What superheroes are not : not inventors, discoverers, doctors,firemen , teachers , thinkers

Mother Teresa --- with an assault rifle

It is well known that all the superpower violence of the superheroes is designed only to save us from bad guys -- what could possibly be wrong with that moral stance ?

Saving an "us" who is not totally good but not really very bad either, from bad guys who are totally bad .

Well for starters, one might reply  that in the real world the good and bad guys rarely morally divide up as neatly as all that , under all circumstances.

Again, we might ask how do the superheroes marvellously manage save us with all that superpower violence without that same violence being lethal to human lives ?

They do seem rather like a fairy tale version of the real world US Air Force.

If wartime penicillin was a wah pedal ....

Imagine the Nobel prize winner for medicine , Baron Howard Florey, being pulled off his efforts to discover new antibiotics in the late 1940s by an impatient Leo Fender.

Leo pleads, "Howard,make me a wah pedal, and make it quick ; I need something unique for my new guitar and amp line".

Howard takes his time, and delivers the pedal years late. But it is beautiful finished and has a high fidelity electronic circuit that is so pure that it delivers vanishingly small amounts of harmonic distortion (albeit at the cost of an anemic output).

I can already hear guitar players going "Oh, goody !"

Luckily for humanity, Leo has also telepathed the spirit of penicillin pioneer Henry Dawson back to earth and given him the same assignment.

Early next morning, Henry has the job all done : a crude but workable bread-board design, with screamingly high distortion impurities, but with a low battery drain design and the effect level preset on 11 on a scale of one to ten (aka ("stun").

It is very basic looking , with just one big button, set in the very middle of the sturdy front panel of the wah pedal.

Henry's genius is that this button simply says one word : MORE !

And that my friends, is the essential kernel of the conflict between these two giants of wartime penicillin....