Oh dear – here’s Joan Baez:
[N]ow I’ve gone back very much to my roots musically. As it turns out, politically it is absolutely the right thing to do: rather than try to find new songs to deal with the state of the world, which unfortunately this country is leading in a disastrous direction, the songs from 40 years ago are coming back very comfortably. Dylan wrote With God on Our Side before Americans started fighting in Vietnam, and that’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
No it isn’t. It’s not at all amazing. The first step to political awareness is when you start to question why your country’s always presented as being in the right (well, it used to be: nowadays teenagers brought up reading their parents’ Independent presumably struggle to some kind of political maturity with the realisation that the West isn’t always in the wrong). Dylan managed to capture that feeling, but there was nothing amazing about it. It’s powerful, but in Dylan terms it’s a fairly trite piece of work, aimed at the smugness of the Cold War rhetoric of the Fifties and early Sixties rather than the Vietnam era.
I think many people are pretty well stymied by the state of affairs here, and I think that this country, like any country that’s about to fall, says: “Oh, it couldn’t happen here.” And I think it’s happening. It’s getting deeper every day: wiretapping and people getting frightened for their jobs and their reputations, and all that stuff. My mom says that when I was 14 I was reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I came out of my bedroom and announced that the same thing was going to happen to the US as what happened to the Third Reich. I’d forgotten that, and when she told me I thought: “Well, do I gloat because I was clever, or do I despair? Because it’s devastating news.”
There’s something so fatuously narcissistic about this comparison of current-day US with Nazi Germany. Meant to show that she has some kind of heightened sensitivity, some special antennae picking up the fascist vibes that the rest of us are too blind to notice, all it really demonstrates is that she doesn’t have a clue: that she’s never given any serious consideration at all to what life might have been like back then. The gangs of Nazi youths roaming the streets, the smashed store fronts of the Jewish shops, the sudden disappearance of those Jewish neighbours, the Gestapo thugs….and that’s before the horrors of war, before the Holocaust truly started up. It’s a monstrous piece of conceit to pretend that her concerns bear any comparison with the victims of the Nazis. It trivialises the sufferings of those who lived through that period. And what are Joan’s concerns, in BusHitler proto-Nazi America?
My favourite dinner is a whole, crispy-cooked fish, and I love to eat with my hands. I won’t usually have wine: sometimes if I’m eating out I’ll think, “That would be nice,” and then I drink about half of it and forget it’s there.
Meanwhile here’s Kurt Vonnegut, speaking at the Ohio State Union (via):
“Well,” says Vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”
The students seem to agree.
“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” Vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”
“You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.”
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