The Message(s) and the Messenger(s)

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

My academic pal Bryan Sentes often recommends (to me and his Facebook friends) exquisite reading, mostly of scholars and scholarship.

He’s a source for vast knowledge.

But I have had some caveats about a few of his recommendations: Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant among them. (Yes, Heidegger and the great Kant)

But that in a moment …

When I was in college, I always looked at the life and beliefs of the authors and greats recommended by my professors.

I wanted to know what their approach was to the topic they excelled in and maybe what biases they brought to any works that they were being lauded for.

(During my radical right period – when I was a Section Leader in the John Birch Society -- I became even more stringent about the background of people being recommended to me for reading, hoping to determine if I was being set up to accept Communist sympathizing or propaganda.)

Today, I’m still attuned to know inclinations and life situations that may be present or encased, subliminally sometimes, in what is being passed on to readers by those who are published or getting hyped by media and the public.

I read in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) for May 17, 2019 a review of a new book about Michel Foucault, a polymath I adore (for his writing on psychological issues and madness).

The book was by Simon Wade, Foucault in California [Heyday Press, $22], the review by Eric Bulson. The gist of the story appears online and can be read here -- https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/1353.

It presents a kind of extensive anecdote about Foucault using LSD while visiting Death Valley in the 70s.

I hated reading that Foucault was “tripping out” with some hippy-types, although I had some beloved friends who were hippies, and often high on marijuana, LSD, and other psychedelic drugs: John Sinclair, the manager of the Detroit rock group MC-5 was one; I loved the guy.

For me the use of experimental drugs, hoping to enhance one’s thinking, is anathema, and ultimately discouraged by Oliver Sacks who indulged to an addicted degree until he realized their detrimental affect on his life and work.

(I am an Oliver Sacks – may he rest in peace – aficionado, as some of you know.)

Bryan Sentes sees, I think, the enhancement of the mind, by such drugs – mushrooms and other natural opiates – as supportive adjuncts to thinking. Bryan is a poet, by the way.

A favorite poet of mine Samuel Coleridge was said to be a regular user of opium, something that my idol, Sigmund Freud was inclined to indulge in also.

So, I am heathenistic when it comes to liking people with the “character flaw” of drug use.

The persons named above – de Man and Heiddeger – whom Bryan likes are loathed in part for being Nazi sympathizers, or inclined to be. Bryan will provide exclusionary reasons for doubting their inclinations, but I think he’s a little too forgiving.

As for Kant, his occasional flawed thinking and purported use of a stimulant to perk up his thinking, makes me hesitant to accept the glorification that Bryan applies to the great philosopher, but I won’t throw his many tomes away that I’ve collected over the years either.

My point – phew! (thanks for bearing with me) – is that all persons, no matter how great, carry some baggage with them, baggage that influences their offerings to the mainstream and academia.

Sometimes that baggage is benign, such as Emily Dickinson’s “spinsterish and/or lesbianistic affectations,” but sometimes it’s perversely deterministic, as when one is plotting a viewpoint or viewpoints that interrupt society in adverse ways: Trump’s sloppy or wayward ethics and morality.

And now to my current obsession, the acceptance of Luis Elizondo as a good guy, even if his sojourn at the DoD/AATIP venue is less than has been stated by cohorts of his and some in the UFO community.

A less than Directorship of AATIP is akin to Emily Dickinson’s quirky neuroticism or Foucault’s testing of LSD.

It’s the message (poetry, philosophical renderings, data, et cetera) that matter. It’s what researchers should be attached to, not the peccadilloes of behavior or self-enhancement that some give themselves.

As Page 129 of The Craft of Research [Fourth Edition] tells us – "Some … researchers think their claims are most credible when they are stated most forcefully. But nothing damages your ethos more than an arrogant certainty.”

This what damages those who are anti-Elizondo; They are loud and noisy while he is subdued and cautious.

Elizondo’s “baggage” is exemplary – military service and actual work inside the United State’s Department of Defense.

So, let’s move on, and absorb what Mr. Elizondo and his cronies are bringing forth to help explain what UFOs may be (or not).

RR