Come Gather 'Round People

Once upon a time, Bob Dylan stood dead center on a stage facing citizens of an oppressive regime that denies free speech and spat these lines viciously to the crowd:

But something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

If you read Maureen Dowd's idiotic, park-your-keister-in-a-DC-coffeeshop and hit the Google column in The Times, you're probably nodding and thinking wistfully of 1963 when young Bobby Zimmerman out of Minnesota's Iron Range actually stood for challenging authority and telling stories of truth and justice. Dylan, wrote the NYT's resident right-wing sex columnist, had sold out in China - indeed, was a sell-out for most of his career.

But you'd be wrong. Dylan, in fact, sung those lyrics front and center on the stage in the Beijing Workers' Gymnasium last week. He also sang these:

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden

With a little reporting, James Fallows skillfully destroys the "Dylan Sells Out" charges Dowd so sloppily left at Dylan's feet. Here's a bit:

Jeremiah Jenne, a Chinese-speaker and long-time resident of Beijing who covered the actual "Jasmine Protests" in Beijing in a stint as Guest Blogger here, says in his Jottings from the Granite Studio that "there has been a rash of increasingly unrealistic drivel [about Dylan] from the foreign press, culminating yesterday in a truly moronic piece by Maureen Dowd." Jenne pointed out that one of the numbers Dylan sang in Beijing, "a corrosive version of All Along the Watchtower, ain't exactly bubble gum pop.

Dylan's not perfect, and nor has he ever been the idol of folkie protest that froze time in the last months of the Kennedy Administration. The troubadour has made a habit of shedding skins. Yet anyone with a little knowledge of the man's actual career and writing knows he's as far from a sell-out as a major entertainment figure has been in the last fifty years. He plays it his way. The incisive BooMan finds the coda: "Dylan doesn't have to sing songs of rebellion to be subversive. His entire existence is subversive. And Dowd doesn't understand any of it."

But let's get some more from the poet, who opened his Communist-approved set in China with his Christian era (sell out!) classic Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, from Slow Train Coming - goes like this:

So much oppression
Can't keep track of it no more
So much oppression
Can't keep track of it no more