This morning I ran across this nauseating article, which made me feel, yet again, ashamed of my country. It haunted me all day, and toward evening called to mind this poem by Kenneth Rexroth, from his sequence entitled “A Bestiary”, published in his 1956 collection In Defense of the Earth and reprinted in The Collected Shorter Poems. The “you” refers to Rexroth’s daughters, Mary and Katharine, to whom the sequence is dedicated:
UNCLE SAM
Like the unicorn, Uncle
Sam is what is called a myth.
Plato wrote a book which is
An occult conspiracy
Of gentlemen pederasts.
In it he said ideas
Are more nobly real than
Reality, and that myths
Help keep people in their place.
Since you will never become,
Under any circumstances,
Gentlemen pederasts, you’d
Best leave these blood-soaked notions
To those who find them useful.
Presumably Dr. John Cutler, injecting syphilis “below the back of the skull” into seven epileptic women in Guatemala, also thought ideas were “more nobly real than / Reality.” Just as the aide to George W. Bush thought when he told journalist Ron Suskind that “[w]e’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
“Blood-soaked notions” indeed….
After reading the article linked to, I googled Dr. Cutler and found some of his project files & correspondence at the National Archives (on-line). One (heavily redacted) list of female patients in the insane asylum is hand-dated 1952, with a scribbled notation after one patient: "Free or Dead, OK [???] Apparently, at the insane asylum, a "gift" (that Cutler suggested should
What appalls me most, and I'm old enough to know better than to be appalled, is that there are enough moral cretins out there—<i>educated</i> cretins—to make such atrocities possible. I'm ashamed of my country for many things, but as you point out, Jim, every country has these skeletons; but not every country so brazenly trumpets its faux moral superiority. Nothing to be done about it, I
yeah<br /><br />my friend, Fred Cherry was a Tuskegee Airman ..<br />he was VN era spent 6 years in a box in Nam as a prisoner… his story is a chapter in a book..<br /><br />He is also the black character in Hotel Hanoi movie..<br /><br />here those experiments:<br /><br />http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtuskegee1.html<br /><br /><br />K.
didn't "they" these same …. ugh, experimenters<br />do the same tests on black inmates during the 30's (or early 40's) down in South Carolina ?<br /><br />imagine all of those present tests of new "experimental" drugs on people now … every twelve days a new drug is deemed "safe" and put on the Market..<br /><br />as for "reality"<br /><br
I know that my wife’s view of America has changed considerably since she moved to the UK. I don’t think she was ever passionately nationalistic but on the whole I’d say she’s generally embarrassed for America. This doesn’t mean that the UK can hold its head up high – take for example the film <i>Sunshine and Oranges</i> which exposed the forced migration of children from the United Kingdom, a
Thank you for writing this. Guillermo