The Gotham Eight : 'everyday heroes' but definitely not in on the 9/11 NYC firemen model

How to make the tragedy of 9/11 into a national act of heroism soon proved a PR nightmare for the American media.

Because the 3000 real world victims were actually from about eighty nations with many being non-white, non-Christian , non-American , non-male, non-adult.

Some were even unborn babies.

How then to make them all seem to be 100% red-blooded All-American male heroes in the traditional mode ?

Couldn't - so didn't.

Almost instantly all the attention shifted to the everyday heroism of the hunky NYC firemen (about 10% of the total dead) (the equally heroic, equally dead NYC policemen basically need not apply.)

Why ?

Just like the Twin Towers, Pentagon and plane victims, the police dead looked too much like real reality , not imagined reality.

Too many colored folk, too many foreigners, too many women. too many children .

What a relief to focus then on the NYC Fire Department , still a hunky chunky bit of all white, all male-dom , circa 1895.

(Only 24 of the 343 NYC firemen who died were Hispanic or black.)

By contrast , my Gothan Eight were everyday heroes too but ones who were also awkwardly crips, darkies , swarthy Jews, middle aged women invariably called 'girls' by males half their age and experience - and a bit of basement slime.

Nothing there was Fox News friendly - but so what ?

Just think of the Gotham Eight as my figurative uplifted finger to the media types who debased most of those who died on September 11 2001 merely to score ideological points in defence of imagined traditional American values ....

Manhattan Natural : 'The other Manhattan Project', Manhattan natural penicillin renewing hope in a war world tired, huddled and wretched.

To dying patients in Columbia-Presbyterian's hospital , Gladys Hobby's arms daily held aloft a glowing green and gold petri dish of radiated Manhattan penicillin mold as a sort of monstrance of hope.

That image is a fitting and almost exact counterpoint to that other (rather more famous) Manhattan fungus .

We all know the atomic Manhattan Project's mushroom cloud  -- also consisting of a glowing ball high on top of arms of roiling dust.

The Manhattan atom brought wartime death and suffering to Japan on a scale hitherto unimagined.

By contrast, Manhattan's natural penicillin offered all the world relative freedom from the deadly bacterial infections that had destroyed families in peace as well as in war.

Given this - the fact that Manhattan's natural penicillin has saved hundreds of times more lives than Manhattan's man-made Bomb ever took - why is it so uncelebrated ?

Why , as well , was the world morally and intellectually silent when Ramzi Yousef tried to justify his bombing of Manhattan's Twin Towers by claiming it was pay-back for the Manhattan Project killing 250,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?

We can't (and we shouldn't) deny wartime Manhattan's major role in all those atomic deaths.

But would it hurt someone to just once remind Ramzi Yousef and his ilk that wartime Manhattan also produced the safe, inexpensive, abundant natural antibiotic ?

The antibiotic that almost certainly saved the lives of someone in their families in the seventy five years since October 16th 1940 ?

I hope I am not speaking out of line to say that New Yorkers are hardly known for curbing their tongues when something really needs to be said.

But maybe the Big Apple doesn't like blowing its own horn - fair enough.

In which case, it is well past due time that the rest of us in the world should begin doing it for them instead ....