Tambourine Man

March 1966

Playboy:  you’ve said you think message songs are vulgar.  Why?

Dylan:  “Well, first of all, anybody that’s got a message is going to learn from experience that they can’t put it into a song.  I mean it’s just not going to come out the same message.  . . .you’ve got to respect other people’s right to also have a message themselves.”

Bob Dylan went to the University of Minnesota for less than a year.  He read Immanuel Kant’s  A Critique of Pure Reason and then quit.  Kant talked of the ‘understanding’ as opposed to the ‘reason’.  By the ‘understanding’, he meant the a priori – the instinctual knowing that a human is born to have without being taught.  His deep belief is that art, any art, that is true, speaks to the ‘understanding’, and not to the ‘reason’. He tries to convey this to Playboy, without success.  In the process he reveals – and it is startling to see it now in retrospect – that he had this conviction about art and his intention to honor it in his work, at a very young age, after barely growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, after just a short time in college.

In this interview he continually rejects categories, particularly political categories, and intentions or plans for his artistic direction.  The interviewer just doesn’t get it, and Bob is forced to give diversionary answers to questions he has already answered.

I’m not an IBM computer any more than I’m an ashtray.  I mean its obvious to anyone who’s ever slept in the back seat of a car that I’m just not a schoolteacher.

Dylan is trying to say that he will follow his muse, here and now, using his medium.  He won’t describe its meaning or its effect on others.  It is not about descriptive words, he is saying, or that is what it would be – descriptive words.  The song art will either grab you or it won’t.

Colleges are like old age homes” – anything that blocks one’s access to the ‘understanding’ is deadening, a form of suicide.  “Protest” music – “topical” music – is dead music because it is applies reason to the artistic process.  What is reasoned cannot communicate with the understanding.

Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me” – this is his plan – to follow his artistic intuition and communicate to those who will hear it.  That is all an artist can do.

“I don’t know about other people’s sympathy but my sympathy runs to the lame and crippled and beautiful things.  I have a feeling of loss of power – something like a reincarnation feeling”. His urge is to Surrender to an inner sense.

He seems to know there is a price.  People want explanation, they want certainty, they want to belong. They will seek to believe in order to belong.

Dylan is willing to be disappointing.  He is willing to pay the price.  He has paid the price.

I wouldn’t think twice about giving a starving man a cigarette.  But I’m not a shepherd.

The Girl with Tattoo and Fire

It may be significant that a young Swedish author’s books are about evil, revenge, and justice.  The Sweden we all know is egalitarian, humane, rational, and kind.  The people are understanding and generous, and they abhor violence.  They were neutral in World War II.  Life in Sweden is neat, careful, sensible, and compassionate.  Emotions are peculiarities, sex is hygienic, punishment is rehabilitation.  The only problems are  boredom and suicide.

Not so in the Stieg Larrson books.  Here, Swedish men are sadistic murderers, molesters, and neo-nazi rapists.  Our heroine is a victim who won’t accept victimhood, and she uses her digital talents to endure and survive.  She rescues the Swedish journalist – a quintessential good guy who seeks to uncover ‘corruption’ in Swedish society – from near murder.  This guy thinks the man who nearly murdered him ‘must be very sick’, but she will have none of that.  She watches the would-be murderer (who has committed other serial murders) burn alive, when she could have saved him, and this bothers her not at all.  She finds herself having to explain the obvious:  “He knowingly tortured and murdered innocent people, and he enjoyed it”.  Hello.

To those who have always been safe and comfortable, justice comes to be seen as an immature emotional need, like revenge, a juvenile anger.   Compassion is always proper, the way to break the ‘cycle of violence’.   War is never the answer, punishment ‘doesn’t work’.

Perhaps in homogeneous societies, like Sweden up until recently, consensus is easy, trust is high, others are understandable, empathy is natural, good will is a default.  Such a society, however, eventually provides rich opportunity for exploitation by the cunning, the selfish, the deceptive, and the mean.  Such a society can become, like Larsson’s Swedish journalist, naive.

Our heroine’s abusive father is an evil Russian.  She is only half Swedish.

Compassion over justice may need a reset, unfortunately.  In a tolerant and cosmopolitan world, justice may be more necessary.  These novels may be trying to say so.

John F. Kennedy famously said:  “Don’t hate your enemies but never forget their names”.

It is the weak who suffer the most from the emphasis on compassion over justice, and it is the powerful who suffer less from the failure of justice.  Yet, ironically, it is the powerful who are most readily advocating compassion.

Serving Justice, it gets forgotten, isn’t so much about punishing the guilty  as it is about preventing future injustice.

Our heroine seems to know that trying to understand evil may feel comfortable, but it doesn’t do much for the next victims.

Sweden may be trying to tell us something.

J.R.R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey, Houghton Mifflin Company 2000.

The oldest and deepest desire satisfied by fairy tales is to tell tales of the great escape: the escape from Death.”

There is a sublime sadness in the eyes of the hero, Aragorn, within the triumph of resilience that is the story of The Lord of the Rings.  J.R.R. Tolkien suffered loss of his father to rheumatic fever, when he was four, and loss of his mother to diabetes when he was twelve.  He was raised by Catholic priests. He was gravely sickened with trench fever in World War I.

By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

He eventually married – a long and good marriage – and became an Oxford professor of old english, the literature before Shakespeare.  He taught in the years when Britain lost its confidence, Orwell wrote of the corruption of language, society abandoned religion, and Hitler rose to power.

For Tolkien, the great legends, such as Beowulf, speak eternal truths, the truths known before writing, known before civilization, truths that even the authors themselves do not realize they are telling, truths from God.

For Tolkien, God tells a legend story that He makes to actually happen:  the story of  Jesus Christ.

Modern times chose to turn away from the old stories and their truths.  For them, the past was not wisdom, it was superstition, Mythology doesn’t teach, it is artifact.

And for Tolkien, the price paid was ghastly wars.

The Lord of the Rings is a re-telling, for the modern ears that will hear, the old knowledge.  Tolkien re-tells the ancient lore for the modern reader, he re-presents the immemorial truths.

The Lord of the Rings is a story of common people and the power of common loyalty, of the universal temptation of power and the sure corruption by power, of the dangers of disbelief and the meaning in mortality, of the journey of living and courage in the face of despair, of the necessity of resisting evil and of staring annihilation in the face, of looking to one’s own sin and resisting the of sin of others, of facing insurmountable odds and of holding fast, of the power of simple friendship and the king restored to his throne.

“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat” – although it contains glimpses of final victory.”

History is not progressive, it is the perennial story, the recurring struggle with sin and death.

There is deliverance.  There is the Evangelium – joy beyond the veil of the world, the truth of the living God.


Revolution Misremembered

Oh posterity, you will never know how much it cost us to preserve your freedom.  I hope that you will make a good use of it.  It you do not, I will repent in heaven that I took half the pains to preserve it.

So speaks John Adams in the last line of the HBO mini-series inspired by David McCullough’s biography.  Adams knew that our American revolution was precarious, and that its principles were vulnerable to misinterpretation.

The mini-series juxtaposes Adams and Jefferson. We see Adams as a prudent, calculating revolutionary.  For the cause of independence, he leads the Continental Congress with the temperament of a radical.  His revolutionary convictions were shrewd, and genuine.  But as a President he was conservative. Once the revolution was achieved, he was solely determined to preserve the government.  Meanwhile, Jefferson envisioned a perennial revolution, with each generation overthrowing the institutions of the last.

McCullough shows that Adams was uniquely aware of the fragility of the new government and the principles it affirmed.  As he transformed from a revolutionary to a conservative, his reputation faltered.  His efforts in office to protect the delicate union, his preoccupation with its infant weaknesses, lead many in his time to question his true commitment to the revolution—as though revolution, itself, was always virtuous.  He lost the legacy battle to Jefferson, and witnessed firsthand the cold unfairness of history.

Though mocked and unpopular, Adams commented before vacating the Presidency, “Mr. Jefferson is fortunate that I have left him a county at all over which to preside.

It is probably true that part of Adams’ pessimism was partly due to offended disgruntlement.  He clearly resented Jefferson’s popularity.  But there was also something worrying to Adams about the way history embraced Jefferson.  Adams believed completely in the principles of the revolution, and the institutions of the new government, and he knew of their profound importance to the world.  To him, the revolution was real, necessary, and genuine.  To Jefferson, and to many Americans of the time, it was abstract and romantic.  Adams seemed to know that there would be something lost if the realness of the American principles was not appreciated.

In a later scene, the mini-series shows an old, ornery Adams surveying John Trumbull’s painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Adams tells Trumbull:

Do not let our posterity be diluted with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical licenses…It is a very common observation in Europe that nothing is so false as modern history.  Well I would hasten to add that nothing is so false as modern European history, except modern American history.  In plain English, I consider the true history of the American Revolution to be lost…forever.

Beltway Nationalism

“Lobbyists need something to buy, and legislators need something to sell.” Milton Friedman

Lobbyists have clients who pay them to purchase advantage from legislators who are writing laws that affect them.  Legislators have lobbyists who pay them – in campaign contributions – to create laws that favor specific individuals and businesses that are represented by lobbyists.  Utilizing taxpayer money, both legislators and lobbyists prosper.  And so, Beltway D.C. neighborhoods have become the wealthiest in our nation, and the average Beltway income is directly correlated with the continually increasing number of pages in the federal tax code.   The business value of H.R. Block, the company people pay to figure out their taxes, also correlates with the continually increasing number of pages in the federal tax code.

The Beltway must create, but also hide, the myriad favors and exceptions to special interests that are placed into our federal laws.  And it does.  Congress has become not unlike the Catholic church before the reformation, it sells indulgences –  special exemptions –  from its taxes and laws.  And our politics is transformed. Freedom becomes not freedom from government, but support from government. Opposing taxation becomes suspect.  Special groups are selectively excluded from taxation, while of course still able to vote – we have growing “representation without taxation”.

To satisfy this ‘market’, Congress must continually expand its role.  More and more social issues and inequalities must be conjured and legislated.  And they are.   In this way the nation’s original federalism gives way to a nationalism, a Beltway nationalism. The original Federalists advocated for a national bank, a national currency, a strong chief executive in time of war, and regulation of interstate commerce, but not much more.  They believed in the sovereign power of the states over their local affairs.  The original antifederalists, confusingly named Republicans originally, (and later called Democrats), believed the federalists wanted too much power. They sought to limit federal power, and not just to protect slavery – many of them were against slavery – but their knowledge of european history made them wary of government power.

Today, beltway nationalists, who mostly call themselves Democrats, seek more than a strong central power for defense and commerce, they seek national power in local affairs, too.  They have grown from the Progressive movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society.  Confusingly, today’s federalists – neofederalists? – who mostly call themselves Republicans, are more like the original anti-federalists. They seek to limit national power in local affairs and the economy.  The nationalists have been the most successful.  They have essentially nationalized transportation, public education, food production, medical care, and college education, with the recent nationalization of all college loans.

The Federal Register, the compendium of all federal, bureaucratic rules and regulations, is 20,000 pages long. . . . weekly, and it keeps getting longer.

Old World government, centralized bureaucratic government, has come to the United States.

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