Over, Over and Over They Talk Like We Are Fools:

11 thoughts on “Over, Over and Over They Talk Like We Are Fools:”

1. Ms: I sat through the video you posted on 9-11. IN MY HUMBLE OPINION,, it wasn’t credible. I trust the mainstream experts’ views. The majority of structural engineers concluded correctly. The official reports about 9-11 are correct. 2. I do read music and play it some by ear. Good piano players learn “Rhapsody in Blue” in a few days; it took me a year to get its 36 pages down, committed to memory. Took me half a year to get down the three-movements of “Moonlight Sonata”; a month to get Chicago’s “Color my World.” Good piano players at Berklee and NEC would get those songs down cold in a couple of days, if not hours. 3. We all have diverse educational/experiential backgrounds; strengths and weaknesses. 4. Let’s forget our backgrounds; lets forget the problems of yesteryear; instead, let’s stay focused on current events, on the problems of today.

2. when a pickpocket stands in the middle of a group of saints
   all he sees is their pockets

   Mr Connolly: I took harpsichord lessons when I worked at Dowd which is essentially the same as any keyboard with the exception of touch. When I left my job at Dowd it was the beginning of summer and my plans were to
   begin college at Mass Bay Community College in Watertown in the fall.
   I decided to apply for a job at Aeolian Skinner organ company in Dorchester and was in charge of building the swell shades for their organs during that summer.
   Boston Symphony Hall owns a Skinner as well as the Christian Science Mother Church next door. Memorable experiences include watching the pipe makers pour a molten mixture of lead, antimony and tin on top of canvas covered tables to later be used in making the metal pipes. Even more amazing was to feel and watch the pipe builders tune a 32′ wooden pipe where you felt the pipe more than heard it because it’s frequency was below 16 cps.
   Fast forward to the mid 1970’s when I relocated to Maine. I found myself
   playing bass in a local group called The Wayne Newton band I made a lateral transfer to the CSM band(Chicken Sh*t Methane)as a bass player. Most of the material was original. One of our guitar players went on to fame as a writer of Murder mysteries. Maine author Stephen King read his first novel Firewater Pond and got him a publisher. Around this time with CSM I applied for a job teaching at UMass Amherst working for Walter Silva at the Center For Interdisciplinary Studies.Walter created a program that pulled in close to a dozen Mass Colleges who went into the prisons at Walpole and Norfolk to help Lifers get their Bachelors Degree. Once the lifer received their degree Walter helped get them a pardon and into graduate school.Walter currently sells real estate on the cape. He is a native of Nauntucket. His dad was part of a group of three Nantauket men who donated several hundred acres of land they owned on the island to be set up as a nature preserve. The last time I checked 1 acre on the island was selling for over $1 million. Prior to returning to Mass to teach I co-founded a 501 c3 non profit called LAW (Lay Advocates at Work). The focus of the group was to expose corruption in the legal profession i.e. lawyers comingling clients funds, sleeping with clients, etc. The group developed an intake form to document complaints; worked with the Maine legislature and established the Maine Board of Overseers. created a court watch group; brought guest speakers into Maine to educate members about change in the legal arena. The first president of the organization Joan Brown was rewarded for her efforts by having her home burnt down.
   The next president of the group was retired Baltimore cop Tom Dunn who was later shot in the back and had his farm burnt down. I suspect Dunn may have worked for the FBI. The weekly newspaper in Maine the Maine Times covered his story with a front page photo standing in a bloodied shirt pointing to the bullet wound. I would soon accept a generous scholarship from Hampshire College to return to school and study Classical Music composition.( I received an M.A. in Criminology in 1973) I had applied to UMass to study music but flunked my audition on piano as I played the Bach invention and Beethoven sonata by ear. I did not read music very well. At Hampshire I took advantage of the free classes at the five colleges program plus the free shuttle service. I studied electronic music at Smith College, Musical Theory at Mt Holyoke, Palestrina at Amherst and the healing force of music at Hampshire. Returning home for the summer I landed a job as business manager of a Symphony Orchestra and decided not to return to Hampshire thinking I was in a unique position to have my music performed. That’s when my problems with the FBI started . Now you know some of what I know.

   Fast forward to 2013 and I am trying to finish a documentary I started shooting 6 years ago about Maine artist Robert Shetterly. This past spring I was able to visit 93 year old Peter Seeger at his home in Beacon New York for an interview and two months later interviewed comedian Dick Gregory at Lake Placid New York when he came to commemorate the homestead of John Brown. Robert Shetterly has painted both of their portraits as part of his Americans Who Tell the Truth series. see http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org I have licensed the music of
   WC Handy Blues Award winner Watermelon Slim aka Bill Homans and Boston Boy to use in the documentary . On December 16 2010 I videotaped Watermelon Slim getting arrested at the White House along with artist Robert Shetterly and Daniel Ellsberg see http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/93540:winter-soldiers-confront-the-white-house-mass-arrests-as-they-put-their-bodies-on-the-line-for-peace

   Maine performer Dave Mallett was hired to provide music as well.You may be familiar with the song he wrote called the Garden Song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m0LewjkO4s John Denver and Arlo Guthrie have performed the piece. Recently Mallett came out with a CD of Henry David Thoreau’s book In the Maine Woods where he narrates selected passages and performs guitar with the help of a cello. So now you and the FBI know a little of what I know. I hope this narrative helps fill in some blanks and answers some unanswered questions.

   I would hope you might find the time to sit through a documentary I helped shoot.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMT2CHSvyGw

3. 1. At Boston College, in the 1960s, the Arts & Sciences students were required to take both a philosophy course and a theology course every semester. Western Philosophy was the core. I’ve read some of Sartre on arts and literature and psychology and the importance of the individual. I’ve read Camus’ major literary works (Stranger, Rebel, Plague, Sisyphus). I liked both for their outspoken rejection of Oppressors, Big-Government Oppressors, Colonialism, Imperialism, unbridled capitalism. I liked what I saw as a rejection of Freudian cant and psychlogic mumbo jumbo and philosophic gobbly-gook. I admired their humanism and emphasis on the rights of the individual: and the primacy of conscience. I liked their emphasis on Resistance to abusive State Power and Defiance and Resiliance in the face of Corrupt Powers. Camus and Sartre would have stood with us against America’s metastatic Police State, Spy State, against Imperialism and our “tax and spend” Imperial City, Washington D.C.
   2. I remember during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon was said to be studying the lyrics of the band Steppenwolf to see if there were something subversive in their songs. I also remember that the National Guard send helicopters with food and medical supplies to Woodstock.
   3. From: Robert Zaresky: “ 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Albert Camus “ : 11/07/2013
   “Today, Albert Camus would have been 100 years young. The voice of the Nobel Prize winning author of The Stranger and The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel remains as vital today as it was during his own lifetime. Raised in a working class neighborhood of Algiers ()Camus confronted the absurd at an early age. Not only did it pursue him through his youth – a serious soccer player, he began to cough blood one day and found he had tuberculosis – but it also struck France in 1940, when the nation collapsed in the face of the German onslaught, transforming it into the collaborationist regime of Vichy. After returning to France from Algeria in 1942, Camus joined the Resistance and eventually became the editor of the great clandestine newspaper, Combat.
   “From the liberation of France to the end of his life, Camus continued to resist. Whether it was France’s brutal treatment of the Arab and Berber . . .or the glaring social and economic inequities in both Algeria and France, . . .capital punishment or the . . .atomic bomb, the practice of torture and terrorism by both the French Army and Algerian nationalists during the bloody war of independence, Camus resisted the ways in which we turn fellow men and women into abstractions and we justify inexcusable means by citing impossible ends. On his centenary, we could do worse than recall his words on the duty of the writer: The nobility of our métier, he declared, “will forever be rooted in two engagements difficult to keep: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance against oppression.”
   THE SEVEN “THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW” ABOUT CAMUS
   1) Camus was not an existentialist. Smoking a Gauloise cigarette over an espresso in a Parisian café does not an existentialist make. Nor does an intense, but brief friendship with the poster child for existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus always, and rightly, reminded interviewers he wasn’t part of that fashionable postwar movement, largely because it refused to move. Rather than offering an answer to its bleak diagnosis of the human condition, existentialists instead embraced it–a response unacceptable to the author of The Rebel and The Plague.
   2) Camus was not French
   3) Camus was not a philosopher
   4) Camus was not a pessimist
   5) Camus was not Anti-American
   6) Camus was not always a novelist
   7) Camus was not George Orwell’s twin, (but) both men with their moral lucidity and personal courage, were essential witnesses not just to their age, but remain so for our own age as well.” Viva la France: We wouldn’t be free without the French (see 1775-1783, from Paul Revere to Jean Paul Lafayette to Rochambeau: French-Americans, French soldiers, French sailors who sided with the Patriots!

   1. Thanks for posting Mr Connolly. Camus is a favorite author of mine.
      When I saw the title to this post by Matt it reminded me of Harry
      a former roommate of mine when I lived on Gainsborough street near Symphony Hall in the Back Bay. At the time Harry had moved from Canada to study at the Berklee School of Music and I was employed by William Dowd a Harpsichord Maker based in Cambridge near Lechmere. Harry would always be bringing fellow Berklee students to our apartment to jam, usually on the weekends.I have fond memories of hearing Ernie Watts blowing alto sax and who would soon leave Berklee and eventually work in the Tonight Show band. Miroslav Vitous also jammed at our apt . He would later join the Jazz Fusion group Weather Report as Bass Player. Harry played guitar.
      Well as things happen Harry graduated moved to New York, married an American , got divorced and moved to Toronto Canada when the Vietnam draft got to close for comfort.We were roommates in 1966. Harry went on to write music for Canadian Public television . We stayed in touch
      over the years and in 2006 Harry sent me a CD he made at Sun Studios
      in Memphis of the music of Jerry Lee Lewis . His Toronto band members traveled with him to Memphis to record at Sun Studio as a Lark.Harry played the piano for the recording as well as sang some of the songs.
      My friends cannot tell the difference between Jerry and Harry.

      Enjoy the video

      1. Msfreeh: I am a keyboard guy (started lessons too late at age about ten years old) but I got pretty good, not bad, just average, and learned to play rock, jazz, classical a bit: we had a two-bit rock band at our cottage down the Cape in ’66 and I sat in once with a Berklee band, called the Fugue, down the Cape at the Casino on Falmouth Heights in the late 1960s; I also played with some Christian Rock groups in Medfield and Westwood a dozen times or so, as my lifelong friend Bob Mancini, a guitar guy, whose daughter was studying at Berklee, asked me to fill in some Sunday mornings over the course of a few years. So, I enjoy your references to the Berklee music guys and the philosophy guys. 2. Although I am skeptical of many conspiracy theories, I agree that there’s too many questions our government has not answered about the actions of the FBI/DOJ/CIA etc. 3. We can speculate till the cows come home about historic events: I offer this, however for your consideration, from BLAZE: “According to author Vincent Bugliosi: ’42 groups, 82 assassins and 214 people’ have been accused of having a hand in the assassination (of President Kennedy).” 4. There comes a time to focus on the present and try to change the things we can. Remember “The Serenity Prayer”. I want us all to have the honesty, courage and wisdom to try to change “what’s happening now”. Matt’s recommendations for reforming the FBI/DOJ are good starting points. I hope he repeats and amplifies those recommendations in his next book.

      2. This video suggests that President Obama has aliens working for him in the U.S. Secret Service: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb8mU_g_f2w

      3. This video states that an alien spaceship was present flying over President Kennedy’s motorcade when he was assassinated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecdku_luQyc

4. LOL
   Only if we believe in Being and Nothingness,eh?

   http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/art-books/camus-sartre-fbi-hoover/#.Uo1ElOInXYS
   The FBI files on being and nothingness
   by Andy Martin
   November 19, 2013
   From 1945 onwards, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI spied on Camus and Sartre. The investigation soon turned into a philosophical inquiry…

   I was leafing through some FBI files on French philosophers when a new candidate for occupancy of the populous Grassy Knoll in Dallas leapt out at me. To the massed ranks of the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, Castro, Hoover, and LBJ, we can now add: Jean-Paul Sartre. FBI and State Department reports of the 1960s had drawn attention to Sartre’s membership of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was also a member. And—prophetically?—Sartre had “dismissed the US as a headless nation.” Naturally I rushed around trying to work out exactly where Sartre might have been on 22nd November 1963. Could he, after all, have been the Second Shooter? Suddenly all the pieces started to fall into place.
   But subsequent references in the main Oswald file showed that the FBI, although generally perturbed by the “Leftist tendencies” of Sartre, and his association with Communists, Castro, and Bertrand Russell, were specifically concerned that he was now—in addition to protesting against US involvement in Vietnam—threatening to “take an active part in the French Who Killed Kennedy Committee” (according to an article in the Washington Post of 14th June 1964). The FBI was wedded to the Lone Gunman theory. The emphasis of their interest in Sartre, then, was not on whether he had participated in any conspiracy, but rather that he was a believer in conspiracy theory and “supported the position that Oswald was not the true assassin of President Kennedy.”
   The FBI had been keeping an eye on Sartre from as early as 1945. Soon after, they began to investigate his contemporary, Albert Camus. On 7th February, 1946, John Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, wrote a letter to “Special Agent in Charge” at the New York field office, drawing his attention to one ALBERT CANUS, “reportedly the New York correspondent of Combat [who] has been filing inaccurate reports which are unfavorable to the public interest of this country.” Hoover gave orders “to conduct a preliminary investigation to ascertain his background, activities and affiliations in this country.” One of Hoover’s underlings had the guts to inform the director that “the subject’s true name is ALBERT CAMUS, not ALBERT CANUS” (diplomatically hypothesizing that “Canus” was probably an alias he had cunningly adopted).
   The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades (and which, still partly redacted, I accessed thanks to the open-sesame of the Freedom of Information Act) is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.
   Hoover needed to know if Existentialism and Absurdism were some kind of front for Communism. To him, everything was potentially a coded re-write of the Communist Manifesto. That was the thing about the Manifesto—it was not manifest: more often it was, as Freud would say, latent. Thus FBI agents were forced to become psychoanalysts and hermeneuts—drawn into what the historian Carlo Ginzburg neatly called the “cynegetic paradigm” (a brotherhood of clue-hunting detectives in which he includes Freud and Sherlock Holmes). Thus we find intelligence agents studying scholarly works and attending lectures.
   But the FBI were “philosophical policemen” in a second sense: in tracking Camus and Sartre (surveillance, eavesdropping, wiretapping, theft) they give expression to their own brand of philosophical investigations. In particular, the FBI philosophy files reveal how the agency became so dogmatically anti-conspiratorial.
   Sartre had been invited to the US, towards the end of World War Two, as part of a propaganda campaign overseen by the Office of War Information (OWI). In the face of FBI scepticism as to whether the author of Nausea and Being and Nothingness was capable of coming up with decent propaganda on behalf of anyone, Sartre had at least one stout supporter: Archibald Macleish, Under Secretary of State, and assistant director at the OWI. Macleish is now best-known as the author of the classic formulation of the modernist aesthetic: “A poem should not mean/ But be.” He was a poet in Paris in the 1920, and went on to become Librarian of Congress and Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard. But during the war he was a founding figure of the “Research and Analysis Branch” of the Office of Strategic Services—precursor to the CIA, the more international intelligence service (and thus rival to the FBI) that Hoover tried to abort and undermine.
   In an interview published in France-Amérique in March 1945, Macleish asked his interviewer “not to forget to inform Sartre, whose talent he loved so much, that he was rejoicing in advance over his visit.” Meanwhile, from the FBI point of view anyone who had been in the Resistance (whether actively—Camus—or more marginally—Sartre) was automatically under suspicion. Especially journalists and philosophers. And even more so when another French writer, based in the US, Geneviève Tabouis, was busily denouncing them as Communists. (Sartre wrote an article denouncing her as a spy for the State Department, something she vigorously denied, even while reporting it back to the State Department.)
   Sartre expected to be spied on. But he was never undercover. He valued total transparency. Hence his scorn for the Freudian unconscious and his anticipation and appreciation of the role that visibility plays in celebrity culture. Sartre proved a mystery to the FBI: it was impossible to steal information from him because he was desperate to give it away. Even so, after a quarter century of puzzling over his work, noting his links with Che, Russell, the Black Panthers, and the anti-Vietnam War movement they had to conclude, in their 1970 synopsis of his oeuvre, that, on the one hand, he can be “described as pro-communist” (and “encouraged youth to believe in nothing spiritual”) while at the same time is “also described by some sources as anti-communist.”
   Camus, following in Sartre’s footsteps in 1946, was held briefly by immigration owing to Hoover’s stop notice. In contrast to Sartre, Camus proposed an aesthetics of discretion and privacy. Whereas Sartre tended towards a maximization of information, to the point of obscenity, Camus believed that there can be such a thing as too much information.
   Camus, like Sartre, had a supporter within the proto-CIA: Justin O’Brien, Professor of French at Columbia, and translator of the journals of André Gide. O’Brien was also chief of the French desk at the Office of Strategic Services during the war, which was tasked with “establishing intelligence networks behind German lines in France.” In the course of the Occupation, he developed a fondness for the work of Eluard, Michaux, Vercors, “the poetic renaissance that marked the occupation,” and Louis Aragon, who was explicitly Communist.
   Once the war was over, the two intelligence services, the FBI and the CIA became locked into “a binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity” (as Sartre would say). In other words, the FBI, specifically Hoover, hated first the OSS and then, after 1947, its avatar, the CIA. But there is more than just a turf war dividing the two agencies. There is a broad philosophical (and, it should be added, aesthetic) divergence.
   Hoover’s FBI was deeply suspicious of philosophers, especially foreign ones, virtually philosophobic; but this does not stop the organisation from developing its own brand of philosophical thinking in response to Sartre and Camus—the FBI files on being and nothingness.
   The FBI did not read Sartre or Camus in the original French. One of the agents, having stolen some notebooks and diaries (“obtained from the personal effects”) in early 1945, complains that this “material [is] all in French” and translators were drafted in. Then the investigation proper could begin.
   The FBI emerge from these files as neo-existentialists in the classic early Sartrian mould. They, like the early Archibald Macleish, take the view that people, not just poetry, “should not mean, but be.” They don’t like meaning—they are on the look-out for it, especially secret coded meanings, but they don’t like it. They certainly subscribe to the “hell is other people” school of thought. And Hoover, in particular, would be greatly relieved if only everyone across the whole of the USA was an angst-ridden, anomic, introverted loner. In short, an Outsider. What they fear and object to is meaning, and finally, the plot—or narrative. They are anti-narrativists.
   The FBI echo Sartre’s classic modernist critique of narrative, in his novel Nausea. Hoover’s FBI are quintessential existentialists in refuting teleological narrative—they would rather have contingency and chaos than telos. The FBI found Camus fundamentally their kind of guy: the Camus of the Absurd and the Outsider, according to which the individual will never really make sense of the world, nor hook up, in any kind of long term way, with others.
   We are apt to think of the FBI as the great conspiracy theorists. But the reality is quite nuanced: I am tempted to say they are not conspiratorial enough. They resist theory. They don’t really want to believe in plots. Hence their primal attitude, their metaphysics, when it comes to the question, Who Killed Kennedy? Was the assassination of Kennedy a conspiracy? The FBI won’t have it. They were, in their typically neo-existential way, intent on the Oswald lone-wolf story—or non-story. Oswald, in short, is just their kind of guy: a conflicted, anomic, disconnected loner. More Meursault than conspirator.
   Narrative, philosophy, and espionage share a common genesis: they arise out a lack of information. Sartre’s expectation of a world of total information would kill them all stone dead. There would be no need of the FBI, novelists, or French philosophers. Existentialism and Absurdism insist on an asymmetry between being and information. Agent James M. Underhill, who heroically pursued the elusive “Albert Canus,” encapsulated the theory in a resonant phrase: “The file does not show the final disposition.”

   1. ms:

      I don’t get much out of Martin’s article. Whatever he was trying to say he could have done it in 1/4 of the time. Writing concisely is not something to be avoided. It would be nice if you could sum up some of the articles you post and give us the location of them on the internet rather than putting the whole article in your comment.

5. GOK:

   Thanks. I think the version I was thinking off when I wrote the piece was the one sung by Llyod Price in the late ’50s. I’m going to have to correct my post.

6. Excellent post, Mr. C.

   Aside: According to WikiPedia, Lloyd Price, one of the tune’s co-writers, had the big hit with this song in the late ’50s. Jerry Lee recorded it for an album released 20 years later.

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