Skygods vs Earthlings: a post-Modernist history of WWII

Modernity finally gets its own WAR

The historians of 75 years ago could only see the things that made the leading warring nations different but with the passage of time and today's new era, younger historians are beginning to see the thing that all the leading warring nations held in common: Modernity.
World War II was like all the certitudes of grade 11 High School Science, armed with machine guns and unleashed upon the physical reality outside the laboratory door : the most violent, evil, catastrophe that Humanity has ever inflicted upon itself.

Modernity's scientists - scientists of faith - lost the physical war but crucially won the postwar battle of words, won the war of books, myths and movies (or did they ?)

1945 : MO goes PO

Because today historians are starting to uncover the stories of WWII's evidence-based scientists ,who resisted the onslaught of science based on faith , as best they could.

Above all, younger historians are starting to tell Mother Nature's version of WWII, because she easily bested Modernity's science, time and again.

Now we can see post-war 1945 for what it really was : the time when MO goes PO, when Modernity began to fade and be gradually replaced by post-Modernity's new Global Commensality Era.........

What a difference one little substitute word can make...

My partner Rebecca said some very nice things about this, my new blog.

But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.

I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of  'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .

Taking the widest view of the term Postmodernity : converting it - but only very slightly -  from my emphasis on ethics and morality to one of aesthetics - it can be phrased as a difference in  the sort of people we find aesthetically attractive.

Today we are far more willing to see attractiveness in many more body shapes,  skin colors and lifestyles - or at least to let other people see beauty in people we don't find  that particularly attractive.

It is typical of this Postmodernity era to learn of a recent poll saying that most of us find a person of mixed color ( the tawny or coffee colored flesh tone so common in places like Brazil) as the most attractive physical type.

(Just as it is a hangover from our grandparents' Modernity era to learn that most high fashion models continue to be the icy blue-eyed blonds of  1930s Aryan wet dreams.)

My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.

They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that  all  life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.

When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.

Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.

But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.

In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.

In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.

Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.

 And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

Martin Henry Dawson, the born subordinate.

He had a number of life-changing ideas but he was too cautious and too polite to go all out in proclaiming them and his colleagues and opponents knew it.

In a metaphorical sense, he was the proverbial 'coward of the county' .

I don't think he disobeyed but one order in his entire life.

But when he did.... our whole world changed for the better, forever.

@MOgoesPO

We agree WHEN Mo started going PO, but not necessarily why

                  Martin Henry Dawson , on enlistment, 1915

My partner, Rebecca, has tried to explain the meaning behind the title of my latest blog "MO goes PO" .

All I can add is that there is overwhelming agreement that the Mo-to-Po revolution began fairly abruptly, in 1945.

You remember 1945, the end of 'double-u, double-u, two' , the so called last good war and the last good generation.

Few people have given a good account why PoMo began then, AND in the nations of the moral victors.

If the good guys are just won the war against the bad guys, why were the good guys leading the way in uneasily evaluating their own values ?

I hope "MO goes PO" succeeds in telling us why....

@ArcadianRecord

This is my new blog for my MARTIN HENRY DAWSON project

I will post the finished segments ( albeit not likely in their proper chronological sequence) here, one week after the 'final' version of each segment has had a chance to pass my 'wiggle test'.

That is to say, I will print out a reduced size, B&W 'final version' copy on my computer printer and see how it reads on paper, after it has been lying around my house a day or two.

For sometimes you catch things you didn't when the segment was on the computer screen, no matter how often you re-read and re-edited it.

In time, I will also put each of these segments in my 'MO goes PO'  public archives - my 16 GOOGLE SITES websites.

But this time, they will be in their intended chronological order, leaving blanks for the segments not yet published.

One GOOGLE SITES website for each of 15 Scenes (in three Acts)  --- plus one for the author's Afterword.

No more than 26 segments maximum per Scene - hopefully not that many ! - so I can label them from A to Z.

So their numbering will be labelled 3c and 16j etc , indicating that the first is the third segment of Act I, Scene 3, while the other is the tenth segment in the author's Afterword.

Think of it as a sort of Play or Musical covering six years (exactly - September 2nd 1939 to September 2 1945) in three hours...

I will reserve my right totally, to revise/ revise/ revise each 'final' segment - but you will at least be able to follow the revisions publicly.

@mogoespo

Martin Henry Dawson's lifework- Lobar Pneumonia,Rheumatic Fever,SBE : when hosts overreact

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON 1896-1945

When harmless tiny bacteria called S. pneumococcus living peacefully in your throat get blown the equivalent of 1000 miles deep into our lungs - they panic.

Who won't?

More fatally, so does our body's immune system.

Like a latter day 'Bomber Harris', the immune system 'area bombs' our lungs - too often the collateral damage is us.

S. pyrogenes bacteria is so used to surviving in us, its only home on Earth, that it begins to look like us - and when our immune system overreacts to a case of strep throat, it might start attacking our heart tissue instead of the long since defeated strep throat : the result is often- fatal acute Rheumatic fever.

Lucky you, you've survived a couple of attacks of Rheumatic fever - except for a scared

heart valve ---- a valve messed up by your own immune system.

Now you've neglected your teeth and gums a little and the gums tend to bleed when you do brush them.

This allows some harmless S. viridans (green strep - the bacteria that makes unbrushed teeth look ,well, sort of green - not actually the reason they are called green strep but a colorful coincidence !) to get into the blood stream and start whirling around your body much faster than the Space Shuttle does with us.

Naturally the green strep panic and start looking for a new safe home before giant white blood cells swallow them for dinner.

All these bacteria can't move - they are basically tiny blogs of jelly who can stick to particular types of human cells, if they have the right kind of adhesive on their surface for that kind of cell and they happen to bump into it and not the wrong sort of cell.

Its all a lot of hapstance.

Hardly your usual predators, right??

Usually, the green strep gets eaten before it makes that safe haven. But for people with scared heart valves, the scar tissue (produced by our immune system - remember ?) is

just the sort of thing that could be that safe haven.

If they make it into these scar areas' depths, while whirling past at space-travel-like speeds, they attach themselves to the scars.

The immune system reacts by creating more scar tissue, which inadvertently prevents white blood cells from getting in and at the green strep.

The green strep start re-creating dental plaque (and tartar) right on the heart valve - taking a biofilm meant for our mouth and teeth and replicating in not too dissimilar circumstances at the heart valve.

A normal biofilm colony eventually lets loose bits of itself in the liquid swirling over it to form mini colonies elsewhere - the green strep on the heart valve do the same.

We call those particular mini colonies 'embolus showers' and if and when they reach a heart/ lung or brain blood vessel with a restricted passage, they will block it and kill us.

Explaining and preventing or curing these three serious/common/fatal diseases was to be Martin Henry Dawson's lifework.

In a sense, he succeeded well beyond his expectations and changed our world , for the better, for ever.

All three dieases are the unexpected side effects of us and our fellow commensals scrambling to adjust to a micro change in our body's environment.

Just as global warming today is making all of the world's commensals scramble to adjust to a macro change in our environment.....

@arcadianrecord

Martin Henry Dawson - the Commensal Doctor

Martin Henry Dawson 1896-1945

S. Pyrogenes/GAS Strep/Hemolytic Strep - whatever you call it, this bacteria is usually regarded as the single deadliest pathogen we humans face over our lifetime.

This is because the list of fatal diseases it is implicated in runs into pages and can involve almost every part of the body,in any age group , in any part of the world.

Paradoxically, S. pyrogenes is only found in humans - it exists no where else - and usually lives peacefully - more or less - in our throats, as it has for millions of years.

It hoes a narrow row - but it hoes it deep and long - it can outwit anything our body or our mind's invention can put up to remove it, as it struggles to get by.

Martin Henry Dawson spent 20 years (all of his tragically short life as a scientific researcher) also hoeing a narrow row, deep and long.

He tried always to remain focussed on one area: the consequences for both of us, human and oral strep, of co-sharing one body so intimately all of our collective life.

A rarity in his day, he tried ,as a medical scientist, to see our body from its bacterial flora's point of view: to study how they wiggled and twirled -genetically- as they struggled to survive in our body's hostile environment.

Some bacteria is only 175 billionths of a metre "tall" - that means the body of an adult male is exactly as big to them as our Earth is to us - they aren't in any way aware they are 'invading' a body - they see us only as a vast hostile & lush world.

Early humans also didn't know they lived in a tiny part of a big sphere of rock that in turn only made up a tiny part of the entire universe - they saw no further than area immediately around them.

It is always worth recalling that we are actually 90% them and 10% us, if you count the number of bacterial cells on us, versus all the cells of our internal organs.

Without any of us, they would quickly die in hours - without them, we would die in a few months.

We must co-exist together, diners at a common table - commensals as a biologist or theologian would say.

Dawson never used that term as far as I know ( he died, after all, in 1945, before the word came into common use in medical or religious circles), but he lived his life as if it was the central core of his being as a scientist.....

@arcadianrecord