`Bloody Minds'

Come, you Bloody Minds
Look what I done find
I done did research
IDA exists.
Laugh between your walls
And sit behind your desks
And watch your missiles fall
IDA exists.

The value-free school
Your mask we see right through
The weapons of the Pentagon
Their brains procured by you.

Godly Grayson Kirk
On the board he knits
Smokes upon his pipe
While his bombers bite.
Problems he assigns:
“How to make men die?”
Professors they plan
Death for Viet Nam.

In ’56 to serve Defense
Five schools they did combine
Four years later
Columbia
It joined the Bloody Minds.

City slums they rot
Homeless live in lots
Atoms to destroy
They’re your little toys.
Oh, they pay you well
To create a hell
Did you see the news?
Twelve children they slew.

A division
Its name Jason
In summer they study
They meet, they talk
They plan, they plot
Counter-insurgency.

Lovers they must part
Lamps they now are dark
Knowledge turned to swords
Kirk sits on the board.
Schools changed into guns
For the Pentagon
Students now they learn:
How to make kids burn.

You stand in class
You spout your facts
A” noble scientist.”
But then at night
You join the fight
You do secret research.

Murder poor peasants
With the tools you sent
Orphan thin children
Help the Junta win.
Kill them with your mind
Paralyze their spines
Someday you will die
And in slime you’ll lie.

To listen to this protest folk song about Columbia University’s complicity with the U.S. war machine during the Vietnam War Era, you can check out the “Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society” site at the following link:

http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music

The Bloody Minds protest folk song was written in a Furnald Hall dormitory room on Columbia University’s campus in March of 1967, after I discovered that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Pentagon’s Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank and that Columbia University President Grayson Kirk was a member of both IDA’s board of trustees and IDA’s executive committee. The Bloody Minds protest folk song was lyrically patterned somewhat after Dylan’s Masters of War protest folk song of the 1960s (which was sung to the melody of the traditional folk song Nottamun Town that Jean Ritchie used to sing in the late 1950s and early 1960s).

IDA continues to exist in 2008, continues to perform weapons research for the U.S. war machine and continues to include representatives from U.S. universities like M.I.T., Harvard, the University of South Carolina and the University of Texas on IDA’s board of trustees. For more information about IDA’s most recent war research in this current 21st-century “era of permanent war”, you can check out IDA’s website at http://www.ida.org/

Next: Protest Columbia University’s Complicity With U.S. Imperialism: April 24-27, 2008