[Peace-discuss] Regarding difficulty accessing the WSWS today

[Karen Aram]

> On Oct 21, 2016, at 11:19, World Socialist Web Site <list at wsws.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear WSWS readers,
> 
> The WSWS is currently experiencing problems for some readers, particularly in the US. This is apparently due to a denial of service attack on a major DNS provider, Dyn, which is affecting many sites. We have been assured that the problem is being fixed, and the WSWS should be fully accessible soon.
> 
> This article provides more information: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/21/ddos-attack-dyn-internet-denial-service
> 
> Included below is the full text of selected articles from today.
> 
> Regards,
> The WSWS
> 
> 
> 
> The 2016 elections: American democracy in shambles
> By Joseph Kishore
> 
> In the aftermath of the final presidential debate on Wednesday, the US media is in an uproar over statements made by Republican candidate Donald Trump that he might not recognize the result of the November 8 election.
> 
> Asked by debate moderator Chris Wallace from Fox News whether he would "absolutely accept the result of this election," Trump replied that he would "look at it at the time," and would "keep you in suspense." On Thursday, Trump climbed down on his remarks somewhat, saying that he would "accept a clear election result." However, arguing that Clinton "is the most corrupt and dishonest person ever to seek office," he added that he would reserve the right "to contest or file a legal challenge in the case of a questionable result."
> 
> Trump's comments at the debate are in line with previous statements that the election is rigged by the media in favor of Clinton, and his assertions, which clearly have racist overtones, that millions of Americans, particularly in urban centers, are voting illegally. He is pitching his appeal to conditions that will develop after the elections, seeking to channel social anger and hostility to the entire political system in an extremely right-wing direction.
> 
> From the media and dominant sections of the political establishment, the response has been universal condemnation of Trump for besmirching the purity of American democracy. The Washington Post proclaimed that "respecting the will of the voters has since the end of the Civil War allowed for a peaceful transition of power that has made this country the envy of the world." The New York Times added that Trump has turned from "insulting the intelligence of the American voter to insulting American democracy itself."
> 
> Republican Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain issued a statement declaring that a concession to the victor in an election is "an act of respect for the will of the American people, a respect that is every American leader's first responsibility." And Vice President Joe Biden, donning the mantle of sanctimonious outrage, said in a speech on Thursday, "If you question, if you assert that a democratic election is fixed, you are attacking the very essence of the notion of whether we have a democratic system."
> 
> These statements from newspaper editorial boards and leading politicians reek of hypocrisy. They also express a nervousness whose causes extend far beyond the comments of Mr. Trump. The political representatives of the ruling class are rushing to the defense of a political system that is increasingly seen as illegitimate by broad sections of the population.
> 
> From a historical standpoint, it must first of all be pointed out that until the middle of the 20th century every election in the United States was "fixed," insofar as large portions of the population were barred from voting. Women were only given the right to vote in 1920. The systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South-through poll taxes, Jim Crow segregation and other measures-was only ended in the mid-1960s, a byproduct of the immense social struggles of that period. And it was only in 1971 that the age of eligibility for the franchise was lowered from 21 to 18. Until then, young men could be drafted to fight and die in wars at the order of a commander-in-chief they could not vote for.
> 
> For the past four decades, democratic forms of rule have been under systematic attack, in line with the extreme growth of social inequality. A turning point came with the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton over a sex scandal in 1998 and 1999, followed by the theft of the election in 2000. To the extent that the 2000 elections are mentioned at all in the present discussion over Trump's comments, it is to praise Al Gore's "respect for the process" in accepting the Supreme Court decision to hand the election to George W. Bush.
> 
> In fact, the 5-4 decision by the highest court in the country to halt the recounting of ballots in Florida installed in office an individual who lost the popular vote and, if all the ballots had been fairly counted, the electoral vote as well. In one of the decisions culminating in this travesty of democracy, the Supreme Court asserted that the American people have no constitutional right to vote for the president of the United States. The rigging of the 2000 election was carried out, not in the back room of a county courthouse, but by the highest court in the land.
> 
> In early December 2000, in advance of the decision in Bush v. Gore, WSWS editorial board chairman David North noted that the decision would reveal "how far the American ruling class is prepared to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic and constitutional norms." In the end, the blatantly political action by Supreme Court was met with no serious opposition from the Democratic Party and Gore, or from the media and political establishment as a whole. The outcome, as the WSWS wrote at the time, "revealed the lack of any significant constituency within the ruling elite for a democratic adjudication of the presidential election."
> 
> The ruling class has demonstrated its contempt for democracy through its actions over the past decade and a half. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were followed, under Bush and then Obama, by a raft of anti-democratic measures justified by the "war on terror": the Patriot Act; warrantless mass surveillance; indefinite detention without trial; torture and "extraordinary rendition"; drone assassination, including of US citizens; the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the Northern Command, a military jurisdiction to oversee the increasing domestic use of the military. To this list must be added a militarized police force that kills more than 1,000 Americans every year.
> 
> As for the electoral process, Supreme Court decisions have undermined the Voting Rights Act and sanctioned state laws requiring photo IDs and other restrictions aimed at disenfranchising poor, elderly and minority voters. Some 6 million citizens (one out of every 40 eligible voters) are barred from voting due to previous felony convictions. The Citizens United decision in 2010 abolished restrictions on big business financing of candidates and their political action committees. It is estimated that more than $7 billion has been spent on the 2016 elections, all told, twice what was spent in 2012.
> 
> Everything is done to prevent independent and third-party candidates from having their names appear on the ballot, including requirements that they gather tens or even hundreds of thousands of signatures. Many states will not even count write-in votes. Meanwhile, the media works to ensure that the official "debate" remains safely confined to the narrow framework acceptable to the ruling class.
> 
> "American democracy" is a hollowed-out shell, overseen by two parties that are controlled by the financial oligarchy and the military. The experience of the Obama administration-which came to power promising "change you can believe in"-has only demonstrated to millions of people that their vote has no impact on the policies of the ruling class.
> 
> The protracted decay of American democracy has culminated in the election of 2016, a contest between a millionaire scion of the Clinton dynasty and a billionaire real estate speculator and reality television star.
> 
> Trump himself is a product of a diseased social and political system, the legitimate heir of the "war on terror." As for Clinton, she is merely another expression of the same disease, running her campaign on the basis of the same scandal-mongering used by the Republicans against her husband, combined with McCarthyite smears that have a long and noxious history.
> 
> The Democrats' stock response to any question about leaked emails exposing Clinton's ties to Wall Street is to change the subject to the completely unsubstantiated claim that it is all the handiwork of Russian President Vladimir Putin. While Trump has said that he might not accept the election as legitimate, if Clinton is defeated the Democrats will declare that it is the result of Russia's interference in the electoral process.
> 
> Behind the whole rotten process, the fundamental issues are covered up or ignored. The reality of American "democracy" can perhaps be summed up in the fact that, three weeks before November 8, the American military has launched a massive military escalation in the Middle East, and there is no significant discussion about the consequences in an election that is supposedly the principal means through which the population can affect policy.
> 
> The crisis of democracy is a product of the decay of American capitalism, overseen by a ruling class that is determined to advance a policy of war abroad and austerity at home-a policy that requires ever greater attacks on democratic forms of rule. Whatever happens on November 8, it will resolve nothing, and only set the stage for a protracted political crisis that can be resolved only through the independent intervention of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.
> 
> 
> ***
> 
> Mosul offensive stirs a cauldron of conflicts
> By James Cogan
> 
> Iraqi Army units and troops of the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), backed by US and allied air power, special forces and "advisors," continue to push toward the Islamic State (ISIS)-held northern city of Mosul and the estimated 1.5 million civilians trapped within its confines. In the past 24 hours, Kurdish forces claimed to have captured villages and towns to the city's north and east, while Iraqi Army units advanced from the south.
> 
> The assault is unfolding amid uncritical media coverage, with embedded journalists filing reports that in general laud the success of Kurdish and Iraqi forces in the face of supposed fanatical resistance and suicide attacks by ISIS defenders. Vast columns of black smoke rising over the battle zones are universally attributed to ISIS igniting oil wells and mounds of tyres to obscure their movements from aerial detection and attack.
> 
> No official estimates of Kurdish or Iraqi government casualties have been released, nor figures on ISIS losses. The US military confirmed yesterday that one of its special forces soldiers was killed by a roadside bomb to the north of Mosul.
> 
> Next to nothing is being reported about the devastation and casualties caused by US and allied air strikes on targets within the urban reaches of the city itself. Instead, the media is full of accusations that ISIS is using people as "human shields"-justifying civilian deaths in advance. American, British, Australian, French, Canadian and Jordanian bombers, jet fighters, helicopter gunships, drones and surveillance aircraft are involved in the air assault.
> 
> One indication of the destruction being inflicted was an October 19 report by the British Broadcasting Corporation that the University of Mosul, once one of the best equipped in the Middle East, is in ruin. A source stated: "The university is completely inoperative and air strikes have made it a difficult place to go. Most of the buildings have been brought down, it's virtually gone."
> 
> US and allied military commanders project that operations to recapture Mosul will last as long as three months. This suggests that much of the city will be reduced to rubble and the predominantly Sunni Arab civilian population will suffer horrific casualties from the bombing, starvation and disease.
> 
> Just five days into the Mosul offensive, however, it is stirring a cauldron of inter-state and ethno-sectarian conflicts that are the legacy of 25 years of US imperialist violence, intrigue and destabilisation in Iraq, Syria and the broader Middle East. Before the city even falls, savage fighting threatens to break out between nominal allies in the operations against ISIS.
> 
> The Syrian regime, with the assistance of Russian air power and Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite militias, claims it is on the verge of recapturing the eastern sectors of the city of Aleppo from Sunni Islamist militias that have received overt support from the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to try to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The fall of Aleppo would largely end the US-backed rebellion in the coastal regions of Syria and enable Assad's military to shift focus to the ISIS-held areas in the interior and east of the country, particularly the city of Raqqa.
> 
> Both the Syrian regime and Russia are accusing US-backed Iraqi and Kurdish forces of deliberately allowing ISIS fighters in Mosul to escape the city to the west and cross into ISIS-controlled areas of Syria. Hundreds have allegedly successfully made their way to Raqqa to join the fighting against the Syrian government.
> 
> Iraqi Shiite militias, known as the Popular Mobilisation Units, are rushing to the west of Mosul to cut off such escape routes for ISIS and declared yesterday they will launch an assault on the ISIS-held city of Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. The Shiite militias had been blocked from taking part in the attack on Mosul due to the sectarian killings and abuse of Sunnis they committed during earlier battles to recapture the western Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
> 
> A militia attack on Tal Afar raises the prospect of Turkish military intervention, as it has a predominantly ethnic Turkmen population, factions among which are calling for their own autonomous province. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made shrill vows to protect the Turkish diaspora-which includes Iraq's Turkmen-from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, to Central Asia and Afghanistan (see: "Amid Mosul offensive, Turkey denounces US policy, stakes claims in Balkans").
> 
> Erdogan has also expressed alarm that US backing is strengthening the position of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. The openly-stated intention of the KRG is to incorporate the areas it has taken from ISIS into its autonomous zone, not return them to the jurisdiction of the Shiite Arab-dominated government in Baghdad. A spokesman for one of the largest Shiite militias said in September they would fight against KRG annexations.
> 
> The Turkish establishment bitterly opposes any further expansion of the Kurdish region, fearing it will lead to the declaration of a Kurdish nation-state and fuel separatist agitation among the substantial Kurdish population in the east of Turkey, bordering Syria and Iraq.
> 
> Unable to act in Mosul itself at this point, Turkey responded yesterday with its most intense air attacks on the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria, which recently seized a number of villages from ISIS and expanded the areas of the country under their control. The Turkish military claimed to have killed up to 200 fighters of the YPG-which it alleges is a front for the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) that advocates the separation of the Kurdish region of Turkey. This operation may well sharply escalate ethnic conflict inside Turkey itself, or attacks by Kurdish forces on the small number of Turkish troops that are in Iraq to the northeast of Mosul.
> 
> In a statement, the Syrian government said it viewed the Turkish air strikes as an attack on its sovereignty and vowed to engage any future incursions.
> 
> Anthony Cordesman, a leading US analyst for the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS), expressed the perplexity among US imperialist strategists. On October 17 he commented: "[T]he most critical aspect of the battle may not be whether ISIS is defeated. It may be whether Iraq's deeply divided factions can find some way to cooperate if they win. The alternative could be worse than ISIS: Sunni versus Shiite, Arab versus Kurd, and Turkey, Iran, outside Arab states, and Russia all competing to serve their own ends. 'Winning' could all too easily divide Iraq on a lasting basis and/or turn into new forms of civil conflict."
> 
> The victims will be the long-suffering masses of Iraq and the Middle East. In recent days, some 5,000 people have made their way from Mosul to a squalid tent city in northeastern Syria, while several thousand have reached the overcrowded refugee camp of Dibaga in Iraqi Kurdistan. Hundreds of thousands more are predicted to follow, overwhelming unprepared relief agencies.
> 
> Disturbing video footage has already emerged of Iraqi government troops beating, with a hammer, a young boy who fled Mosul. All males over 14 who escape the city are being detained and interrogated on suspicion of ISIS loyalties.
> 
> ***
> 
> Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature?
> By David Walsh
> 
> Is American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, now 75 years old, deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature?
> 
> Numerous issues need to be disentangled here, probably too many for one article.
> 
> In the first place, there is the matter of the Nobel Prize itself. No one is obliged to accept the awarding process as either entirely objective or disinterested. The prize has been handed out by the Swedish Academy, whose 18 members have tenure for life, since 1901. The winners have for the most part tended to be European, with Swedish writers especially well represented in the first few decades of the prize's existence.
> 
> The list of 113 Nobel Laureates includes many writers--however one may feel about the overall thrust of their work--who undoubtedly are serious figures, including Harold Pinter, Günter Grass, Doris Lessing, Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Munro, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Heinrich Böll, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre (who refused the award), Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, André Gide, Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Anatole France, Knut Hamsun, Gerhard Hauptmann, Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Neruda and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
> 
> There have also been numerous mediocrities and nonentities among the award winners, and inappropriate prizes, such as the one in 1953 given to former British prime minister Winston Churchill, "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."
> 
> Missing from the list of Nobel Laureates are Leo Tolstoy, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Sean O'Casey, Isaac Babel, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Richard Wright, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, Ignazio Silone, B. Traven, Jaroslav Hasek, André Breton, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mariano Azuela, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and a host of other intriguing and important writers.
> 
> The failure to bestow prizes on Tolstoy and Chekhov (who died in 1910 and 1904, respectively) in the first decade of the prize's existence is attributed to the anti-Russian inclinations of Swedish ruling circles. So much for the Academy's Olympian objectivity!
> 
> No doubt politics of one sort or another entered into the 2016 choice. The Academy seems to be making an attempt to widen its definition of literature and perhaps prove its "relevancy" in the 21st century. Beyond that, one has the sense that, in the midst of US-European tensions that can only worsen and an unprecedented, tumultuous American election campaign, this is a signal from sections of the European upper middle class and bourgeoisie to their affluent counterparts in the US-the Obama constituency-so to speak, offering support and the "hand of friendship."
> 
> There is a "political-psychological" aspect of this particular honor as well. The average age of the Swedish Academy members--academics, linguists, poets, critics--is 69 (the youngest member is 44 and the oldest 92). It may be that proceeding as though the American singer, who belongs more or less to their generation, still represents something artistically innovative and even socially oppositional is a means of convincing themselves that they still do as well, what with their dim memories (in some cases) of a radical youth and their abandoned idealism. In reality, to speak frankly, the prize is handed out by affluent 60- and 70-year-olds who, like Dylan himself, have been thoroughly integrated into the establishment and have not had anything politically interesting or serious, let alone genuinely rebellious, to say for decades.
> 
> In any event, leaving the Swedish Academy and the various political considerations out of the picture, the unavoidable question is this: is Bob Dylan worthy of a major literary prize?
> 
> Dylan is a singer and popular song writer. Decades ago, high school English teachers in America (and perhaps elsewhere), to inoculate their students against the supposed threat of rock and roll, liked to read out song lyrics and point to their inanity. It is doubtful that this ever accomplished much of anything, because it was largely the energy, the "beat," the vaguely subversive feeling of the music that young people were responding to.
> 
> Bob Dylan has not been a composer of "hit songs," by and large, but popular songs of any kind have their peculiarities and limitations. Songwriting and poetry are not the same thing. Rhythm and repetition have far larger and more independent roles, even determining roles, to play in the creation and production of popular songs, as the adolescents of yesteryear instinctively recognized. The most profound or cleverest lyric will die on the vine unless it is backed or accompanied by--or counterposed to--the appropriate musical setting. In a truly memorable popular song, the words and music interact to enormous emotional effect.
> 
> At least until the late 1960s, many popular tunes were written by duos, one member of which would concentrate on the music and the other the lyrics. To treat Dylan's work as "literature" is unfair to him, because one is then obliged to judge him solely on the basis of his lyrics, of what lies cold and dead on the page, and even in the best of circumstances that will almost always seem inadequate or lacking with vocal music or theatrical works, which are meant to be performed.
> 
> So, we have to rephrase our question again: did Bob Dylan, in his popular songs, write lyrics that are worthy of a significant literary prize?
> 
> On this score, a good many foolish claims are being made at present. Dwight Garner in the New York Times on October 13 contributed a few of them. "This Nobel," Garner wrote, "acknowledges what we've long sensed to be true: that Mr. Dylan is among the most authentic voices America has produced, a maker of images as audacious and resonant as anything in Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson."
> 
> The Times journalist goes on to cite "venerated [British] critic and scholar Christopher Ricks," who has made "the case most fully for Mr. Dylan as a complicated and complicating poet." In his 2003 book, Dylan's Visions of Sin, Ricks "persuasively" compared the singer-songwriter to "personages as distinct" as Yeats, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, Andrew Marvell and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
> 
> In an interview following the announcement of the prize winner, Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, placed Dylan in the company of Homer, believed to be the greatest epic poet by the Ancient Greeks, and Sappho, one of the greatest lyric poets.
> 
> Historian Sean Wilentz, in the introduction to his Bob Dylan in America, was slightly more cautious, suggesting that Dylan belonged to the "tradition" of "Whitman, [Herman] Melville, and [Edgar Allan] Poe, which sees the everyday in American symbols and the symbolic in the everyday, and then tells stories about it."
> 
> Such comparisons are out of place and unnecessary (and speak more than anything else to the debased state of present-day criticism and commentary). In the end, it will not do Bob Dylan any good to be placed in such company.
> 
> By any objective measurement, contrary to Garner in the Times, the singer and songwriter has not created "images as audacious and resonant as anything" in Whitman (1819-92) or Dickinson (1830-86), two remarkable figures of the "American Renaissance," the period intimately bound up with the coming of the Second American Revolution, the Civil War.
> 
> As literary historian F. O. Matthiessen noted, "The half-decade of 1850-55 saw the appearance of Representative Men (1850) [by Ralph Waldo Emerson], The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of Seven Gables (1851) [both by Nathaniel Hawthorne], Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852) [both by Herman Melville], Walden (1854) [by Henry David Thoreau], and Leaves of Grass (1855) [by Whitman]." Matthiessen added: "You might search all the rest of American literature without being able to collect a group of books equal to those in imaginative vitality."
> 
> In his introduction to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote: "Of all nations, the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most needs poets, and will doubtless have both the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common reference as much as their poets shall." This insight was confirmed within a half-dozen years by the elevation of a poet into the White House, Abraham Lincoln, who was also America's greatest president. Whitman went on to assert that the poet "bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land. ... he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking."
> 
> He continued: "If the time becomes slothful and heavy he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it. ..."
> 
> And further: "The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other."
> 
> Does this bring to mind Bob Dylan's body of work? Would he even maintain, were he to be honest with himself, that it does?
> 
> Of course, in all fairness, not every poet could live up to Whitman's vision--in fact, probably few have. But his overwhelming ambition points to the complexity and demands of poetry, language concentrated and charged with meaning to the greatest possible extent. Whitman's own life-work is an illustration. He spent nearly four decades writing and adding to Leaves of Grass, expanding it from a slim volume of 12 poems in 1855 to a work of nearly 400 poems in the final edition published during his lifetime in 1892.
> 
> It would be false and misleading to suggest that Bob Dylan has been "poetic" in the Whitman-Dickinson meaning of the word. He has been doing something else.
> 
> A perusal of Bob Dylan--Lyrics: 1962-2001, at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty, satirical, insightful and, as well, genuinely outraged at American society's injustices. The lyrics are capable of conveying physical and psychic longing, both for "the beloved" and for recognition by society at large.
> 
> The songs from 1963-66 possess many appealing characteristics, but there is hardly one that does not suffer, if assessed solely by literary standards, from occasionally sloppy imagery, wordiness, and strained and obscure verbal juxtapositions (borrowed from the Beat and perhaps surrealist schools, among others, with mostly unhappy results). The songwriter passes between genuine spontaneity and informality, at one pole, to mere carelessness, at the other, sometimes within a single tune.
> 
> Of course, he aspires quite deliberately to be the opposite of rigorously self-disciplined; on the contrary, part of the charm (and social unruliness) of the early music, before a certain self-pity and paranoia set in in the mid-1960s, is often its self-deprecating, breezy, unfettered feel. This was material, one must say forcefully, even at its angriest and most socially focused, that was not written and performed with the view in mind of securing prestigious literary prizes. And that is no insult, by any means. This is another reason why the Nobel Prize seems so false and out of keeping.
> 
> To his credit, in May 1963, Dylan walked out before a scheduled appearance on the popular "Ed Sullivan Show" on CBS Television, at a time when performing there was one of the preferred routes to stardom, after CBS officials refused to allow him to sing "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues," which satirized anti-communist hysteria in the US. Would the Bob Dylan of that day have passively and obediently resigned himself to the upcoming Stockholm ceremony?
> 
> As noted above, the Swedish Academy's rather grandiose gesture will only have the paradoxical result of diminishing Dylan's reputation in many eyes. That would be unfortunate. I think it is an error to dismiss his best work. It meant a great deal to a certain generation, or more than one, and for good reason.
> 
> In the early to middle part of the 1960s, but only during that period, as far as I can see, Bob Dylan represented an attitude to life that resonated strongly with many middle class young people in particular.
> 
> There was at the time among these same young people a sudden and strong desire for honesty and authenticity. Official America was obviously lying through its teeth about everything. It was lying about its concern for democracy and freedom, it was lying and had been lying for years about "communism." A dreadful hypocrisy prevailed, which almost no one challenged. Authorized morality, including the rules governing conduct between the sexes, did not begin to correspond to elementary human needs and feelings. And there was terrible anxiety too. In October 1962, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, many people felt the world might be coming to an end.
> 
> In hindsight we can see that the growing skepticism about what the government, the corporations and the military were telling everyone had something to do with the unresolved and mounting problems of American capitalist society. But the young people did not see that, they merely felt they might suffocate if things continued as they were.
> 
> It was inevitable that someone would articulate some of these earnest but confused feelings in a popular-artistic way.
> 
> This is not the occasion to delve into the sociological background of the "folk music revival" in the 1960s and the extent to which it reflected the ideological influence of Stalinist Popular Frontism. The Stalinists' modus operandi consisted in finding "progressive" tendencies in every national bourgeoisie and its cultural traditions, as a means of helping to justify the alliance of workers with--or, in practice, their subordination to--the supposedly liberal, democratic sections of that ruling class.
> 
> It would be wrong to view the "folk" outburst as something purely artificial or invented, although it is often challenging to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic in the case of the folk music world as a whole or the career of a given performer.
> 
> But there is no question that to the extent that this music was seen in the early 1960s as a center of anti-establishment sentiment and even social opposition it drew into its ranks some immensely gifted and sensitive artists, including Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell, Odetta, Judy Collins, Fred Neil, Eric Andersen, Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, Tim Hardin, Carolyn Hester, Ian and Sylvia and a good many others.
> 
> The desire for what was perceived to be greater sincerity in popular music meant a rejection, which also had a generational element, of the polished and more easily palatable. There was a resulting interest in "abrasiveness" and "rawness," in imperfection even and in greater social and personal urgency.
> 
> Bob Dylan brought to bear some of these elements. There were no doubt numerous irritating features to his first musical efforts: the inevitable dropping of the final "g" (as in "goin'," "freewheelin'," "travelin'," etc.), the other folksy pretenses, including second-hand and not very convincing Woody Guthrie imitations (and Guthrie's music already contained an element of not entirely convincing "folksiness"), the self-consciously rough voice, and so on.
> 
> Some of the initial "protest songs" are affecting, or contain affecting passages, including "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," "With God on Our Side," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and "Chimes of Freedom."
> 
> In the last mentioned, the singer makes an impassioned plea on behalf of "the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse / And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe."
> 
> There are also heavy-handed and mawkish "socially conscious" songs on Dylan's first few records.
> 
> It is possible to argue that Bob Dylan's strongest and most enduring tunes are his love songs, and that the latter, for better or worse, contain some of his most pronounced feelings of opposition and protest, although of course expressed in semi-bohemian and "individualistic" tones. In that regard, one could point to songs like "Boots of Spanish Leather," "All I Want to Do," "Spanish Harlem Incident," "To Ramona," "I Don't Believe You," "She Belongs to Me," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," "Farewell Angelina," "Love Is Just a Four Letter Word," "One of Must Know (Sooner or Later)" and "Just Like a Woman," along with other personal pieces such as "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."
> 
> These songs produced some of Dylan's clearest and "cleanest" lines, including these, from "To Ramona":
> 
> The flowers of the city
> Though breathlike
> Get deathlike at times
> And there's no use in trying
> To deal with the dying
> Though I cannot express that in lines
> 
> From his music of 1963-64 in particular we come away with the image of the artist in energetic and sensual pursuit of the woman (or women) he adores in the face of the collective disapproval or hostility of official society. In the earliest songs, one has the impression at times that the various warmongers, racists and "John Birchers" (right-wingers, after the ultra-reactionary John Birch Society) provoke the singer's ire, as much as anything else, because they threaten to deprive him of life with the object of his affections. A little later, in the more sophisticated efforts, family obligations, conventional wisdom and "public opinion" seem the chief impediments.
> 
> It is outside the scope of this article to discuss in any depth Bob Dylan's abrupt "jumping ship" in 1967 or so.
> 
> Suffice it to say that given the relative thinness of his own commitment and understanding, Dylan inevitably rejected the role that had been prepared for him by the "left" folk music world, as the new "people's troubadour." He was not wrong to do so. Arch-Stalinist Irwin Silber's "Open Letter," published in Sing Out! magazine in November 1964, which criticized Dylan's new "inner-directed ..., inner-probing, self-conscious" material, had unmistakably repressive, even threatening overtones. Silber, a longtime member of the Communist Party, went on to an inglorious career in Maoist pseudo-culture and politics.
> 
> The musical-lyrical status quo was untenable. It was impossible to go on playing at "hobos" and "freight trains" and "Walkin' Down the Line," and so forth. The singer himself recognized that, titling a new album Highway 61 Revisited. Inner city riots erupted in New York and Los Angeles. A Democratic Party president, after having promised not to send "our boys" to Southeast Asia, was doing precisely that, in large numbers. Something new and tense was in the air.
> 
> Less and less convinced (if he ever had been) by radical politics, ever more attracted by the siren song of commercial success, intensely envious of those who enjoyed that success, and not immune either to "good, old-fashioned" American anti-communism, Dylan used Silber and company and their crude efforts to direct him as a pretext to turn his back on any concerted social involvement or interest. In the time-honored manner, he threw the baby out with the bathwater.
> 
> It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, he had never meant to be a "leader" or a "protester," he now regretted idle talk about "equality" ("Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now"). His evolution was rapid and ignominious. There is precious little to show for the past 45 years or more.
> 
> Bob Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist, or artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social processes--which threatened to "slow down" or even block his rise--by avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn't realize was that in turning his back on social life and softening his attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting himself off from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what was best in him.
> 
> Links:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeP4FFr88SQ
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fB9xqA3eUY
> 
> Other performers singing Bob Dylan songs:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ94iDhF7Cc
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y89rmBlNAx4
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHwILs8bdo
> 
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> 
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