You remember all those wartime movies that tried to build a sense of unity within diversity , both among Americans and among Americans and their erstwhile Allies?
The platoon had to have a WASP for the Captain, but the rest of the enlisted men and Non-Coms were a bundle of ethnic and regional stereotypes.
The tough Sergeant from Tennessee or Texas, the scared kid from somewhere in the milk-fed Mid West,the weedy smart Jewish kid, the Italian aleck from Brooklyn with an accent you could cut with a knife , sorry NOI-IF.
If our multi-ethnic infantry platoon meet anyone from the British army, all the British enlisted men men were short and stubby and talked in a broad sort of Cockney that you only really meet at the discharge door at Wormwood Scrubs - or on a theatre stage.
The officers were all tall and thin and talked in a plummy voice redolent of Oxbridge or Whitehall.
It must have been something like that the day that John L first met Sir Howard Florey,FRS and offered to take him to see the Dodgers play.
This after Florey had spent an uncomfortable hour with Gladys Hobby watching the natural penicillin vials tumble off the Pfizer production line faster than an Oxford chemist could change their final, final formulation for their synthetic penicillin molecule.
Alec Fleming would have been delighted - Florey would just have turned stiffer than normal and said he had another urgent war-related engagement elsewhere and then would have gone off to the nearest washroom to change the pickle up his ass.
The duel between Brooklyn and Oxford was not just a difference of penicillin science between artificial chemistry and natural biology.
It has also a battle between two types of social classes and cultures - Brooklyn crude and Oxford refined.....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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...
No comments:
Post a Comment