Will Bob Dylan portend the election of 2004?
by Steve Consilvio
When Bob Dylan recently accepted the offer to have his music used in a Victoria's Secret commercial, he shocked observers by offering to appear in them, too. The world's reaction was pretty much "Bob's Gone Mad," but the cross-branding opportunity was too tempting for the lingerie empire to resist. As a philosopher-poet-musician, Dylan is accustomed to being called mad, but there is a method to his madness.
It is the people who think they are sane that are truly mad, including the advertising executives who spin webs of lust and greed and pride.
Let's strip off the last veil of political history and see man and woman as they really are: Sex and violence are intimately linked. Dylan understood the interplay of a total war economy and abortion in the
1963 song "Masters of War," when he wrote the line: "You have thrown the worst fear that has ever been hurled, the fear to bring children into the world." Long before 9/11 and the Patriot Act, taxed citizens have always paid for the militarization of their own society. Rising divorce rates in a liberal society exposes moral disunity. Neither the Rights of Man nor Woman can be honored in a state of domestic stress.
Abortions by the desperate poor and complacent rich match the growth of the war industry, security firms, locks and suveillence systems. Fear is commonsense and common; My key-chain car alarm is living proof.
American prisons bulge. New laws are written everyday to keep up with our new fears.
America has always had a total war economy. We stand in grand ceremony for heads of state and elections, but the powers that be are still the ideas in our head. Spin upon spin of inhumanity, buried in a language of rights and social justice, has become our perpetual double-think.
All political sides do it, which is why the drumbeat of the poet seems cacophonic.
History is written by moral choices, not by marketplace economics or populist systems. Where better a place to find Dylan than in the center of a lust driven industry commercial? The political and economic realms are where the moral choices are made, not where they are formed. He silently stands in contrast to the sea of titillation and domination that casually adorns our modern culture and our thinking.
Big Brother authoritarian government and Big Mama socialist government both require dominion by government, the same as theocratic or monarchial states. Citizens of both genders remain unwittingly enslaved by their fascination of sexy fascism. America's central government is simply a new type of fascist state; your safety is dependent upon turning a blind eye to its excess, the same as with all the other fascist-style states. Dylan appears with models to show us how ugly we have remained. The women are still slaves to man's desires for war, sex, and profit.
We think Lincoln freed the slaves, but what he really did was make everyone a slave of the central government. The cast had been set years before when Washington accepted the honor of being an elected king, and built a city unto himself, complete with idyllic monuments to blind moral choices. The American annihilation of Native Americans was no different than fascist Germany's annihilation of the Jews, except there were no cameras to document the brutality. Killing technology has grown along with our fears. Annihilation is the hypocrisy of empire, it is a domestic murder-suicide of geopolitics raked over time. Destroy, destroy! Those are the words of fear.
Dylan evokes the wisdom that every religion teaches: If you follow fear, anger and violence you become a Pharisee, and you will teach your children hypocrisy. The poet opens both eyes and gazes into a narcissistic pool. The greatest struggle in anyone's life is with their own mirror, which is why poets are called mad by those who see themselves in their vision. There is no political party for poets like Dylan. He is isolated from both the left and the right because, unlike them, he recognizes their fear. Like Snow White's cruel stepmother, politicized people only want to hear words of praise from their reflection, not the brutal truth.
In the commercial, the contrast between Dylan and the beautiful damsel was stark. While some labor under the glare of their masters, others inhabit an intellectual land of superficial beauty with manicured lawns and tea/tee times. Dylan wants us to struggle to hear, see and understand the human condition behind the big painted eyes; they are our own. Fear controls us. Happy sex is enough to keep many satisfied, and the fascist promise of never getting hurt satisfies others. Poets take us to the raw edge of creation, not to a superficial separation of church and state. Dylan's work is a conversation with God. He describes the beauty of motherhood and the bestiality of man. He asks his mother why she didn't tell him these things he sees. Of course, she couldn't, not in the way he wants to understand them. Will the scantily clad angel teach her children any better?
Fascists for political liberation demand mercy and vengeance in the same breath. It is a battle for equal privilege, not equality. Please buy my bra or I will starve, says the advertiser. (Hunger is fear,
too.) I guess that means women are no longer burning bras, but something more important is smoldering. Women are now soldiers, and the equal of men in their desire for war, sex, and profit. America is losing its gender blindness, which is a good thing, but where is the liberation of men to be merciful, loving and nurturing? Mother Earth remains imprisoned and neutered by fear, pride and economic duplicity.
An election is on the horizon, and the candidates are rolling down Highway 61 looking for votes. I will be casting mine for Kerry, and hoping that Dennis Kucinich will soon be Speaker of the House. Both men are slightly more poetic in their willingness to look into their own mirror than the current incumbent. If the President can not think of any mistakes he has made, then he is not looking in the mirror. Given the way the issues are being framed in the current election, my hopes are measured. The American people need to vote against the moral hypocrisy of both parties when it appears or we will continue to sink like a stone.
The political blame game begins and ends in the mirror. Vice-President Cheney criticized Senator John Kerry saying that we cannot wage a war against terrorism with sensitivity. I respectfully submit that without sensitivity we cannot win the war against ourselves. We are destroying ourselves, not the terrorists.
Peace is our mother and the voting lever is our umbilical cord. A future with peace need not be stillborn; Voters need to grow beyond their false child-like fears and pubescent partisan politics. If the people are wise, then they can govern themselves without the domination of Big Brother or Big Mama. Dylan is not seduced by false promises.
That, I suspect, is Robert's Secret.
Steve Consilvio www.behappyandfree.com is a small business owner with a history degree. He is also co-owner of a start-up software developer www.augursoftware.com developers of eCalculator. A MacIntosh aficionado, and, as yet, unpublished author of political philosophy, he wants to change the world with a Constitutional Convention. His body roams Massachusetts, but his mind is years away. He can be reached asteve@behappyandfree.com Yes, he knows he is a hypocrite
