***CAF Note: We receive some wonderful testimonials. This one was so delightful, I asked the author if we could share it with you.***
By a Solari Report Subscriber
You will not be able to fully appreciate the depth of my response to your interview with Joseph Farrell last night without knowing something about me. Thus the following biographical information is not gratuitous, but the motivation for understanding the depth of my response.
I was born February 19, 1948. To explain the oddities of my life, I have consoled myself with the facts that—sometime during May and June 1947, while I was being conceived—the following in?uences were at work in the world and percolating through the aether: Kenneth Arnold sees a ?ying saucer zipping around Washington State; Thor Heyerdahl sets off from Peru on the Kon-Tiki; Jackie Robinson steals home for the ?rst time; Miracle on .34th Street opens; and somewhere someone is putting the final touches on the National Security Act that Harry S. Truman will sign at the end of July.
I grew up a bookish, straight “A” student whose father wanted him to be a baseball player. In spite somewhere of that, I made it to high school where my class, the Class of 1966, was, by the unanimous opinion of all our teachers, a really brilliant bunch. They had to create two groups of Honors algebra, chemistry, biology, etc., classes to accommodate us all. Needless to say, intellectual competition was keen. I bonded with four of my classmates, and we considered ourselves (and probably were) the crème de crème. (As you can see, modesty was not one of our problems: can you imagine being in the same room with four other teenagers your own age, and all of you thinking you were the smartest one in the room? We had a lot of fun!)
Our conversations were so stimulating that they carried over after school time. My family lived in the apartment behind a closed storefront: my father had tried to run a dry-cleaning business but had failed. The good news was that my friends and I had a custom-made “clubhouse” at our disposal. The room was spacious, about 40 feet by 40 feet with a wonderful 15 foot ceiling, a perky gas stove for long cold winter nights, a ping pong table, two sofas, and all the privacy five 14 year-old loquacious, contentious, and precocious intellectuals could want.
We met together almost every Saturday night for our entire four years in high school. The intellectual depth and the intensity of the conversations we had were of the kind that most people find only when they go to college. We had it from the ages of 14 to 18. In fact, for me college was such a letdown that I never finished. With a bit of self-mockery and a bit of pure shamelessness, we called ourselves the “Society for the Preservation of Intellectualism.” As you can see, the memory of the Intensity and the value of the wide-ranging and no-holds-barred discussions we had about politics, about God, Man, and Science Fiction, have never left me, and has never been equaled in my experience—until now.
I have been a member on only two websites—Solari and The Giza Death Star. I can’t tell you how amazed and pleased I was as, over the past year and a half, I saw you and Joseph interacting.
So when I say that I enjoyed your conversations with Joseph, it is no casual or flippant remark, but something that arises from deep within me. Nowhere in the past 45 years have I found minds as eager for the truth and as relentless in their pursuit of it through all the lies and deceptions that have transformed our world so far from the one we were all borne in.
Thus we finally reach the whole point of this, I hope not too boring, digression into my life: In listening to you and Joseph talk, I am—not without good reason—conscious of being in the presence of the two greatest minds of my generation. You remind me of the very best moments of the “Seminar for the Preservation of Intellectualism,” and as such, I salute you, I thank you, and I wish you all the blessings that the God of Love, Truth, and Beauty can shower upon you.
