded.

But no time to rest on our laurels.

We must once again take to the streets as Boomers - even as wheelchair-bound Boomers with gray hair beneath our tie-dye caps - even through the streets of Washington DC , to fight for the climate.

We indeed didn't start the climate change fire but we must try to fight it.

To do one more Great Thing, before we go ....

Climate meltdown & boomer epitaph : "we didn't start the fire but we tried to fight it"

Was baby boomer Billy Joel really singing about harmful human climate change and our need (as fellow boomers) to take the lead in putting out the fire that our parents, grandparents & great-great-great grandparents actually started ?

I'd like to think so.

And so the lyrics from Joel's song may live on and on and on, long after he is just a brief entry in a book of quotations :

BILLY JOEL (1949-2039) this now obscure singer and songwriter is remembered in the 25th century solely for this fragment from one of his forgotten songs, which has become the epitaph of the famous Boomer Generation who first stalled and then reversed human induced global warming threatening Humanity's continued existence...

Boomers : the 'Greater Generation' or the generation that precipitates the ending of the entire human experiment ?

Come on Boomers, we can do so much better !

We were supposed to be the generation from whom great things were expected.

Instead (somebody, somewhere, certainly not humanity itself) will remember us merely as the pathetic little generation that ended the entire human experiment for all time in a great big global meltdown.

Some of us Boomers will do so actively (big shout out to PMs Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott !)

But most of us will merely passively help end the human experiment : apparently we Boomers are not ones for much passion --- or commitment.

We'll just be inert Netflix Potatoes, as the equivalent of our parents' war against Nazi values grinds on outside our comfortable living rooms.

What we do - or don't do - on harmful human climate change, not Elvis, Rock 'n' Roll or Civil Rights Marches, will end up being what defines us Boomers.

Yes, we're all a little older, a little slower : the youngest of us are almost fifty and the oldest are in their early seventies - but we're not dead yet, not yet in the nursing home.

We still have time to do that One Great Thing that we all promised the world way back when....

dear Children of Janus Manhattan '45 : "If CO2 not at 350ppm by 2040, you'll tip us into a runaway disaster"

An Open Letter to my fellow members of the Boomer Generation:

(By 'boomer', I mean roughly all of us born after the initial start of what was to be the Manhattan Project and before the final implementation of the first Test Ban Treaty.)

Some of us, like myself, probably won't be alive when 2040 rolls around - we will never suffer the most severe consequences of our folly.

But we boomers currently rule the world and have done so since news of the 'hockey stick crisis' first hit the public media.

We are the boss in government and in the military, in finance, in intellectual and cultural circles.

We have heard the news, we are intelligent, highly educated people, we rule the world : we have no excuse, no barrier lay before us.

Only our selfish wills.

We are the children of Janus Manhattan '45 .

That janus year in the eternally janus city.

The New York City physicists of the Manhattan nuclear Project claimed that they had successfully bent even the most recalcitrant atoms to do Man's will: the signal triumph of 500 years of the Enlightenment Project.

By contrast, the New York City chemists of the Manhattan penicillin Project had admitted defeat : they had been unable to bend some very recalcitrant atoms into commercially viable synthetic penicillin.

Instead New York City biologists had shown how by working with Nature and not against her, humanity could produce abundant cheap natural penicillin-for-all : postmodern penicillin, Adorno's penicillin.

We boomers were given a choice : on one hand look backwards to the Manhattan nuclear Project with all its top down, anti-democratic secrecy and violence as a model of our relationship with the world and each other.

On the other hand, the Manhattan penicillin Project had involved tiny teams, even single individuals working on kitchen counters, using freely exchanged samples of penicillium spores.

With almost no government monies - often only hostility - they had proven to the rest of a doubting scientific world the clinical and economic value of freely-cooperating humanity and Nature working together around the commensal table.

We boomers had a choice : and some us became the classic boomer image of back to the land environmentalists - we got the message of natural penicillin.

But many others - like Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott - spurned that trend among boomers, became instead rogue Boomers and drank deep from the tainted Kool-Aid of the myth of the Manhattan nuclear Project.

Now they are driving this planet , like a car with its emission controls removed, off a climatic cliff.

As long as we boomers control most of the world's governments, its wealth and its biggest media outlets, only us can stop them.

My part in this effort - as I see it - is to urge all of us to take a hard look again at the legacy we were left with from Janus Manhattan's twin - warring - Projects in the Fall of 1945 ...

Elizabeth May - unlike Stephen Harper - is NOT a 'Rogue Boomer'

It is interesting to speculate why Elizabeth May, so similar in age to Stephen Harper, is so different in her attitude.

While Elizabeth is only 4 years older than Harper, I think she benefited from having an activist mom who introduced her children to adult issues at least a dozen years before many others first seriously think about them.

(Ie as young adults, after their upbringing in their formative years have hardened into dogma --- and when it is thus too late !)

I think I was a relatively ordinary child until I was ten, when a sudden change of circumstance separated me from a neighbourhood of kids playing outside and left me with only adult aged books and adult aged news magazines for boon companions.

Almost instantly, kids even a fair bit older than me seemed immature and boring and I much preferred to hang about with educated adults.

Ten - and an intellectual snob !

But as a result, my recollections of the Fifties (coincidentally my years before I was ten) is almost 100% childlike sunshine - while the early Sixties (my true formative years) are cast in the darkest direst most adult-like Noir.

I suspect that Harper had a perfectly ordinary childhood and that he never even suspected he'd just played tag and keep away during some of the most exciting years of the century - until he was in university.

Then regret-filled nostalgia kicked in - and he's been trying to relive the glory days of Fifties Big Fin Cars, Scientism and Golly Gee Modernity ever since...

Silent Majority Boomers - not their parents - running (and ruining) this planet

I've changed my thinking - at least a little.

The unacknowledged divisions within the Boomer Generation

I still believe that the most extreme and the most vocal supporters of climate change denial are older people - men mostly - in their eighties - people who were teenagers at the very apogee of Modernity and who thus naturally find it hardest to change ingrained habits.

Rupert Murdoch is a prime example of this sort of 'changed reality'  denier.

But Murdoch and his generation aren't running and ruining this world - at least not officially.

My generation - the Boomers - is.

Clearly not all of us Boomer kids fully absorbed the obvious lesson from WWII : that there actually are limits to even supermen's ability to control reality.

Not all of us Boomers - not by a long shot - successfully made The Transition from the old ways of thinking (ones that had fueled the Enlightenment Project for nearly 500 years) to the needed new ways of thinking.

These Boomers weren't the most vocal or most visible part of the Boomer generation (recall the Sixties protests), but like their parents before them,  they formed a powerful - if largely reticent - silent majority.

Some of these silent majority Boomers are now prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, media publishers etc but most are not.

They are simply voters and consumers who might even (feebly) talk the new talk - but when it comes to their pocketbook at the gas pump and the ballot box, walk (or rather drive) the old walk.

And if we can't help them make The Transition - and soon ! - subsequent generations might never get a chance to live out their expected three score and twenty five ...

the "Transitional Cohort" : those born after the Fall of France but before the rise of Elvis ...

A cohort ("generation" in lay-speak) is forever defined by the significant external events happening during its key formative ('coming of age') years.

For my cohort - born roughly between 1940 and 1956 and usually defined simply as "first wave Baby Boomers" -  its key characteristic is its 'neither nor' transitional aspect : neither fully and comfortably Modern nor fully and a comfortably post Modern.

Modernity's values were instilled into us by our teachers and elites but before those values had time to harden and to feel natural and inevitable they were assailed by post Modern doubters.

In turn, those doubts about Modernity never properly hardened into feelings that seemed as natural and inevitable to us as they did to our younger siblings.

We have eaten and enjoyed both white Wonder Bread and artisan whole grain loaves but are not now totally at ease with either.

More seriously, the Transitional Generation is quite uncomfortable with young people dismissing vaccines.

We too share their distrust of big drug company profit mantras but we also remember some of our parents and grandparents' fears before most life-threatening childhood infections had preventative vaccines.

But we are not a short, sharp, sharply defined cohort like the WWII cohort - we can't point to six years of war to forever define us.

Nothing really dramatic ever happened with us : modernity just went out with a long long slow gentle sigh and post modernity equally slowly seeped in , almost invisibly, day by day.

There was nothing Super-Hero-like about it : it wasn't a quick clean clear dramatic break between Eras , but rather more 'slow and messy' , contested and plodding : characteristically un-superhero-like in fact .....

People born between 1930 -1938 probably rare as PMs or Presidents

Try out my thesis in the case of your nation's PMs or Presidents - you'll probably find lots of national leaders  born before 1929 or after 1939 but the decade in between seems to have gotten skipped.

Look at two of Britain's more recent Labour PMs : Callaghan born in 1913 followed by Blair born in 1953  --- a 40 year spread !

No wonder then that the socialist Callaghan supported the maintenance of the British empire while the centrist Blair (and his conservative opponent John Major) did not.

They were simply generations apart.

I think the reason for the absence of those born in the 1930s is because they were either too young to convincingly support WWII's values from personal experience and too old to convincingly oppose WWII's values from lack of any personal experience with it.

And I think the key date in the changeover was 1990 : a date by which virtually all WWII veterans had to have retired from powerful positions at the top of the workforce because they had reached 65 .

Also a year when baby-boomers too young to share the war hype finally were old enough to be taken seriously as the national leader.

A baby-boomer, in my definition, is someone who is more exercised by why the Allies did so little to prevent the Holocaust (a story revealed post 1945) than they are emotionally stirred by stories of the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk of 1940.

I think you'd have to be born in 1929 or earlier to really get caught up in the emotional high of 1940's Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain --- only a few children in 1940 who were younger than ten would really understand what all the fuss was about.

A person born in 1935 (a tweener) was simply both too young for the Dunkirk spirit and too old for the Woodstock spirit...

The big "DISCONNECT" that drives the climate change debate

    When High Modernity (aka Scientism) lost the intellectual hegemony it held between 1875 and 1965, it did not also lose any political or economic power.
   So now we see a world that basically - publicly - says it worries about a steadily warming planet, but, in practise, does nothing to mitigate it.
   To exaggerate a lot, to make my point more vivid, it is as if the 99% agreed that that climate change was real and dangerous, but that the 1% did not.

    High Modernity, the Theology of greed, is the Theology of Southern Baptists and of CEOs of growth-oriented multinationals and of leaders of growth-oriented political parties (socialist and capitalist).
     Power and Age on one side, numbers and youth on the other.
     Gridlock.
     I hope this blog post survives the burning of the planet so any survivors in the future who can still read, as well as forage for scraps, will understand how the baby boomers came to blew up the earth....

Like BOOMERS, High Modernity kids divided into early and late stages

     From 1873 to 1893 to 1913, people in North America went through first the 20 years of the long depression and then the 20 years of the long boom (in Canada much better known as the Wheat or Rail Boom).
   Children born early in the Era of High Modernity , say between 1870 and 1885, were old enough to fully enjoy the fruits of that long Edwardian summer of optimism and exuberance between 1893-1913.
   And then were often too old to enjoy the mud (and death) of the Great War.
   Those born after 1885 and on until 1900 felt cheated - they had missed the boom Edwardian Years but got to enjoy all of the mud and all of the death of WWI.

   The Twenties slumped except for a brief recovery in 1924-1929, then they had the Great Depression (The Ten Years Lost/LES DIX ANS PERDU) and the tight years of WWII.
   When the 20th century's long boom between 1950 to 1970 began, they were more than ready for it.
   In Canada, these now-elderly teenagers of the Edwardian Era were determined to relive their missed youth - this time right - and   the Canadian Natural Resources Boom of the 1950s (what I call  LES DIX ANS TROUVE/THE TEN YEARS FOUND) was wallowed liberally in late Edwardian hubris .
     Seen in this light of feeling long cheated, the Boom's promotors (BC premier Wacky Bennett a clear example) felt they had good cause to be free of any restraints upon their soon-to-be-fading powers.
    A cohort or generation is as important as to where and why it divides internally, as for what unites these 30 years worth of children from the generations before and after them...

Don't waste your time scanning newspapers of 1945 for reports of MODERNITY's demise...

      The current view that 1945 was the year that Modernity died and Post-Modernity was born wasn't shared by many in that crucial year - at least not consciously.
     No doubt, at all, that many in 1945 were alarmed by modernity's latest 'triumphs' - but even more found those triumphs exhilarating in their potential.
    No, 1945 was established as the year that Post Modernity was born (for once, a curiously apt metaphor) by senior university historians picking suspects out of a police line-up after their university had been occupied and trashed, in May 1968.

    Long-haired protester after long-haired protester: it was soon evident that the vast bulk of them had awoken to life, after 1945.
     (Age ??? I'm 22. Hum, 1968 minus 22 equals 1946, again !)
    Baby-boomers, in another words, were leading the charge against all that most 1960s era senior professors held holy: progress and modernity.
   But what boom - merely the regular boom in pregnancies after every one of humanity's wars or could it just be, perish the impure thought, the babies born post the atomic boom ?
   Post the boom and smoke of Dresden ? Post the human smoke of Auschwitz ?
    Modernity's hegemony was broken in 1945 - yes ! - but among babies not yet born.
   By 1965 to 1973 however, they were fully ready to deny that hegemony and did so - in spades....
   So, a revision: Post Modernity was conceived in 1945, but it first started voting with its feet, in 1968.....