It’s been a few years since it first dawned on me that I would never be able to lay rightful claim to any status as a Bob Dylan fan. I was cozying down to an afternoon of casual reading on a couch in the cavernous Austin location known as Book People – that city’s best analogue to Powell’s City of Books in Portland – and I had just begun to peruse “Songbook”, the novelist Nick Hornby’s then-recent collection of music criticism essays. Allowing the volume to open randomly across my lap, I was confronted with Hornby’s perplexing explanation that he was no fan of Dylan: Although he owned all the studio albums and a few bootlegs, although he genuinely enjoyed the music and the persona and found many of the themes engaging, he didn’t actually own all the bootlegs; he didn’t know all the words by heart; he never pulled together the $200 for the show at Madison Square Garden. (Again, it’s been a few years; forgive me if my details are off.) By this metric, of course, few of us can ever be true fans of any musical act – but to Hornby, the prohibitive fact was that there are so many fans of that particular artist so much more fanatical than he. The standard for admission into the club of Dylan fandom is just a bit more high than that for fandom of, say, Britney Spears, which basically entails thinking she looked pretty hot in that video dressed as a Catholic school girl.
Nonetheless, there are Web sites devoted to symbolic analyses of Dylan’s lyrics that attempt to demonstrate that he is a flag-waving zealot for the Christian Right, or that his singular aim in life is to see the destruction of the state of Israel. Whoever cobbled these improbable theories together and posted them to their Web sites, it’s fair to speculate that they are not members of the elusive club to which Hornby alludes. Somehow, however, in this world of innumerable possibilities, these scholars are entitled to present their delusions as authoritative readings, and the Internet makes no judgment. So perhaps the times allow me, a rube who owns no more than four Dylan albums, to mention that every time I encounter a news item these days there is suddenly an apparition next to my ear singing “All Along the Watchtower,” in which the thief counsels the joker, “Let us not talk falsely, now; the hour’s getting late.”
How exciting it was a few weeks ago to learn that Bob Woodward, the man who dethroned Nixon, had written a book called “State of Denial,” in which he intimated that Laura Bush feared Rumsfeld was ruining her husband’s presidency. How enlightening it was to learn that Bush’s resolve concerning the war was such that as long as his wife and his dog were on his side, he needn’t consider the will and wisdom of Americans, the welfare and honor of the military or the factual reality of conditions in Iraq. What a stunning disappointment, after all this, to observe our most distinguished journalist respond to questions about his shifting treatment of the President’s character between different books by dissembling. I’m just an impartial observer, he demurred. The President is a man who thinks in eras, not years, he offered.
The New York Times had to get one of its hacks in on the act, so David Brooks picked up where Woodward left off. Bush is a President of sweeping vision, he opined in one column. His vision is such that he sees freedom spreading forth across the Mideast, he insisted. The reason he doesn’t seem to make sense is simply that we can’t see what he sees, and the reason the war is faltering is that his generals can’t see it so well either, he stated with a straight face as he sat across a table from Bill Maher. It isn’t Bush’s fault; it is all of ours instead.
The charade made me wish I could shake Woodward and Brooks by the ears and demand that they answer some questions. If it was the generals’ fault that the war was a failure, for not communicating with the Administration, whose fault was it that the generals who were honest lost their jobs? If it was Rumsfeld’s fault that Bush’s presidency was a failure, whose fault was it that Bush excluded the counsel of anyone not part of Rumsfeld’s circle? What exactly is it that compels everyone to shy away from thinking of things in real terms and to plunge headlong instead into delusional scenarios that are then acted upon?
Now we have the opposing party dominating both houses of Congress, and we are all quite excited to envision a near future in which the will and wisdom of the American people play a role in our national decision-making. I’m excited too, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s been only a few days since the Democrats’ victory, and Nancy Pelosi has already promised there will be no impeachment. How many years has it been since it dawned on us all that George W. Bush would never lay rightful claim to any status as a visionary of democracy?
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