8 thoughts on “Wormwood: A Trip Back in Time, Literally

  1. It’s intriguing to compare this (a fictionalized presentation of real events that really happened to a real person using that real person’s real name) to the recent flap over a computer-model recreation of Anthony Bourdain’s voice reading a letter written by Anthony Bourdain.

    Like…the former is okay, the latter isn’t?

    1. Well, given that the son is in charge of it, that changes things a hair.

      I mean, compare to Ottavia Busia’s statement:

      I think that the kid telling his dad’s story (and maybe investigating what he thinks is his murder) puts this in not only a difference of degree but a difference in kind.

      1. I mean, Errol Morris has been doing this for a looooong time. It was way back in 1988 that he got snubbed for an Academy Award nod for his excellent film The Thin Blue Line because it used reenactments in a documentary. But, it also got a man off death row and out of prison, so I don’t know that he was terribly concerned.

  2. The more I read about the MKUltra stuff, the more I can’t even believe it.

    “The operation was officially sanctioned in 1953, reduced in scope in 1964 and further curtailed in 1967. It was officially halted in 1973.”

    1973. That’s after I was born.

    You find out that Whitey Bulger was touched by the MK Ultra program. Ted Kaczynski, as well (though I understand he gets really upset when asked about this sort of thing).

    “After retiring in 1972, Gottlieb dismissed his entire effort for the CIA’s MKUltra program as useless.”

    I sure hope so.
    But it’s not like he’d have said “Oh, we figured out how to get people to do stuff.”

    I’m pretty sure that they didn’t achieve 95% of the goals of the program. That 5%, though…

      1. They had their fingers in a lot of pies. I wonder if stuff will ever come to light?

        (I still want to know what hasn’t been declassified from the JFK stuff.)

      2. I’m halfway through the audiobook and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder! I may need to start over at this point.

    1. Probably what they learned was:

      1) if you want to make people utterly insane, you can do that by giving them an overdose of LSD
      2) an overdose of LSD is a surprisingly small amount.
      3) you can’t make them anything other than utterly insane
      4) it’s obvious what happened to them so you can’t have it be a secret thing
      5) you can’t make them not-insane afterward
      6) we probably didn’t need a massive government program to learn all this

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