Deadly group A strep bacteria (GAS) will tolerantly and democratically carry off all sorts of injured and wounded individuals : Aryan, Jewish, 4F ,1A , fit, unfit , warrior or civilian.
It knows and accepts no hierarchy of worthiness but like any incoming artillery shell it kills and maims in perfect equal opportunity randomness.
Remember all this when the true wartime story of penicillin-for-all is made into a typical Hollywood fantasy.
Under Hollywood's blinkered gaze, wartime penicillin would have to have been manufactured by 1A handsome , virile/virulent , WASP military doctors with chiseled chins.
Their moral conflict driving the plot would be this : should they interrupt their vital violent combat work , just to rescue some weedy swarthy 4F civilians on the Home front who are once again revealed as too inept to resist fatal bacterial infections like GAS on their own ?
In reality , it was of course totally all the other way around.
In fact it was weedy 4F stay-at-home unfits who created the wartime penicillin that saved the lives of hunky virile 1As dying helplessly from bacteria-infected wounds from random 88mm shell fragments.
A plot so subversive of the established American literary cultural and political order that Jesus and the Gospel authors could probably write it in their sleep.
But equally so it is a plot that would be far beyond what the most supposedly 'radical' graphic novelist or Indie film director could ever write.
They - to date - have only unconsciously reproduced the traditional authoritarian rejections of democratic debate over values.
They have only unconsciously continued to hype the ageless American monomyth of regenerative violence that by-passes democratic debate ,compromise and tolerance , albeit a monomyth now cloaked in the hippest of counterculture colours...
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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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