1. I have a few thoughts on the CIA, literary modernism, abstract expressionism, Nina Simone, heavy metal music, torture podcasting, and, for old times sake, Jack Kirby.
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8. Angleton had been trained in the technique of close reading taught by the New Critics to understand modernism & he applied it with viciously in the torture program he ran interrogating Soviet defectors, using violence to pry out hidden meaning.
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9. With music, the CIA eschewed high modernism, rejecting the experimental works of Milton Babbitt & John Cage. Instead, they suborned Louis Armstrong (via the State Department) and Nina Simone (unwittingly recruited by a CIA front organization to perform in Nigeria).
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10. The preference for popular genres in music (as against literature & painting) was motivated by racial politics. Sponsoring Armstrong & Simone was a way to combat the idea America was racist & make an appeal to decolonized peoples in Africa & Asia.
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11. Music -- primarily African-American music -- was the CIA's gateway into popular culture, opening the door to later adventures like using a front to recruit Jack Kirby for a fake sci-fi movie to be shot in Iran (Argo). Here's some of Kirby's never used set designpic.twitter.com/ypPpyek83r
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12. Some more thoughts on the CIA's cultural policy here (and go listen to the Winds of Change podcast -- it's great).https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/wind-of-change-cia/ …
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CIA needs less nerds and more cool gamers.
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I admit, I was skeptical of the thread but, please continue.
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Angleton was born in Boise to a former cavalry officer and a seventeen-year-old Mexican woman, Carmen Mercedes Moreno, which is why his middle name is the not-particularly-WASP-y "Jesus." So, while he attended Yale, he was never really fully apart of the Blue Blood CIA set. (1/2)
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This matters for a variety of reasons (some unrelated to your argument here), but I bring it up because Angleton was drawing on non-elite American mass culture for inspiration practically since the agency's inception. See this bit in "The Ghost" by
@jeffersonmorley (2/2)pic.twitter.com/cmUUDf9EJi
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