Burned-Over District, NY. The week that Wisconsin voters threw out Russ Feingold, the only stepgrandson Fighting Bob La Follette had left in the U.S. Senate, I went to hear an Upper Midwesterner of similar pedigree, Bob Dylan of Hibbing, Minnesota.
I actually saw some heads without hoarfrost, a pleasing contrast to the last time I paid a column’s wages to sit in a hockey arena and listen to music. When my brother and I attended a Bruce Springsteen concert a couple of years ago, we surveyed the crowd and figured we must have wandered into a tour stop by the Ray Conniff Singers.
Lord knows I loved Bruce back in the Darkness on the Edge of Town/Nebraska days, after he had shed his early Dylan mimicry and set out to be the John Steinbeck of Freehold, New Jersey. My buddy Chuck and I would snake around town in his old jeep yowling “If she wants to see me/You can tell her that I’m easily found…” Alas, while we were easily found, she sure didn’t want to see us.
Politically, Bruce was nowhere near as interesting as the early punks or even that Mormon-Jewish hybrid Warren Zevon. (From Crystal Zevon’s warts-aplenty 2007 portrait of her ex-husband, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, comes this account of the Zevons’ child-custody dispute: “Warren got on the phone; he was obviously drunk…He said, ‘I’m to the right of your father and Ronald Reagan and if you think I’m going to let my daughter be raised by some f—-ing Communist hippie, you’re sadly mistaken.’” But really, who can resist a songwriter who begins a lyric, “I went home with the waitress/The way I always do/How was I to know/She was with the Russians, too?”)
Dylan, on several other hands, has been a Goldwater admirer, born-again Christian, and proponent of agrarianism as the “authentic alternative lifestyle.” He was formed in Minnesota before he ever saw Greenwich Village. In his memoir Chronicles, the singer, mindful of his roots in that frozen ground, writes of Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eddie Cochran, Sinclair Lewis, and Roger Maris as men he “felt akin to,” freethinking sons of the North Country who “followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed them.”
Lindbergh’s congressman father, whom the New York Times tagged the “Gopher Bolshevik,” was a fierce critic of Wall Street, Woodrow Wilson, and the war machine. Charles Lindbergh Sr. was a progenitor of a vigorous Minnesota antiwar tradition that found expression in men such as Senators Henrik Shipstead and Eugene McCarthy before degenerating into the boring Cold War social democracy of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale or the Republican polenta of Pawlenty.
Bob Dylan is very much in the Lindbergh-McCarthy tradition, as Norwegian academic Tor Egil Forland explained in a 1992 Journal of American Studies paper titled “Bringing It All Back Home or Another Side of Bob Dylan: Midwestern Isolationist.” But then Dylan is 69, and old enough to remember when the people of his place looked askance at empire. There were giants in the earth in those days.
When the Masters of War (“even Jesus would never forgive what you do”) requested the presence of American sons at the blood orgies of 1917, 1941, 1950, and 1964, it was the Upper Midwest, with its Non-Partisan Leagues and retro-Progressives and Sons of the Wild Jackass, that brayed “No!” Where are their offspring? I don’t mean to be impertinent or importunate, Dakotas and Minnesota and Wisconsin, but we look to you for La Follettes and Nyes and McGoverns and you give us Al Franken and Ron Johnson?
Turn off the goddam television, would you please, and turn on Wisconsin!
Feingold had his flaws but he was the only member of the Senate with the guts to vote against the Patriot Act; as Jesse Walker of Reason writes, he also “voted against TARP, was decent on the Second Amendment, and was one of the rare liberals to reach out to the Tea Parties instead of demonizing them.” He was neither red nor blue—each a scoundrel hue.
Senator Feingold quoted Dylan in his concession speech: “My heart is not weary/It’s light and it’s free/I have nothing but affection for those who have sailed with me.” Dylan closed our concert with “Ballad of a Thin Man,” rasping, “Something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?”
I’m no more perceptive than Mr. Jones, but one thing is all too clear: the Upper Midwest, historic home of the American peace movement, has come down with an awfully bad case of laryngitis. And it’s gettin’ dark—too dark to see.
This appeared in the January 2011 issue of The American Conservative (www.amconmag.com), to which all fans of Bob Dylan and Bob La Follette should subscribe.
Glad to see Warren Zevon getting some well-overdue recognition. I’ve never understood his relative obscurity compared to the Boss (whom I love as well) or other singer-songwriters.
Then again, perhaps there’s a lyrical accessibility gulf. Thunder Road and Backstreets is a little more palatable to the sensitive than Excitable Boy.
Granted, he’s no Gene McCarthy, a wonderfully crazy and smart populist who combined the Keynesian demand for policies of full employment with a civil libertarian approach to personal freedoms. But cut Al Franken some slack; it’s not like there isn’t any of the North Country in him at all. Anyone who threatens National Review’s Rich Lowry with a fistfight, and really means it, can’t be all that bad.
And anyone responsible for “The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus” is a genius in my books.
http://www.bobonline.net/progxiansd/ssj/index.html
That was pretty blasphemous and horrible, Jordan, but I laughed and loved it all the same. Thanks for the link.
Blasphemous? I couldn’t disagree more. It was quite honouring to the true Jesus, and rightfully critical of the perverted version represented by too many on the Right.
But an uncharitable representation of the free market, to be sure.
While I’m suspicious of excessive admiration for La Follette, I’m downright mystified by admiration for Bob Dylan. It’s a weird gene in the American makeup that lionizes a second-rate poet who can’t sing. I don’t get it. I guess it comes down to the standard defense of the 60’s: you had to be there. After all, there’s more to politics than being anti-war.
Some of us who weren’t there nonetheless think Dylan has written some tremendous songs, Jeff. (Were they poetry? Depends on how you define it, I guess. I don’t think he’s ever described himself that way, for whatever that’s worth. Never forget his own estimation of himself, at the height of the manufactured anti-war folk craze of the mid-60s: “I’m just a song and dance man.”)
I’ll second Mr. Polet: while I occasionally derive pleasure from the tunes and lyrics of Mr. Dylan, he’s most emphatically not an excellent poet, and he’s an even worse singer (often downright cacophonous). And when did semi-statist progressives like LaFollette, Feingold, and Reid become heroes to front-porchers?
How about when they started standing up for the people/places they came from? And who mentioned Reid, anyway? Is that some sort of red herring?
As for Rob Z, find me a bard with a voice like silk, and I’ll find you a Rob who claims he’s a better poet, Rob! -Z
Mystified by admiration for Dylan? Please. You don’t have to like him or think he’s a great poet or singer/songwriter, but mystified by his popularity?
This is the kind of commentary that makes the Porch wearying at times, and only gives fuel to those writing it off as elitist. One can’t even profess admiration for To Kill A Mockingbird without some nitwit explaining its shortcomings.
Fine, but I’m asking a serious question here: when did statists become Front Porch approved? Maybe I’ve been dwelling under the proverbial rock for the past few months, or perhaps the trend was latent in the project from its origins, but I recently returned to FPR to find articles praising monarchy, coercive wealth-redistribution, subsidies of all kinds, and, again, statists. Am I missing something? Does this sort of statism actually harbor space for front porches?
In re Feingold, I think that BK has covered this ground ably:
“Feingold had his flaws but he was the only member of the Senate with the guts to vote against the Patriot Act; as Jesse Walker of Reason writes, he also “voted against TARP, was decent on the Second Amendment, and was one of the rare liberals to reach out to the Tea Parties instead of demonizing them.” He was neither red nor blue—each a scoundrel hue.”
I’m not as warm on Feingold as BK, but these are fair points all. I’m not enough of an expert on Kauffmanism to answer about his LaFollette-ism, but methinks that it has to do with LaFollette’s anti-imperialism and opposition to American entrance in to the Great War and his opposition to economic centralization.
Obviously not everyone on the Porch is going to agree with everyone else on everything, as Mr. Médaille’s foray into monarchism has revealed, but I’m still not convinced that “statism” — that great bugbear — has really been granted an “XXX”-marked jug and a banjo.
Either way, that such (seemingly) questionable ideas have been presented here strikes me not as some sort of treasonous attack on the spirit of Place. Limits. Liberty., but a necessary — even if painful — stage of exploration as we consider how front-porch-ism is to be enacted in our communities, regions, states, and nations. Monarchy, e.g., may have no place in these United States, but that doesn’t rule out the grounds for investigating the localism-friendly aspects of monarchy (c.f. Nisbet?) — both for what we can learn, and to consider how our friends in Britain, Luxembourg, and Jordan could invigorate localism in their nations.
Just the same, while subsidies (I must have missed the specific suggestion to subsidize something in these parts in my regrettably less-frequent visiting of late.) are generally to viewed with suspicion, if not outright disdain, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that some sort of subsidization program to support and to encourage, say, small-scale/organic farming — You know, the things that were natural before government subsidies started to smash them to pieces in the name of monocultural, large-scale production.
It’s an important question to ask, but I don’t think that throwing in the ‘s’-word is helpful. Part of both the beauty and the pain of localism is that what works varies from locality to another, from one nation to another, and nothing that has the potential to restore local control of our policy-making, our economies, and our civic and social organizations should be written off without deliberation simply because it smacks of “statism”.
Yes – I’m genuinely mystified by it. Why is that so hard to understand?
And I’m wearied even more by the charge of “elitism” against those who call popular prejudices into question. I’m not saying there isn’t an argument to be made for Dylan. I’m saying I haven’t heard it, and there are all sorts of reasons to assume one can’t be made (for example: he can’t sing, his music is aesthetically uninteresting, and his lyrics are overrated). I’ve met a fair number of Dylan fans over the years, and I’ve asked them to make the case to me, and haven’t had one do so yet in a satisfactory manner. If that makes me an elitist, so be it.
Well I can’t stand artists such as Tupac, Katy Perry, or I don’t know, pick just about anyone on the top 40 charts… but I understand why they are popular.
Another good issue of the A.C.. As to Dylan, he’s paid his dues, withstood some calls of being traitor and he’s an Alter kacker (for the civilian, this means “old shitter” in Yiddish). Fresh from a wired up and needle-poked stint on the cardiac floor myself, I like his croakings and of course, “the blood of the lamb” in his eyes.
Would that a few more liberty-professing members of the so-called “conservative ” wing were as consistent in opposing the ongoing erosion of fruitless wars and privacy as was Senator Feingold.
Some people like things and some people don’t. It aint mystery, its just human.
…just picked up Springsteen’s ‘The Promise’ box set companion book, amazing original photos and stories frm the Darkness tour. Limited Edition http://www.thelightinDarkness.com
[…] he wrote a little piece run by both Front Porch Republic and The American Conservative, called “The Fighting Bobs,” in which Dylan’s “Masters of War” played a starring role. The piece connected two “Bobs,” […]
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