Mick Wright.net

Nate has an excellent essay at Two Cities, approved reading for both liberals and conservatives.

I’m getting questions about my new header graphic above. Inquire or opine in the comments, if you wish.

Looks like these two guys had a case of the Mondays…

Rick Monday Saved the Flag 30 Years Ago

Monday’s act heroic after 30 years

For this one.

Greg Kendall-Ball has a post up containing little more than the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “God on Our Side,” which he calls a “warning” from “Prophet Bob.”

In the comments, Beverly asks, “Are there some wars that are justified… such as taking Hitler out..? If so..hmm..who gets to decide..?”

The answer in this case is Bob Dylan, and yes.

Now, I’m a Bob Dylan fan. Most of his records are in my CD library and his autobiography, Chronicles Vol 1, is sitting on my shelf along with his slim book of poetry, Tarantula. I recently watched the documentary Martin Scorsese did for PBS called No Direction Home and have also seen the earlier film on Dylan, Don’t Look Back. I’ve memorized more than a few of his songs and can perform sad renditions of them on my guitar. I’ve seen him play live four or five times in as many years, which is several times more than I’ve seen any other entertainer. Whenever he’s in the Memphis area, I’m usually there, most recently last July (see photo above). In fact, I just got tickets to see him tonight at the Orpheum theatre — great seats in the fourth row, thanks to Ebay.

So, in other words, my Dylan credentials are pretty solid.

On the other hand, I can admit that he pretty much sucks in concert, and that while most of his songs are brilliant, a good number of them are terrible or simply fall apart somewhere in the middle.

“God on Our Side” belongs in that latter category.

The song is ostensibly about the zealous Christian American patriots who lead us into war after war, all the while claiming God’s exclusive favor upon our nation and saying he fights with us in our battles. It’s basically the lyrical equivalent to Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics or Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Its easily spread message, its inclusive-sounding strawman and its careful reconstsruction of American history (putting this country in the worst possible light) make it a favorite of liberals.

But is this ode to extreme pacifism really what it claims to be, or does Dylan make a few shortcuts that betray his unwillingness to accept the logical conclusion of his own ideology? As is becoming a theme here at Fishkite, when we listen closer to what the song actually does and doesn’t say, we find that it’s little more than a half-baked rant that collapses in upon itself by the fifth verse (about mid-way through).

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Dylan begins with some tight-lipped background information which serves to position the speaker (a fictionalized Dylan, we assume) as a true, middle-of-the-road, Mid-Western American child soon besieged by ignorant, warmongering Christian-folk — the strawman.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

For Dylan, our history begins not with the great minds of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, our exceptional system of law and order, or the unlikely victory over Great Britain, the most powerful force on the planet. Instead, history begins with a war between the oppressed (Indians) and the oppressors (cavalries).

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I’s made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Lacking either the space or the conviction to identify its victims, Dylan notes the mere existence of the Spanish-American war as means to introduce the ultimate evil — weapons (guns). He finds nothing especially terrible about the Civil War, either, treating it with a passive, past tense, “was soon laid away.” Dylan conveniently ignores the noble cause of President Lincoln in freeing the slaves and restoring the Union, realizing that segments of his audience may be a little more appreciative of that war’s outcome.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side.

Finally, Dylan finds a war that is worthy of his direct objection. That’s easier to do when you can’t point to a clear mitigating factor, such as freed slaves or defeated Nazis, and when its veterans are no longer around to object to his characterization of their sacrifices.

Here’s where it really starts to break apart:

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

Dylan knows very well that he can’t get away with criticism of WWII and the Greatest Generation, at least not while they’re still among the living. Still, he avoids holding up the six million murdered Jews as a testament to the virture of some military actions and instead shifts his focus entirely to Germany, a switch so pathetic that he often doesn’t include this verse when performed live. For example, listen to the live set Dylan did for MTV Unplugged; you won’t hear it.

I’ve learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

This is another verse Dylan skips these days, for obvious reasons.

From there, the song gets even less relevant and logical until he finally returns to make a point in the final verse.

If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.

He should tell that to the freed slaves and the generations which came after them. He should tell it to the millions of Jews who survived the Holocaust and their descendants. He should tell that to children in Kuwait and Bosnia. He should tell it to 25 million Iraqis and 30 million Afghans recently liberated and working to create the democracies in a region desperate for change.

While Bob Dylan is a great musician and songwriter, he’s certainly no prophet.

As No Direction Home makes abundantly clear, Bob Dylan the man (Robert Zimmerman) is basically a jerk and is about the least reliable witness on the planet, even when it comes to his own life. After all these years, and with all his achievements, Dylan hasn’t a clue who he is and fails to recognize his own blessings and the basic goodness of his own country.

If Dylan was truly interested in making a bold, prophetic statement in the world, he would step out of the mainstream (see Green Day, Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Sheryl Crow, etc), stick his neck out and assail the Islamofascist jihad — you know, the enemies of America who actually do believe they’re killing for Allah.

Instead, that stark voice that once spoke for a generation now sounds like little more than the cry of someone who’s completely lost.

A few years ago, the Chicago Cubs destroyed the Bartman ball in an attempt to put an end to the curse. This year, in light of Derrek Lee’s broken wrist and the ongoing Prior and Wood saga, I’m afraid we may need to take some more drastic measures.

@ the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations:

QUESTION: A few weeks ago, a gentleman in Afghanistan was to be tried for his conversion from Islam to Christianity and you were instrumental in securing his freedom and urging for the Universal Declaration of Human Right to be upheld. And my question is: As Afghanistan is a young democracy, do you see this as setting a precedent that may lead the way to wider-spread freedom in that country?

SECRETARY RICE: It’s a really good question and the way that you put it is very important because it is a young democracy. Afghanistan and many of the Muslim countries that are going through democratic transitions are having to deal with one of the most difficult issues that confront any political system, and that’s the relationship between religion and religious law and individual rights and liberties. And we have been through it, although we were founded on separation of church and state; not everybody was founded on separation of church and state. And so it has been a very important evolution as these countries try to deal with this issue.

Now, I do believe that what happened in the Rahman case was a bit of a wake-up call to us and, frankly, to Afghanistan because it immediately brought international expectations into play in Afghanistan for what is understood to be the course of democracy. And I think that was a very good thing. The Afghanistan constitution does have protections for individuals in terms of their religious practice. And so as these countries go through this evolution, I think you’re probably going to have more cases, some of them are going to end up in their courts. You know, we have to remember, again referring to our own experience, that our own evolution was one in which the Constitution has been interpreted time and time and time again as individuals come to the courts and say, you’re violating my constitutional rights. And then we have a case about it and things evolve.

Again, as I said to the lady, we’ve had some pretty awful cases. You know, the Dred Scott decision was a pretty awful decision, and we’ve evolved out of those over time. The same thing will happen in Afghanistan. The same thing will happen in Iraq and there will be decisions that we do not like and that we will have to call to attention the international obligation. I think there will be victories for individual liberties as well. But this is the natural process of democratic evolution and it’s going to take some time. The good news is it’s not the Taliban. Because the Taliban could have carried out that sentence and nobody would have been able to do a thing about it, and that’s what we have to keep in mind. Even when it’s a young, troubled, struggling democracy it’s far better than a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime that does not respect rights nor respects the will of the international community.

“It is my belief that industry and government around the world should work even more closely to protect the privacy and security of Internet users, and promote the exchange of ideas, while respecting legitimate government considerations.”

- remarks at a luncheon with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

This is an interesting article about Fox News anchor Brit Hume. Here’s a bit on his Christianity and his son’s suicide:

“It’s a moment of truth when you realize what you believe,” Hume says. “I realized I believed in God.” He had been “a fallen Christian,” Hume says, but “it was such a devastating loss I was thinking, ‘How in the world am I going to get through this?’ I had this odd thought that I would get a phone call: ‘Brit, this is God.’ I had this idea that somehow I was going to be okay and God was going to rescue me.”

…

Within six weeks, he had received 973 Mass cards. “I cannot tell you how buoyed I felt,” Hume says. “I thought, this is the face of God. I just got on with my life.” Hume now struggles “with trying to make Washington political journalism consistent with an effort to lead a Christian life.”

Musician Dave Matthews and Chicago Cubs pitcher Greg Maddux

Happy 40th birthday, Mad Dog. Keep up the good work.