'Farewell My Valento' : all wartime America tries 'passing' as native born WASP

When an originally dark-haired Italian-American woman successfully 'passing' as Mrs Helen Grayle (an icy blond member of 1940s Los Angeles' upper crust) is threatened with the exposure of her dark (literally : noir) secret , Velma Valento kills and kills and kills again.

All to prevent her secret from ever coming out.

This basically is the engine that drives the plot of the first and greatest noir cum private eye story ever : Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL MY LOVELY (1940).

The city of quartz passes for diamond

From 1920 till 1960 (the years of the very height of high modernity) Los Angeles's population repeatedly told the census people that it had the highest percentage of native born white protestants of any major American city - most residents also claiming to be born with clearly Anglo-Saxon names.

Some - a few - might have been telling the truth - but not many.

Adapting your real name to sound more native born Anglo Saxon did not just start and end with people in Show Biz or LA : it was a national passion under Modernity.

And claiming to attend a mainstream protestant denomination (once every decade - for someone else's funeral or wedding) never ever hurt any 'passer' either during the era of Modernity.

And so what if you were originally a swarthy Italian or a light Colored - who could tell anything anymore in a nation addicted to having deep tans and peroxided hair ?

One of the greatest successes of Modernity film's censor board (the Breen Office) was in preventing any hint on screen of deliberate miscegenation : the races deliberately choosing to sleep together.

But perhaps Modernity's greatest fear was of the screen showing examples of what later is revealed to be unintentional sexual miscegenation.

That Mary Douglas-like nightmare of the supposedly white native born protestant WASP bonkette in your Big House bed actually turning out to be a swarthy dark , foreign and Catholic crop picker from out in the dirty fields .

In the early 1940s, the Allied nations justified the conscripting of their young to possibly die as necessary to protect the vital "small c" catholic concept that 'all men are brothers'.

Meanwhile, Joseph Breen's office, working (ultimately) under the direction of the Pope, struggled hard every day to deny this fact ever appearing on the screen.

But then the race-traitor Raymond Chandler (that rare southern Californian who truly was white protestant anglo saxon and native-born) slipped a catholic darkie 'past' Breen : and Noir was born ...

AKA Modernity : the era of parsimonious plenticide , 1875-1965

The art of denial is not a new 21st century thing.

Denying human caused climate disaster, denying the Holocaust, Stalin's crimes, the existence of rape culture --- they are all but a few of the sub-sets of one way 'to deal' with 'overwhelming' dynamic complexity.

While to most of us , choice is good and more choice is better, many of us direct our entire existence around dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed by plentitude.

Why they feel so excessively this way (because we all feel overwhelmed by plentitude at times) is a mystery.

It may be due to a combination of unique body chemistry that handles stress badly and their parents (with similar body chemistry) being obsessed with dirt and order.

One of the most satisfying intellectual ways for them to deal with 'overwhelming' plentitude is to deny its very existence.

Its real - substantive - existence.

'Oh yes, the surface complexity is there all right - we shan't deny that.'

'But most of it is rubbish, useless, worthless, dirty, dangerous - and to claim that all of it is valuable is a form of false consciousness.'

'Once you properly separate out what is valuable, worthy , clean and stable and discard - eliminate/liquidate - the rest , life becomes much simpler and happier.'

Or so the plenticidial modernists claimed.

Modernity then was a great era for classification & then binning.

To its proponents, parsimonious plenticide was the best intellectual way to deal with the abundant scientific evidence that reality was much much more complex, older, wider, deeper than anyone had ever previously thought.

This fact was materially thrust in their faces every day by the effects of co-current globalization cum modernization - seemingly the planet and all its beings were daily arriving at the customs and immigration gates of their country.

So : normal vs deviant , normal vs degenerated, normal vs deformed, normal vs unfit , normal vs dirty - on and on the classifying and destruction went.

No gene pool was ever shallow enough for them - any and every gene pool could always do with a little more draining.

The surface rubbish was complex but the solution wasn't : a little quick painless culling by some super heroes (and super nations) dressed up in capes and tights and it would all be resolved.

One might think evolution and progress as having been invented expressly to allow a moral mechanism for killing off one's new neighbours with a clear conscience.

Yes the world is a plentitude , but of mostly also rans and a few winners and the also rans will be quietly liquidated after the results of the marathon have been announced.

Reductionism as parsimonious plenticide

In the physical sciences , reductionism was the parsimonious plenticide equivalent : claiming all reality could be reduced to the reliable and predictable assembling and re-assembling of a handful of atoms of a handful of elements , all obeying a handful of  knowable, simple, eternal and universal laws.

For this was the great age of Erector and Meccano sets - vividly expressing how parents and grandparents thought their young should view the world.

But Modernity's big problem would not go away - because reality is really and truly complex and dynamic - and everything science has discovered since 1875 renders this more not less so.

In our new era of global commensality we (most of we , anyhow) see the interconnectedness of everything on Earth : many ,many things and events all interacting with each other is some direct, some distantly indirect ways.

But many of us don't, still in denial that the era of modernity was wrong or that it has ended.

And this attitude is fueling - petro fueling - the destruction of this planet.

For on all of the world's Wall Streets, the Alpha Male 'Masters of the Universe' lead the way in denying that we can't really master the universe ....

Mary Douglas : modernity VERSUS darwinism

One of the hallmarks of the Era of Modernity (1870s-1960s) was a sudden worldwide urge among the 'progressive' nations to begin to closely regulate and restrict immigration , a move I argue was directly contrary to the co-current move to embrace Darwin's theory of Natural Evolution as the best engine of Progress.

Now there is no solid proof that having an university education, or having lots of money or coming from prominent families actually makes one more logical or rational when fiercely defending a privileged existence , so we needn't be too surprised at this contradiction in actions among society's powerful.

In Evolutionary theory , a successful sub species (success being defined in evolutionary terms by the number of offspring who live to reproduce) will tend to flow outward , to completely fill all examples of its biological niche.

To a consistent Darwinist (do they even exist ?) reproductive success is the only form of success.

Mankind, according to progressive Darwinists , can't really stop this biological success and really shouldn't - not if Mankind , as an overall species, is to survive and flourish.

So - in evolutionary terms - what could be more natural than the more fecund Chinese and Indians flowing forth to occupy new biological niches in places like downtown New York and London that were once fully occupied by the now reproductively-failing Anglo Saxon race ?

A worldwide trend to increased emigration had began in the 1880s as ocean travel became safer, faster and cheaper ---- soon outbound Indians and Chinese were heading for the mother-cities of the Anglo-American empire.

But Modern Progressives, Mary Douglas fans before the poor lady was even born , said no to this unexpected consequence of Anglo-American modernization.

Just as Douglas said we humans regard dirt as useful matter that is simply 'out of place' or 'doesn't know its place' , so too with these would-be migrant Indians and Chinese.

Chinese and Indian migrants as useful human matter 'out of place'

Two very nice useful races - manufacturing things for us at dead-cheap wages in their native India and China - but once 'out of place', they were simply dirty Pakis and Chinks.

Now the older theory that Darwin's dynamic Evolution was supposed to replace was that of God's Great Chain of Being.

This theory held that there was a permanently static and unique place for every species and sub species in the great scheme of things -- and that all would remain well for everyone , as long as everyone 'knew their place' and kept to it.

That is to say, that the poor and powerless must accept their lowly position in life as God-given and not try any levelling-up social revolutions.

God and Nature had ordained that the poor were poor and the rich rich -----suck it up.

Just as , according The Great Chain of Being, God had also ordained that the Chinese should remain in China and the Indians in India.

(Returning momentarily to Darwin, his theory was simultaneously used to explain why the English were allowed to leave England to rule in places like India and China.)

If the harsh new immigration restrictions from the 1890s to the 1920s were simply the Great Chain of Being re-born, I contend that they were thus far less Social Darwinian than they have seemed to historians.

That is, that they weren't simply designed to keep out those judged 'unfit' because of mental , moral and physical disabilities.

They were really intent on keeping out the biologically successful fecund Indian and Chinese races along with the fecund poor from Eastern and Southern Europe, and thus they were more designed to keep out the biologically super-fit than the biologically unfit.

Claiming that these 'races' were morally unfit as reason to reject them was simply a Social Darwinist ploy to ignore their obvious Darwinian reproductive super-fitness.

All this as part of a series of defensive mechanisms put in place by Protestant middle class elites of Northern European origins desperate to maintain their high social and economic status.

Elites deeply uncomfortable that they were even then were failing to reproduce themselves in their own lands , let alone 'go forth and multiply' in others ...

Impurity IS Danger : Mary Douglas explains the revulsion towards natural penicillin

In the relatively new academic fields of Horror Theory and Monster Theory , Mary Douglas's 1966 classic "Purity and Danger"  is frequently evoked.

In the ancient academic field of penicillin studies, Douglas's Big Idea has never been braced ----  until now.

Her stunningly original thesis was that "dirt" is merely 'order out of place' : that we believe that gardening soil 'belongs' strictly in the garden field and everything is in order while it remains there.

It can never properly belong among the bed sheets.

Pure (that is , in the right place only) gardening soil is not intrinsically dirty, impure or dangerous - just as bed sheets, on beds, are equally pure and 'in order' .

But have either item leave the mental box we have inserted them into and danger, dirt and impurity quickly emerges.

They are now dynamically fluid hybrids - fused beings - a little garden soil and a little bed sheet with much of our fear coming from the uncertainty over just how much the fused creature is of each.

Douglas also does discuss the opposite of fusion - fission.

This is when a normally solid dry complete object (say a living body) becomes a dynamically uncertain mixture of part solid dry normal body and part mold-dissolved gooey wet decaying nothingness.

This produces another hybrid that crosses mental borders - with the living being solid, dry and complete - while the decayed dead is wet , dissolving and incomplete.

Something similar happens early on when as children we realize that the cooked whole fish, still biologically complete and detailed , will later emerge from us as just a pile of shapeless gooey feces.

This putrefaction of a single being, for all of us, is as least as disgusting and disturbing as any fused being.

Physically, we the living are totally unharmed by the fact that penicillium threads will soon weave their way through the dead body of our beloved in their coffin.

But mentally, that image shakes us to our core.

And that image and dozens like it centring on our revulsion to molds crippled our use of natural penicillin for twenty years : from 1928 to 1948.

Quite quickly, after only a few weeks work in 1928, it was shown that natural penicillium mold juice was both harmless and a great lifesaver.

Rather like oranges are to scurvy threatened sailors on the seas for a long time - a small amount of active Vitamin C buried in a tasty impure mixture of dozens of others of non-toxic materials.

But for about twenty wasted years, Normal science and scientists/doctors ( including the man who first determined it was perfectly safe - Alexander Fleming !) absolutely refused to save the lives of the dying.

Not if that meant having to accept the use of natural - impure - penicillium juice inside the temple of the human body.

Rationally they claimed to accepted the 1928 evidence as a scientific fact (and they were never able to disprove it) --- but emotionally they could not.

"Impurity IS Danger" was their unconscious mantra - and they consciously found ways to rationalize this emotional response into excuses as why they declined to use natural penicillin to save the dying.

Hippocrates weep !

Duhig's Penicillin saved lives where Alexander Fleming failed - because of - not in spite of - "poorer" technology !

GLAXO's moral lowpoint: April '43

Briefly - very briefly - in April 1943, at the height of all the suffering and the dying of WWII, Glaxo the drug company had a tremendous technological success and an enormous moral failure.

Briefly , Glaxo was the world's largest producer of what little penicillin the world produced, 15 long years after its first discovery. But none of that penicillin - zero - went to directly helping World War Two's sick and the dying.

Instead it was all destroyed by Glaxo chemists, as part of in the war-long futile contest to see what drug company would be the first to see MAN make penicillin, instead of some slimey slime.

Much of the story of wartime penicillin was that sordid story.

The dark dirty story of an contest between alpha male chemists and CEOs and chemists manques (in particular), to see who could get the Nobel prize and the glory and the profit for the patentable total synthesis of penicillin --- rather than submerging all that testosterone in an all out attempt to aid the sick and dying now and fuss over the glory later.

95 % of the wartime penicillin story was shabby beyond belief, but 5% was truly heroic medicine at its best

It is a truly shabby tale ---- as shabby as the war itself.

Alexander Fleming was part of that shabby tale : he never deflected from his 14 year old belief that penicillin might be a good antiseptic ( ie not to be taken internally, as life-saving drugs must be), if and only the chemists learned to synthesize it.

Jim Duhig --- once he had learned how people like Henry Dawson had grown their own clinical penicillin and injected it in a semi-purified state into their patients without killing them - went a further step.

He "downmarketed" his technological requirements and didn't bother to even semi-purify his home-owned penicillin.

The penicillin he injected into dying patients in 1943-1944 was cruder than even the semi-purified penicillin that Fleming dabbed around the open wounds of patients in 1928-1929, 15 years earlier.

Fleming reported mostly failures with his semi-purified penicillin while Duhig's totally unpurified penicillin saved the lives of patients all doctors had placed 'beyond hope' !

How on Earth ?!

All attempts at purifying, concentrating or crystallizing penicillin came at great costs: the harsh chemical techniques destroyed most of the delicate penicillin, the efforts wore out the overworked wartime staff and introduced deadly chemicals into the penicillin (when removing deadly chemicals was the original point of the whole exercise ! )

Duhig focussed his tiny overworked crew into merely making more and more raw penicillin - ie in upping raw production - and then in carefully preserving that delicate lifesaver, until it could be quickly poured into the bodies of dying patients.

Per person-hour of effort, I suspect that Duhig got 10 to100 times as much clinical penicillin as Dawson, Fleming , Glaxo, Merck, Florey et all got for all their hard work.

(Dawson being at the 10x end and Florey at the 100x end.)

Only Robert Pulvertaft, despite working in the desert heat (!) of wartime Egypt, probably did as well in turning raw penicillin juice into saved lives , with the minimum of human effort.

The unconscious, untested, assumption had always been that the other materials in raw penicillin juice would cause a deadly allergic reaction in patients unless purified away.

Never considered - except by Henry Dawson's team - was the idea that raw penicillin's other unknown materials might actually help penicillin work - as they certainly rarely seemed to harm the patient.

The jury is still out on that idea --- but un-purified penicillin did in fact rarely, if ever, harm the patients.

But converting penicillin from a weak acid to a salt ( to stabilize it for longterm commercial storage and sales)  does bring the well known dangers of introducing too much salts into the delicate balance of salts in the heart-blood system.

(Since Duhig's totally un-purified penicillin remained a weak acid and not a salt, he could pump simply tremendous amounts of penicillin liquid into patients' blood without killing them.)

And it was only once penicillin was totally purified and given in high doses did some people - a very few people - start dying from an allergic reaction to ------- to PURE penicillin !

Call it groupthink or tunnel vision, but *eugenics' powers over mid century doctors and scientists was so strong, they never asked the most basic of all science questions.

They never asked themselves, " if a mixture of penicillin and impurities sometimes causes a sharp spike in temperature in some patients, is it caused by (a) those particular patients's body chemistry (b) the impurities (c) or the penicillin itself ?"

If only they had, millions of people might have lived out their full lives, starting in 1928.....

* Eugenics was merely the leading edge of a middle class culture obsessed with purity and a hatred of dirt that went beyond all bounds of rationality : only a Mary Douglas could begin to assess what was really going on in the middle class mind in the mid 20th century.