Hyssop (In a Time of Cedar) : GOOD NEWS , from The Bad News War

The other Manhattan Project (1940-1945) was Henry Dawson's ultimately successful effort to "Defend the small, in a Time of the Big".

He sought to defend all of us as equally unique and small individuals.

This, in an age that preferred to see only large reified collectivities.

He had to fight against two billion people and a world that had taught themselves to show group love to their 'own kind' and exhibit group hate for all other humans.

While its impact was ultimately enormous, his four person team was as small as the better known Manhattan Project team was big.

But appropriately so.

Because both the patients he hoped to aid  ("The 4Fs of the 4Fs"  - young people needlessly dying because they were seen as worthless along the mean corridors of wartime medical science) and the means he hoped to use to save them (invisibly tiny fungus factories) were also very small.

This particular life-saving fungus that he was the first to use to save a life was originally found on a hyssop branch in Sweden .

We might recall that the Bible memorably uses the tiny hyssop to contrast with the enormous cedars of Lebanon, as examples of the breadth and width of God's concerns and love.

Modernity's War (WWII) was all about bigness --- as were the peacetime decades proceeding it.

It was a Time of Cedars and the smaller nations of the world were nothing but hyssop underfoot, trampled upon before the onslaught of German, Russia and Japan (and sometimes America and Britain.)

Dawson was too old (and too physically unfit) to once again to rush to the defence of small nations like Belgium --- as he had in WWI.

But he could at least defend the weakest members of the Allied Nations from efforts of many in the Allied medical and scientific elite to defeat the Nazis by matching the Nazi, tactic by tactic.

WWII was hardly The Good War, it was in fact a war of enormous bad faith on all sides, an all-around bad news war.

But in the story of Dawson's dying effort to aid others weaker than himself, we finally have, coming out of that dreadful conflict, a truly GOOD NEWS STORY.......

'A warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' : still the best medicine

"The hyssop and The Cedars" is a book about health during our past most recent man-made Apocalypse : occasionally it is about doctors and pharmaceuticals, but mostly it is not.

For the truth is that  *food* was the only medicine in really desperate short supply during WWII.

Truth is that 'a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' is all most of us ever need to reach our three score and ten.

After that, we generally do need the help of hospital beds and the pharmaceutical firms.

But let us also never forget the warm smile.

I believe that any civilization that truly claims to be a civilization must first see to it that all its citizens have that warm meal, warm bed and warm smile - everyone, from grandmother to granddaughter.

After that our civilizations are free to build all the Castles in Spain that they wish.

But that warm meal must come first.

Now we are about to be engulfed in another man-made Apocalypse , only unlike the last time , this is one in which no nations will be able to remain Neutral, aloof and above the fray.

We still have time to learn the lessons - both good and bad - from the last Apocalypse, because 1939-1945 gave us a very full dress rehearsal.

As a very active , very political , Green Party member I feel I must explain my own reasons for appearing to have gone AWOL the last half dozen years - for myself appearing to remain Neutral, aloof and above the environmental fray.

It is because I believe this book (and the lessons for us today that it contains within) is the best possible contribution I could ever make towards slowing our death march forward into overwhelming hubris-induced disaster....

Atheistic Nature's inordinate fondness for beetles...

The genetically-minded Moderns of the 1930s felt they were facing a grave demographic crisis : why where there so few Ubermensch and so many undermensch: why so few Cedars and so much hyssop ?

In other words, why on earth were there so many beetles, defectives and useless mouths ?

Not believing in a Supreme Being,  at least not believing in any Being Superior to themselves, they had to blame the Iron Laws of Nature and Evolution for this un-natural natural fondness for things weak and foolish.

If in ancient times , the Cedars of Lebanon were the biggest, tallest living beings known, the hyssop growing through the cracks in Beth Nielsen Chapman's concrete were 'the lowest of the low', the plant kingdom's equivalent of being the 4Fs of the 4Fs.

Seemingly the useless hyssop's only purpose for being put on this earth was to form a home for an equally purposeless mold.

But then, of course, when Fleming found that mold stopped bacteria cold and Dawson stuck it into a patient's arm to save a life, the lowly hyssop was revealed to have had a supreme purpose after all ....