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 ....

Agape for non-believers : its all that soppy 'Corinthian talk' at church weddings

Particularly all that stuff about  "faith, hope and charity but the greatest of these is love" that always gets so many of the wedding congregation barely sniffing back tears.

Never been to a church wedding ? Spent your live in jail ?

Well then how about that Alan Jackson country song about 9/11 , "Where were you when the world stopped turning..." - for years, it was hard to avoid hearing it, particularly if you resided in prison.

Charity and love are not really meant to be contrasted --- they are better translated from the original as   "faith, hope and agape love and the greatest of these is agape love" .

Agape love : the selfless love of everyone in the whole world - particularly putting yourself in peril while doing something compassionate for a total stranger who you don't know and suspect you won't really like.

Agape was what the dying Dr Dawson displayed for the world's dying SBEs , putting saving them above saving his own life.

Hence my book title : agape's manhattan project is more accurate than corinthians' manhattan project, but only churchy types and churchy academics are likely to get my drift --- but really , who hasn't heard about 1st Corinthians 13:13  ......

"DR STRANGELOVE" of the global-warming-Jewish-flouridation-vaccination-9/11-conspiracy-plot is long overdue

let's NUKE the warmists !

Listen up, people ! Particularly people of the-Babylon-that-is-Hollywood.

A new 21st century "DR STRANGELOVE" is long, long, long overdue.

But not a re-make of  "fluoride in our water is destroying the vital gonads of the cold-war warrior race" .

No, rather a new one : all about the mad, wacky, bizarre world of  those millions of climate deniers who firmly believe that global-warming-is-all-a-Jewish-vaccination/fluoridation -9/11-conspiracy-plot.

The hitherto hidden racism of those who believe in global warming...

A sinister plot to take over the world and make black carbon and not white gold the basis of the new world order currency of terror.

(Er : shouldn't it be the Negroes ,rather than the Hebs , in charge of this particular black vs white paranoia ?)

It could be a docudrama torn from the pages (er, frames) of YouTube videos and body-snatching podcasts.

True, it could prove a bit hard to exceed these videos' own self-satirizing efforts : out of the mouths of wack jobs, as they say.

But trust the dinosaurs of the newspaper demi-world to get it so totally wrong : by focusing on the science of the deniers, when really - by their own words - it is really all about conspiracies of world domination.

Hmmm , I wonder what Ed Riche or Rick Mercer is up to these days - or the Donovans, for that matter ...

Ungrateful bastards : Manhattan's penicillin saved a family member of everyone of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists

I admit that I didn't start this project on Dr Dawson's penicillin crusade with any intention to call it "the OTHER Manhattan Project".

But here is how it all came about, as best I remember it.

I was watching a CBC TV debate about the reasons why Manhattan was attacked on 9/11; this was some time in 2005... or even 2006.

Someone on the panel was trying to explain that older people everywhere around the world, rather like Frank Sinatra, just loved the Hollywood movie version of New York City.

However the younger generation, in general and not just in the Muslim world, had some quite different, additional, images conjured up whenever 'Manhattan' was mentioned .

Such as the worldwide recession and high youth unemployment caused by the excessive 'Greed-is-Goodism' of a small handful of traders from Manhattan Island's Wall Street.

 And the prospects of Mankind blowing us all up, thanks to the nuclear bomb possibilities generated by "The Manhattan Project."

At this point, I yelled up to my better half, Rebecca, in my usual exasperated TV-watching tone, "What about the OTHER Manhattan Project??"

"I'd bet my life", I said," that someone in everyone of those 9/11 hijackers' families at some time or other had their life saved by the antibiotics that came out of wartime Manhattan and Dr Dawson's quixotic efforts ----- those un - grate - ful bastards !!!!"

I promptly forgot all about it after blowing off steam.

But I soon took to calling my effort, informally and only to Rebecca, Manhattan's other Project or the other Manhattan Project.

But I didn't take it too seriously as an actual concept or theme.

Like most of us, I had long thought the 'Manhattan' part of the Manhattan Project was a clever ruse to put the Nazis off the scent - everyone knew the atomic bomb was developed in the desert of New Mexico and also in desert-like conditions in Washington State and backwoods Tennessee .

Dusty - or muddy - areas as empty of people and urbanity as Manhattan was full of them.

Clever, very clever.

But actually the planners of the Atomic Project were even cleverer.

They took a page from Edgar Allan Poe and put the brainy bits of the atomic effort in Manhattan - "hidden in plain sight" - and only put the final production plants out in the desert. But all that high tech equipment and manpower out in the desert actually came out of the North East industrial core, in particular from the Greater New York City area.

Atomic Historian, Robert S Norris, set the world straight on the massive amount of  atomic history that happened first and foremost in the New York area.

But what I specially noted, even if Norris didn't particularly highlight the fact, was that the Cold War Nuclear Threat was actually birthed in Harlem, not out in the desert, and within a few hundred meters of the most dramatic single event in all the penicillin saga.

As a Baby Boomer, 1950s antibiotics ending childhood diseases and Cold War mass production of  A- bombs possibly ending childhood, period, interested me far more than the small amount of inefficient bomb materials developed out in the desert to end WWII but then were never used again to make A-bombs.

If our world should end tomorrow, it is gaseous diffusion uranium that did it - and that was the stuff developed in Harlem's Nash Building and then taken up by all the world's big nuclear bomb makers.

Now I had the two biggest news stories of the entire 20th Century ( according to a poll of 35,000 Americans ) happening in the same year in the same 80 acre space in North West Harlem - what a story !

And I stand by my claim - everyone on Earth, 60 years after the beginnings of the Antibiotic Era, has had a family member, now or in the past, whose life was saved by the antibiotic revolution.

You all remember the british policeman, one of the most famous patients in all history, who told his family when they saw the tiny dot of blood on his cheek, "Don't panic - I just got scratched by a rose while out gardening and you can't possibly die from that !"

But before antibiotics, you could.

 And he did.

Hospitals back then were filled with foul-smelling septic wards and filled with septic cases, sad stories of  healthy young people dying needlessly of blood poisoning that all started with a little infection.

You don't have to be at death's door to have a course of antibiotics 'save your life' ---- you just need to make the emotional leap back in time to think what might of happened to you if your minor infection hadn't been nipped in the bud.

So don't be like those ungrateful 9/11 bastards.

 Thank your lucky stars, and thank Dr Dawson, the next time your doctor yawns behind their hand while they write out a prescription for a course of antibiotics after discovering you have a minor bacterial infection.

 'May life-saving always be so routine' .....