Grandparents from BOTH sides of NYC's political spectrum sought to define the futurama world of Janus Manhattan's children

From personal experience (as a small child) I know that the very young sincerely believe that their parents are decisive in shaping their young world.

But when we are all grown up and young parents of our own , we realize how wrong we were.

For in fact, a 25 year old new parent is generally at the very bottom of the adult world's food chain, at work and in society in general.

Youngsters need to look instead at grandparents, their own and others, to see those with all the top jobs and most of the national wealth - the ones who actually set the parameters of our childhoods.


(In truth, growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, I wasn't even sure that grandparents ran the world - it seemed more to be somebody's great-grandparents !

National leaders in their mid eighties were by no means uncommon - not at all like today's norm when political leaders and company CEOs are all used up and spat out by age fifty.)

1940 New York's Two (2) Futuramas

1939-1940's Futurama I was a rare formal attempt by some powerful grandfathers (but reflecting the views of the general middle class public) to predict (and thus to hasten) the world of tomorrow, aka the 1960s, that they dearly wanted to see for their grandchildren.

Today we know those grandchildren as 'the postwar generation' or as 'the boomers'.

Even conservative commentators agree that the ungrateful grandchildren of those elite 1940 grandparents basically rejected their proposed brave new world - a high tech world best seen in the 1964-1965 Futurama II - for the seedy charms of Victorian Era Haight-Ashbury.

But is this in fact true ?

Could it not be instead that the 1960s boomers were as divided in their response to the 1964-65 Futurama II as their grandparents were to the 1939-1940 Futurama I ?

Janus Manhattan's Children , the book, will consider whether 1940 New York City was ever as united around the themes of that year's World Fair as is often made out - just as it will consider whether as many Boomers were as counter cultural as it seemed in the late 1960s.

Boomers - aged between 50 and 75 - are the dominant voting bloc in the world because those years of a person's life are when they form by far the most reliable voters, particularly today when only half the population bothers to vote.

So their choices will govern how we all face the existential crisis of the Sixth Extinction.

They are by no means as united as it often assumed - boomers head up both the global warming warning camp and the global warming denying camp for example.

They are divided because people are always divided - and perhaps never more so in 1940, when their grandparents made many of the decisions that still haunt our world.

To save the planet we need to understand the boomers - and to understand them, we need to ignore their parents and try instead to understand their grandparents.

To understand Sixties counterculture, we need to start by looking at who in 1940 New York opposed the values embodied in that year's World's Fair.

Just as to better understand the "scientism can solve any potential problems" of climate denying boomers like Stephen Harper, George W Bush and Tony Abbott, we need to look at the "future's so bright, we gotta wear shades" optimism of their grandparents' generation, best expressed at that same 1940 World's Fair...

One can't be postmodernist (or religious) and still believe in Golden Age Superheroes

The era of Modernity (1875-1965) was the Golden Age of Superheroes almost by definition : the fictional kids' comics simply mirrored the grownups' view of how the world really worked.

But eventually most of even the grownups really grew up and saw that the world's problems couldn't be solved by simplistic violent solutions - and Silver Age comic book heroes evolved in lock step at the same time.

But climate deniers and other elderly wealthy deniers of limits to humanity's powers to bend reality to our every whim are really not much different than the hundreds of millions who claim they simply enjoy new style superhero books and movies as fiction,  but really accept old style superhero thinking at some level of their brain.

Claims that this or that war (including the 'war' on excessive atmospheric CO2) will be won in days, weeks or months is a clear example of thinking that superhero simplistic solutions can actually work in the real world.

Both groups' superman thinking are actually helping to kill this planet's climate - deny it as they may.

Faith communities should not accept super hero media as harmless fodder for immature minds - not if they have agape love for the rest of fellow humanity , no matter how hair brained so much of that humanity seems much of the time ....

The brief blip of Modernity (1875-1965) lost WWII - thank God !

Germany , Italy and Japan didn't lose WWII , not to judge by their present day prosperity and happiness that is far far higher now than even at the height of their world conquering triumphs.

Above all, they're still here - but Modernity (the philosophical glue that held Allied , Neutral and Axis together in 1939-1945) sure isn't.

Isn't really around , except in the minds of angry-old-Protestant-men-with-money, who still have plenty of power and money to deny any limits to Man's ability to control Nature.

(A big shout out to once socialist fellow traveller Rupert Murdoch, who is still denying we can't control the climate  - perhaps by tapping its phone.)

But rabid global holocaust deniers aside, the bulk of today's humanity rejects the idea that Modernity gives us an accurate picture of how the real world works.

Many may do so reluctantly or grudgingly , others eagerly .

Still,  seventy five years on, what is really changed from 1940 and today is just how differently almost all of us think about humanity's relationship to the world and about our ability to predict, control and successfully change that world.

Its almost as if the insights of Quantum Physics were discovered in 1915 at the height of Modernity, but not really believed , even by scientists, until 100 years later.

Physically, the military forces of one part of Modernity did indeed successfully defeat the military forces of another part of Modernity over the six year long duration of WWII.

But mentally and emotionally, over the course of doing so during those six years, the slow rot of uncertainty and doubt had entered the collective mind.

Modernity sputtered on, going through the motions, running on sheer inertia , but conviction was gone in the minds of many - particularly the minds of the youngest.

And no ideology, no matter how strong it appears at the time, can survive if it fails to indoctrinate the new young.

Because no human-created ideology is proof against the slow certainty of the physical deaths of human beings.

And so it is time we stop trying to soften the blow to the elderly who still embrace the Modernity of their youth.

For post-modernity, so-called, accepts the reality of relentless modernization (good and bad) while Modernity only into existence to praise it in rhetoric  --- and oppose it in practise.

It is thus tempting to call today's post-modernity 'anti-modernity' but it goes far beyond that.

For today's world is a form of un-modernity, that in many startling ways is rather like life before the brief (reactive) interregnum of 1875-1965 Modernity ....

VIRAL meme alert : "Deniers deny denial-conspiracy link, claim conspiracy"

WATERMELONS! Under the bed!

Trust EOR to come up with the funniest take on the whole "deniers-see-conspiracy-in-study-that-links-deniers-to-beliefs-in-conspiracy-theories".


Yes, there ARE people "watching" the deniers...

Got the MEME above in my post title, off the comments section of WTD (WATCHING THE DENIERS) .

If you are at all interested in confronting the Big Lie that denies that Man faces any physical restraints on his greed, I suggest you subscribe to WTD ....

Russian oil barons: Commie Red on the outside, Republican Red on the inside

The Red-Red Terror

Russian oil barons, secretly denying climate change because it threatens their profits are only Commie Red on the outside --- inside they are as Republican Red as any mid-western state GOP lifer.

Ironic isn't it that those former supposed enemies-to-the-death, the American libertarian think tank bureaucrats and the Communist oil barons of Russia, are actually more united than anyone else in world in denying the reality of climate change ?

"Reds always stick together", my mom said whenever she sorted clothes for the wash - how right you are Mom !

As a teenager in the late 1940s, Mom had had friends among America's super rich auto barons in Detroit's suburbs AND spent a terrible six months in Budapest at the height of that country's Stalinist state of terror : so she knew red staters of both varieties.

She never liked either of them and always lived by the principle that 'there are no pockets on a shroud' .....

Climate DENIERS as latter-day Alexander Flemings

      If you are a very attentive reader of SVE - and I have good reason to doubt that you are - you will have noticed I took down my first few names from my  ENEMIES  list and added a few unsuspected ones.
     I had started with the usual suspects - the ones you see and laugh at on every denier-watcher blog.
      But I quickly saw they were in fact contrary to my position on the whole 'Deny-Me-Not Movement'.
    The usual climate deniers are almost ridiculously easy to mock - but they are also, in my view, just stalking horses, a false front for the more serious and subtle backroom climate denying activities, performed by the sort of names I put up to replace them.

    More about those new names, in a later post.
    But right now, what insights does my current research on wartime penicillin bring to bear upon these pathetic stalking horses of climate denial ,these Walter Mittys of Science, circa 2012 ?
   Easy to see the pattern: these deniers are almost always elderly male 'applied science' type scientists, who had at best modest careers in scientific terms and are now retired.
   All too soon, they will be dead and forgotten.
   Most people have a realistic sense of their modest talents and are gratefully for whatever life dealt them.
    But a sizeable percentage have always had an ego and an estimation of their own talents out of all proportion to how others regard them. This inconvenient truth rankled them while in employment and it burns now with a new intensity, upon retirement.
   But, now at least they are free as well as forgotten : freed at last of the restraints of peer-reviews, tenure committees and funding committees .
    Now they can say whatever they want, without doing any of that complicated  scientific fact-checking-stuff , while still coasting on the claim that they are (were) scientists, (all bow down).
   Admittedly, they pay a high price by exposing themselves to endless ridicule from many in the media/public and from other (more prominent) scientists, all for just being so willing to say in public what about 10%-20% of the population daily say so freely in private.
   But there are many compensations.
   They are keynote speakers at conferences organized by the rich and nearly famous - who hang on their every word, never belittle them (at last) and cheer them to the rafters. It is totally addictive to receive fame - unexpected fame - so late in life.
   Their speeches are uncritically reported in conservative national and international media, media of the sort that they themselves have read and admired all their lives.
   They travel the world, best hotels and food, press interviews, limos, handlers smoothing the way at their elbow.
   Getting paid for all this seems unnecessary - but some do take money , but only for offering "scientific advice" of course.
   In other words, they experience what I call "The Sir Alexander Fleming Effect".
    I am totally certain that if others hadn't done the hard work of developing penicillin to save lives, and thus accidentally made Fleming very famous, he would have retired virtually unnoticed, despite his own very high opinion of himself.
   And that Fleming would have then developed some 'out-there' scientific hobby horse and devoted the remainder of his life to it.
   It might end up helping or hurting Humanity, but most importantly it would finally give him the press and public attention he had always craved.
    When WWII ended in September 1945 and travel between nations could resume, Fleming was six months away from retirement.
     Unexpectedly, he could instead spend the rest of his life travelling the world on someone else's dime, being feted, awarded, giving interviews, all while being cheered by adoring audiences of kings and peasants.
   Fleming knew he had actually done only a little to bring penicillin to the dying millions, but what little he had done was critical, so he took all this fame as his birthright and decided to make his peace with the Devil in the Afterlife.
    I would highly recommend Robert Gwyn Macfarlane's Alexander Fleming, the Man and the Myth to anyone and everyone seeking to understand the mind of the public denier scientists.
  There are at least two other excellent biographies of Fleming, by admirers, rather than by a critic like Macfarlane, (Kevin Brown's Penicillin Man and Andre Maurois's Life of Sir Alexander Fleming ), but I have found all three end up supporting my thesis.
   Rather it isn't my thesis - I think it was first expounded by Henry Harris, Sir Howard Florey's replacement at Oxford University, who said something like ' the first life that Florey ever saved with penicillin was Alexander Fleming's ' . Perhaps Ronald Bentley said it.
    But in either case, wickedly funny - but bang on.
    Public Climate Change Denial may be having the same life-saving properties as wartime penicillin - for hundreds of has-beens and never-was-es ....