Weekend Semi-Open Thread: Defending Elvis Presley's Reputation Against Charges of Racism While Looking at the Sky for Secret Airplanes and Doing Acid with the C.I.A. in a Brothel

As is our weekend tradition do treat this as a semi-open thread.

In my great conversation with "Champion" Joe Lansdale on the podcast known as The Chauncey DeVega Show, we discussed how Elvis Presley has been unfairly tarnished with the stain of being a "racist". The claim that Presley is a racist has become a truism; like gravity, it just "is".

[Speaking of that conversation with Joe R. Lansdale, as several folks have pointed out, yes I know that beef bourguignon is different from beef sauvignon. That slippage is part of my habitus as a child of the working class. I also was not explicit in one of my instructions--yes, and of course, you add water as need be if the dish is reducing down faster than expected. There is a reason I am not on the Food Network as I take certain things for granted.]

Of course, the Black Culture Industry is real. Yes, African-American music has often been coopted and stolen by white folks. The notion that "love and theft", to borrow from Eric Lott's essential book, typifies White America's relationship with black American culture is an accurate one. Unfortunately, those systemic issues are used to make granular claims about Elvis Presley the individual.

Elvis had many vices. I wonder, was acid among the party favors that he liked to indulge in?

If so, Elvis could have gotten the good stuff from the United States government and the C.I.A..

My former New Haven Black Panther griot mentor and casual friend of my father, would always tell me about the C.I.A. and how it experimented on the American public. Time has been kind to his claims. What some would have once dismissed as conspiranoid thinking has been proven to be true some years later.

The C.I.A. was a naughty boy. They were also perverts. From the website Io9:

For ten years during the Cold War, the CIA conducted mind-control experiments on unsuspecting San Franciscans. Dubbed Operation Midnight Climax, the program was packed with salacious details: a power-mad narcotics agent, a brothel equipped with two-way mirrors, and gallons of LSD.

Operation Midnight Climax was one of a few operations involving government-employed sex workers conducting business in "safe houses" as agents secretly watched; similar outposts existed in New York and in Stinson Beach, just north of San Francisco.

The brothels/science labs were part of the CIA's sprawling, clandestine MKUltra initiative, the infamous "program of research in behavioral modification," of which LSD experiments were just one element. MKUltra thrived in the 1950s and '60s, a time in America when paranoia about the Soviet Union and communism in general was sky-high. Hey, if tinkering around with mind control could secure some kind of military advantage, what could be the harm?

My favorite part of their story:

At the time of the SF Weekly story, Ritchie was identified as one of the last living victims of Operation Midnight Climax. His story is dramatic, but history remembers the program for its most prurient aspect, namely that many of its subjects (none of whom, not surprisingly, seem to have spoken on the record about their experiences) were johns visiting prostitutes in brothels that were decorated with velvet curtains and raunchy posters ... and secretly equipped with two-way mirrors and recording devices. The most famous address: 225 Chestnut Street, an unassuming dwelling in San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood. 

The houses were set up by George Hunter White, a Bureau of Narcotics (now known as the DEA) agent who had become a CIA consultant of sorts. He was a singular character who "made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew," according to a colleague, and he'd always have "a pitcher of martinis" ready for his own use while he conducted surveillance. His conduct on the clock sounds more like a Hollywood spy movie than anything that has any business being funded by the government: 

Throughout the experiments, George White behaved like a power drunk sadist, reveling in his ability to foment debauchery ... The hookers would pour the johns LSD laced drinks. Meanwhile, White would sit and observe behind two way mirrors installed in the rooms. The drug took hold after some time and perversions quickly ensued. The rooms were fitted with listening and recording equipment, providing agents further lurid insights into minds of the drug addled johns. 

Ostensibly, the objective of Operation Midnight Climax was to observe the effects of LSD, and to investigate whether it might have military applications. Could it enhance interrogations? Could it turn a soldier into a time bomb, a la The Manchurian Candidate? The nature of the experiment also allowed the CIA to study the use of sex as a tool of war, discovering, for instance, that "the postsexual, light-up-a-cigarette period was much better suited" to information-gathering than any other part of the encounter between prostitute and customer.

The National Security State has conducted numerous illegal experiments on the American people, soldiers, spied on elected officials, undermined the "free press", uses Hollywood films to manipulate and manufacture consent among the public, and has conditioned the American public to be comfortable with--and in some cases actively surrender to--the surveillance society.

Orwell and Huxley are now the beast with two backs in the form of the American National Security State. The American people watch the copulation with a mix of fascination and fear.

Two of my favorite unfinished plastic models from my childhood are a Russian MiG-31 interceptor and an imagined version of their (circa 1990s) "stealth" fighter-bomber. One of the highlights of my ghetto nerd childhood was reading the monthly Jane's related and other military magazines. The Internet has made getting such information much easier. But, the immediacy of finding such information does not trump the joy of anticipation that was waiting for one's favorite monthly magazine to come in the mail.

My interest in military affairs and "secret" projects was only increased by late night listening sessions of the Art Bell radio show. In response to the supposed sighting of a secret American plane over Texas last year, the entertaining military aviation website Foxtrot Alpha, has a very thorough exploration of "black projects"--and which of them may soon be made public.

As someone who called his friends when the F-117 stealth "fighter" was debuted on the evening news during the late 1980s/early 1990s, I have always wondered about the early retirement of that platform. And of course, why was the SR-71 retired to then be brought back into service? There are so many "black" aviation projects still in existence. The public is let in on the secret when one of them crashes in Iran (and that subsequently should have been destroyed by an airstrike), but what other secrets are hiding in plain sight, or will only be admitted to decades later?

[I once had a chance to ask someone who would directly know such things about the existence of the Aurora spy plane and the Black Manta project. He looked at me with severe annoyance and then immediately changed the subject. I also asked a navy submarine officer about the Kursk incident and also got a really cold response too. And never mind, how the general public still has no idea about what really happened with the shoot down of the Korean airliner by the Russians during the Reagan era...]

Do you have any information about matters of public or private concern that you would like to share? Oscar thoughts or predictions? Recipes to share? Secrets to divulge?