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Posted by Mike E on May 30, 2012
“Dylan raked those Masters of War, and then gets honored by them?
“It is possible for people to ‘see’ and even lead in one context, and be utterly lost in another. It isn’t just that they change, and it certainly isn’t that they are always assholes.
“Often the confusion precedes the sellout — which means that it is not simply corruption.
“And isn’t the Obama moment just such a cause for confusion?”
by Mike Ely
You see a picture like that, and it is hard to find words.
Tellnolies of course did:
“”I guess I am gonna work on Maggie’s Farm some more.”
Adam Richmond wrote to me:
“What a fucking sellout. He got the same medal as war monger Albright from a man who is planning drone kills.”
Honored by the Masters of War who lie and deceive?
We could spit on the ground and end the discussion there, if we chose.
But then Aine Fox asked:
“Question: is was he really ever a revolutionary? I just am unsure if his motivation was to make money or whether he at one point believed what he said. I don’t personally think he was anything of relevance but i didn’t grow up in this country so maybe that is also why i have no time for someone who releases their music through Starbucks…..”
And that kinda forces me to step back. It is sad that so many have trouble seeing who Dylan wasbecause of who he is. I have trouble seeing who he now is because of who he was.
Dylan was a god to us
As for how relevant he was… it is hard to exaggerate. I often say “To us he was a god.” And I believe it. And it is a testimony to the power of poetry even in a time of birthing ideology.
Most revolutionaries I knew took Dylan’s songs as the musical scores of their lives and politics. There was a heated rupture moment in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) where virtually every position paper started with a quote from Dylan (and only occasionally Mao). The Weatherman organization (for example) take their name from a Dylan lyric:
There is a remarkable passage in Bobby Seale’s book on the Black Panther Party (Seize the Time) where he describes Huey Newton “breaking down” the Dylan song “Ballad of a Thin Man” to explain to a roomful of Panther cadre how to understand the radicalization and antiracism of young revolutionaries.
Again, it is hard to exaggerate Dylan’s impact at a certain point (late sixties) among revolutionaries. He wasn’t alone, but he was certainly outstanding.
Motives
Aine even speculates that Dylan may have been just about money — since his songs made him rich.
Again the present obscures the past — and sometimes the outcome seems (falsely) embedded from the start.
Dylan was a folk singer emerging from a time when there was very little money to be made as a folk singer. I think he was clearly sincere in his views and in his apocalypic sentiments.
The folk circles were (obviously) almost universally left — antiracist, antiwar, pro-people, anti-corporate, pro-thinking — with a lot of influence by the Communist Party and the religious left. And Dylan was (at least at one time) considerably to the left of those Old Left politics (and openly connected to the early primitive revolutionary left for a moment or two).
His song “The hour when the ship comes in” speaks to that.
Beyond that, Bob Dylan has always been a convoluted person, and went through a convoluted political evolution.
When he adopted an electric guitar (at the 1965 Newport folk festival) the attack on him from the “official left” (a very conservative Old Left) was vicious to a degree that must be hard to imagine now. He also felt that (to a degree that was painfully impossible) many people expected him to be a “political leader” — when he was an intensely private poet and an eclectic thinker.
Afterwards, he went through a number of changes (even Zionist, fundamentalist Christian, and gawd only knows what else). But even as he was leaving us, Dylan left us a parting gift in 1971:
How do we look at those who bend, or break, or cash in?
I believe people often make their contribution and then move on. I don’t like it, but I’ve seen it a lot.
People do what they understand, and often they run into the limits of their understanding.I don’t think it is just that “people are weak” — but that people often see, and feel, and understand things in the storms of one specific context (and one Badiouian “truth process”), and their fidelity to that fidelity can’t carry them on forever.
We should struggle with each other. We should seek to carry each other over the gaps of understanding. We should critcize those who step back. We should not forgive the real traitors, snitches, betrayers — who traffic on their past deeds to crush our current ones.
Bill Martin does Dylan — with the band Porphyry, May 25, 2012, Chicago
But otherwise, personally, I’m in favor of being generous with people. I think a kind of generosity with people flows from our understanding of complexity, particularity and the difficulty of what we are attempting. I think we should honor what people do and did, and not make the verdict on their lives be simply the last or the worst things they’ve done.
Dylan’s songs still live. They are cherished.
I just went to a concert of Bill Martin’s trio that did a whole evening of Dylan covers. And the songs are quite beautiful (and I don’t just mean the “political” or prophetic ones).
Also: It was hard for many people to deal with the defeat of a revolutionary upsurge. People aren’t just jailed or killed in that process. Some just become shadows of themselves (or pimps on their own past selves). Just think of David Hilliard, or Huey, or even Bobby Seale, or Eldridge Cleaver, or Arafat (fercrissakes).
But in such cases, the “end of the story” doesn’t define or negate the whole of the story. IMHO.
Dylan may be pathetic in his old age (as Aine says: “Pumped out of starbucks to make a few bucks.”) And it is especially pathetic given what he represented (a legacy he has been cashing in on).
But it doesn’t change what he was, or what he did, or what it meant to millions of people. (Even if that is understandably hard for someone young to perceive, or FEEL, looking back.)
The aging of insights, the need for renewal
Maoists in China described a process where former comrades announced “This is my stop, this is where I get off.”
Dylan raked those Masters of War, and then gets honored by them?
It is possible for people to “see” and even lead in one context, and be utterly lost in another. It isn’t just that they change, and it certainly isn’t that they are always assholes. Often the confusion precedes the sellout — which means that it is not simply corruption. And isn’t the Obama moment just such a cause for confusion?
Flowers fall off, do what one may.
We struggle with each other (hard!) against that. And we sometimes win people over — win them back. But we can’t win them all. And you can’t forcesomeone to see a truth, or stay on a bleeding edge.
The Maoists in China also used to say “Flowers fall off, do what one may.” Meaning there are objective forces and arcs at play in life. Thing rise and then age. We can influence objective processes, we can recognize them, we can prepare to deal with them, but we can’t simply negate them.
Human beings are complex, squiggly creatures. The courage and creativity people wield are often closely linked to specific moments and insights — and in other contexts those insights can prove exhausted. That courage and creativity can dry up. And people sometimes find themselves beached on shores where they can’t orient themselves. I’m not excusing it. I’m not saying we can’t all fight our way through to new insight. I’m just describing a process, and expressing an orientation towards it.
Dylan’s own words are an indictment of him now. Yes he turned his back on his own best self — and worse, on the people.
Personally, I’m just glad we had him, and still have those songs. The creature he now is just doesn’t make much impact on me. He is pathetic — and inhabits a shadow world of the depleted and corrupted. And even then: I don’t rule out that people can’t come back, or reawaken, or at least lend their weight in a good way at some point. People are complex.
Personally, I accept that people make their contribution, and then sometimes just can’t anymore. And I’m obviously not just talking about Dylan, but many dear former comrades and friends who once led and then (in other contexts) got sadly lost. They aren’t defined by their end state — though that end state may make onlookers angry, or frustrated or (worse) demoralized. And i think, now, this has something to do with the conjunctural nature of change and insight — and how radically the landscape shifts, and how much youth and flexibility it demands of us. Some think our work is uncovering eternal truths, I suspect the hard part is capturing and then recapturing a sense of wide-eyed freshness with which to identify newly posed and potent truths.
As for those we leave behind: Their best work and best days are not negated by how far they may then fall.
Works of art, or theory or history don’t disappear because their authors later bowed or crumbled. We can learn from the dead, even if their zombie selves still lumber among us.
