The New Criterion

Though often associated with political activists like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or Joan Baez—both musically and politically—Bob Dylan was no Chief in the protest politics of the 1960s--he wasn’t even an Indian, Kemosabe. Bringing it all back home, it would be more fitting to call Bob the Lone Ranger: Dylan rode solo, as is made clear in Bob Dylan: the Essential Interviews. This entertaining review is written by Harvard’s professor of English, Louis Menand, and is found in the most recent issue of the New Yorker. Professor Menand quotes from one of Dylan’s interviews:

Mr. Dylan, how would you define folk music?

As a constitutional re-play of mass production.

Would you call your songs “folk songs”?

No.

Are protest songs “folk songs”?

I guess, if they’re a constitutional re-play of mass production.

Do you prefer songs with a subtle or obvious message?

With a what???

A subtle or obvious message?

Uh—I don’t really prefer those kinds of songs at all—“message”—you mean like—what songs with a message?

Well, like “Eve of Destruction” and things like that.

Do I prefer that to what?

I don’t know, but your songs are supposed to have a subtle message.

Subtle message???

Well, they’re supposed to.

Where’d you hear that?

Dylan was nobodies’ party-boss—a fact celebrated by lovers of music and pop-culture, but given today’s editorial by Andrew Rosenthal, lamented by the New York Times:

This, perhaps, is the ultimate difference between the Vietnam generation and the Iraq generation: When you hear Young and Company [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young] sing of “four dead in Ohio,” their Kent State anthem, it’s hard to imagine anyone on today’s campuses willing to face armed troops. Is there anything they care about that much?

Student protesters helped drive Lyndon Johnson — in so many ways a powerful, progressive president — out of office because of his war. In 2004, George W. Bush — in so many ways a weak, regressive president — was re-elected despite his war. And the campuses were silent.

There was a brief burst of protest when America first invaded Iraq. But if there is a college movement against the war, it’s hiding pretty well. Vietnam never had the moral clarity that the 9/11 attacks provided to this generation’s war. But in Iraq that proved to be a false clarity, and a majority of Americans now say they oppose the war and no longer trust Mr. Bush’s leadership of it.

But because there is no draft — a fact that Graham Nash noted sardonically on Sunday night — no young person has to fear being conscripted into the fight. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Americans find it much easier to stay silent when there is no shared sacrifice.

Such is life in the new Millennium for the left-wing malcontent. Alas, today’s students spend their time in college studying and have little time or inclination left to get all muddied-up protesting for protest’s sake. Rather than celebrate this fact, Mr. Rosenthal is acting the naughty boy in Dylan’s classic Visions of Johanna: “Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously. He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously . . . He’s sure got a lotta gall, to be so useless and all . . .”