One Year's Revolutionary Hero, Next Year's Lackey

Here's a bit from Maureen Dowd's NY Times op-ed. It highlights how the lean and hungry young Cassius' sadly turn into aged, puffy, comfortable, and rich sell outs:

Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.

Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.

Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.

She goes on to point out that Bob Dylan (aka Robert Allen Zimmerman) simply used people to get what he wanted. He knew which side of the bread was buttered:

“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”

“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”

He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. In his memoir, “Chronicles,” he stressed that he had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the “cultural mumbo jumbo” imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.

“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.

He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.

“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he wrote. He complained of being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent.”

Of course the above is as much a lie as his songs of the 1960s. If you ever watched Bob Dylan being interviewed by the press he showed pure contempt for them and fed them whopping lies just to see what they would swallow. The "white picket fence" is classic Bob Dylan.

The only thing "real" about Bob Dylan was that he used people, he used things, he used the music scene, he used Woodie Guthrie, he used his "friends" in Minnesota, he used everything about him to get what he wanted. That's the only truth about him.

The above Dylan quote is the very essence of why politics is polluted. The kind of people that politics attracts have all the characteristics of Bob Dylan. They get into politics just like Dylan got into music and just like Willie Sutton got into bank robbing... because that's where the money is.

It is sad when you live in a society that has no ideals, in a society where the artists are "just in it for the money" and where the politicians are "just in it for the money" and the average Joe down the street is "just in it for the money". That's a dead society. A zombie society. It has no future.