Atomic Modernity/High Modernity is Male.
Is reductionism writ Large and Laddish , something that sees reality, aka Mother Nature, as fundamentally simple, static and predictable : reality as something you can easily separate into its pure atoms components and then reassemble those atoms into new realities.
Better yet, break down even those pure atoms into different atoms, releasing some useful energy along the way, and transform them into new visions of reality.
Alchemy : a man-cave hobby about as Laddish as it gets.
Synthetic Autarky : replacing all of Mother Nature (and even most of humanity) with wholly synthetic improvements : Bigger, Faster, Smoother, Tougher, Cheaper.
Atomic Bombs terra-engineering the Earth anew, Atomic cars and planes, transmuted miracles unseen : a future so bright ya gotta wear shades.
The second wartime Manhattan Project : General Groves, Little Boy, Los Alamos, Oppenheimer.
A story about Man, more specifically about men/males and their semi conscious conception fantasies.
A wartime Manhattan Project that seemingly has been talked to death.
The first wartime Manhattan Project is much much much less known : unknown, unrecognized as even being a capital P project.
Mother Nature’s wartime Manhattan Project.
( With a whole lot of help from a doggedly visionary male, as it happens.)
But Mother N is a woman of deeds and not words and the man died trying to bring Nature’s Manhattan Project to our attention, so the story has been mostly untold for 75 years.
In 1945, it seemed to practically everybody that dirty impure natural Mother Nature-made penicillin was just an unfortunate wartime temporary necessity and that cheaper, better, safer more abundant Male-made synthetic penicillin was like a rapidly approaching ray of light.
A light as seen from inside a tunnel somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam Nam.
As it turned out.
It turned so quickly, the shift from atomic modernity to post-modern naturality.
When I was seven in 1958, it was all about living bigger and better atomically and chemically.
But when I was ten, in 1962, it was all about ‘living better chemically’ human babies born with seal flipper arms while baby birds were poisoned by DDT, along with Mother’s Milk unsafe for all sorts of babies thanks to ‘living large atomically’...
