1940s Super-Heroes : each an intoxicating - toxic - mix of muscles, magic, machine and mind

Comic Books in 1940 would never profess that "Might is Right" , rather that "Only Might can Do Right" .

But first : why then the need for a secret ID , if one is truly omnipotent ?

Well , remember that 1940 superheroes were merely the moral equivalent of that year's notorious enemy Fifth Columns : because while their great strength was impressive, their sneakiness was even more so.

While in perfect disguise as weak, meek , mild civilians, no police, military or intelligence service could destroy these superheroes in some predawn surprise attack.

With our workaday nerds and geeks instantly turned into cloaked avengers, sneak attacks of a sort were always the other way around --- now coming from the good guys.

So Superman : a Panzer tank disguised as a Peugeot.

But while these superheroes tried to avoid violence on the innocent, rather like a moral 1940 Norden bombsight, one can see that, once off the comic pages, that even their violence to physical structures were bound to kill real world innocent bystanders.

Surgical strikes by superpowers or superheroes rarely are.

More importantly, on a moral plane, exalting violence for social good allows others to equally and sincerely claim to also morally use violence for social good.

Many - perhaps most -  of those killing Jews, Romas et al truly believed their job were like that of social doctors , cutting out cancerous portions of the Aryan body politic to save its life.

Morality is in - or isn't in - all of us , any of us : morality does not come only SuperSized.

In 1940, Dawson's tiny team of unfits was certainly not super , but it definitely was heroic....

4F ... or Fifth Column ?

It sometimes seems to me that the weak and the small were the real main enemy - not those nice clean and orderly (if slightly pushy) Germans - to wartime America.

A nation many times the size of Germany or Japan, with twice as many people and a far richer economy, and separated by thousands of kms of cold deep water from its closest credible enemy, is always going to find internal enemies (Reds under Beds) far more convincing a threat than any distant external foe anyway.....

Before 1989 : RED tape impedes Greed. After 1989 : GREEN tape impedes Greed.

Grandpa, what was "RED-tape" ?

Remember yesterday's truths, the good old verities of life divided into left and right?

RED-tapes under the bed ; better dead than RED-tape ?

But that is soooooooo yesterday : like Democrat & Republican or Labour & Conservative.

Now it is GREEN-tape holding up Progress and it is GREEN-tape impeding greed.

What is left of the old left has joined what remains of the old right in agreeing that progress is good and growing an ever bigger economy is even better - arguing only over the details, sotto voce (a very quiet shout out to Darrell Dexter !)

The green Fifth Column

Now only one Fifth Column stands in their way : those anti-progressive green-clad climate worriers among their wives and children.

Ungrateful brood ! Can't they see how their GREEN-tape is entangling Daddy's schemes for making the family secure as the economy chills down and the climate warms up ?

Again - and ever again - I think the coining of this term GREEN-tape is a good thing for the green climate movement - first some must openly fear us before the majority deign to take our arguments seriously.......

Dr Dawson a FIFTH COLUMN of low postmodernity , inside the Citadel of High Modernity?

The term "FIFTH COLUMN" is now more than 75 years old.

 It was first used in a radio address in 1936, by a right wing (Nationalist) general named Emilio Mola , during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, to describe his efforts to take left wing (Republican) Madrid .

 He unwisely claimed he had four visible columns of troops and tanks and planes advancing upon the capital but a secret hidden fifth column of sympathizers inside the city, awaiting to sow mayhem.

 Thousands of the semi-innocent were quickly murdered in Madrid, out of fear that Mola had been telling the truth (and not merely trying to evoke panic).

But already by the mid 1940s, 70 years ago, the phrase had lost it literal, real world, meaning because the people claiming to see fifth columnists had "cried wolf" once too often.

 It had been reduced to a metaphor, in fact a pejorative word, in the Cold War to semi-seriously describe others as hidden, secret communists or fascists.

Today, few are alive and active that can recall it's use as a word conveying real terror.

Maybe, then I can use it to describe the activities of Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team of DIY cum PUNK scientists inventing "GP" penicillin in that Citadel of High Modernity and Big Science, the Columbia University of the Manhattan Project.

He didn't see himself as a postmodernist because the term hadn't yet been invented : that was happening , about the same time as GP penicillin and the A-Bomb, in yet another part of Columbia University housing the social scientists Adorno and Horkheimer !

Dawson was a modest man (with much to be modest about) but he was also in his quietly defiant way, a true "Inside Agitator" (to mis-adapt that phrase much used by the Jesse Helms & Strom Thurmond generation of southern racists.

His small science , DIY Punk approach to inventing GP penicillin was in its way, as typical of what we today call low postmodernity as the Manhattan Project's bigness in creating the A-bomb was of High Modernity......