IT'S BOB'S BIRTHDAY, THOUGHT I SHOULD NOTE THAT

 The soundtrack of my life sounds both heavy and corny, but I barely remember life before Dylan.  I first became aware of rock and roll when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan.  I was in second grade.  Shortly after, I was flipping through some entertainment, or women's magazines, that my mom had stashed for when she was bored at the dry cleaning drop off she ran on Main St.  The writer described taking her teen aged daughter to performances by bands and singers her kid liked.  The line that struck me was about some guy whose last name looked to me like it would be pronounced 'die lann'.  She said while her daughter may have wanted to bring Mick Jagger home, she (mom) wanted to take this guy to a hospital.  

Soon, Like a Rolling Stone was as familiar as Satisfaction.  But, growing up, in grade school, I knew there were other songs too, like Blowing in the Wind.  The nuns would try to get us to sing the words to the church song they had ripped off from popular music.  Blowing in the Wind became Living in All Men...  for guitar mass.  I hated that.  

But my lifelong connection, for lack of a better word, to Bob Dylan came the day I first heard Positively 4th Street on the radio.  I looked around to see if anyone else was listening.  This should be a secret.  People didn't talk like that.  People didn't think like that!  Well, they did, but you didn't say it out loud.  Now people say any fool thing they want, live their supposed lives on reality TV shows and there are no taboos.  Girls will be boys and boys will be girls.  But, life was different in the mid 1960s.  The world was still in black and white.  I couldn't get over that song.  The attitude.  The exposure of hypocrisy.  The pissitude!  Fuck off, in a song.  Fuck everyone, really.  One of the first albums I ever bought was Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.  Positively 4th Street is on it.  Maybe it was being an only child, but that song, stiff arm and middle finger introduced me to an attitude I could never shake. 

I remember my fascination when I discovered my friend Paul Bamman's brother Steve had left his record collection, in their attic, when he went off to college.  That was the first time I ever saw the album Highway 61 Revisited.  Dylan looked like the coolest person in the world, sitting there on the album cover.  I was mesmerized by the liner notes.  "I accept chaos.  I do not know if it accepts me."

I soon bought Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume 2 and played both albums relentlessly from 7th grade through college.  The quote never made into a high school year book, but if I had a lifelong theme, it was the last verse to Maggie's Farm:  

"I try my best, to be just like I am

but everybody wants you 

to be just like them.

They say, 'sing while you slave',

and I just get bored."

I started collecting all his albums, or trying, including Highway 61.  One Christmas morning, Eddie and Rosalie knocked on our back door and brought me a copy of Dylan's self titled first album and invited me to "go for a ride in the car".  I'm still trying to teach myself some of those old blues songs on that album.  

A couple carloads of us drove to St. Louis, on a school night, Feb 4th, 1974 to see Dylan and the Band.  In what later became so common place it became a pop culture joke, the crowd held up lit matches while calling for an encore.  Later, over the years, concert goers would hold up cigarettes and lighters and today, they use cell phones.  But, the practice began a couple of shows before St. Louis, on that tour.  

 Everybody has music for life events, be they joyous or heart rending.  Dylan provides for any occasion.  Fierce permanence in Planet Wave's Wedding Song.  World weary sorrow, loss and the winsome discovery that life goes on, on Blood on the Tracks.  Anger, sweet memory and pleasure in Desire, giving way to the final hopeless hope of the last two lines of the album, "don't ever leave me; don't ever go."

Dylan played the SIU arena, on Halloween 1978.  I, and 500 of my best friends, slept on the sidewalk outside the ticket window the night before they went on sale.  After, 25,000 partied on Illinois Ave.  I've seen him four more times since, at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield in 1989 (an unknown, to me, Steve Earle opened), again at the SIU Arena in 1990, in 2005 at the Pageant in St. Louis and in 2007 at the Fabulous Fox.  Different times:  high school, college, early 30s/beginning parenthood and a career, middle age/travel/political activism/twilight of a career. Soundtrack.

I stopped buying his albums when a lot of others did.  The song writing lagged.  But then he'd come out with Oh Mercy.  And then a killer song, Things Have Changed.  And then, in rapid succesion, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times.  Jerry Garcia died and Dylan inherited many of his nomadic concert followers to add to his own.  His shows were packed again.  I was buying his albums.  But, I never thought he was someone you'd want to hang out with.  I assumed he would rapidly turn that scorn he held interviewers with on anyone.  Then becomes a DJ.  Theme Time Radio Hour.  The former religious convert, who sounded pissed off for 20 years, sounded absolutely jovial.  Turns out that he just needs to be turned loose on a subject he likes.  And he loves American popular music.  Here was a guy I would have hung out with. 

Speaking of which, if you judge one by their friends, Dylan is the coolest.  He seemed to return to certain collaborators:  George Harrison, Van Morrison, Patti Smith.  As Chrissie Hynde would say, he's "the last of the independents."  

EPIPHANY FOR A FAILED COUP

Three days later and what seemed unbelievable then, we now (or we should) realize, was worse than we thought.  In fact, as awful and ongoing as this nightmare is, and was, but for accidents of timing and circumstance, we could be living in a very different world right now.  What if Trump had been even more overt?  What if he had marched to the capitol with the crowd?  What if the crowd had gotten into the Senate chamber, even sooner?  What if they had quickly gotten into the House chamber?  What if those House security personnel had been overwhelmed?  What if they had gone over to the other side, as some of their brethren, outside the building, and downstairs, had done?

 As someone who watched the Capitol overrun, live on TV, I was most stunned by how quickly it occurred.  We now know that was due to police negligence and complicity at the lower levels, and maybe by design at command levels.   Either way, the seat of government of the most powerful country in human history, a building closed to the public due to COVID for months, suddenly had swarms of people roaming its halls, offices and legislative chambers.  These enemy combatants forced their way past metal detectors and any Capitol Police that were inclined to do their jobs.  

And what was their goal?  For most, they probably didn't know.  Many had no idea where the chambers were or what to do next.  They had overrun the citadel of the politicians they hated and of the government they've been taught to hate.  Vaguely, they wanted to stop the certification of the election.  But, some of them had an idea.  Trump had given it to them:  hang Mike Pence. 

I want to point out not only the horror of that, but that that would have been the beginning, not the end of the blood letting.  If the crowd had breached the Senate chamber before the Secret Service could get him out, and the crowd laid hands on him, one of two things could have happened.  One, the Vice President of the United States gets held hostage.  Anyone doing that would probably grab the Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley, as well.  Or, the crowd that was chanting, "where's Pence?  Hang Mike Pence?", might have used some of that gear they brought and hung him from the Senate gallery.  Or taken him outside to the gallows they'd built.

 And, if they did that, the blood lust would take hold.  If they are going to hang Christian Mike Pence, who thinks they wouldn't murder Bernie Sanders and Chuck Shumer, two Jews that they hate?  Think I'm being hyperbolic?  On Trump's stage, Congresswoman Mary Miller quoted Hitler.  Hitler.  And her audience?  The crowd that stormed the capitol, a crowd with people wearing t-shirts that read "6MWNE" (six million wasn't nearly enough) and Camp Auschwitz.  

Now let's remember the scene in the House of Representatives.  The one with security aiming drawn guns at a door that the crowd was busting through.  What if security lost the gun battle?  What if the crowd decided 'they can't kill us all'?  If the Secret Service couldn't get Pelosi out, the Speaker of the House, second in line of succession could have been kidnapped, or murdered.  

Does anyone believe she would have been spared if some in that crowd could have gotten her?  Now imagine they get their hands on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Or, Ilhan Omar.  

In addition to the atrocities and violations they would have had to endure, their fellow members would have been hostages.  Maybe in both chambers.  How would that end?  Simply certify Trump the winner, under duress?  A hostage negotiation?  By whom?  Storm the building with commandos?  

While the end of the story is unpredictable, we all understand what one immediate result would have been, last Wednesday.  With the capitol building in control of terrorists, and hundreds of elected officials hostage or dead, the line of succession broken or uncertain, Trump would declare martial law.  Uncooperative generals would be dismissed and, realistically what could they do?  Who could a conscientious general turn to?  Congress is held captive, Pence, Pelosi and Grassley are out of action.  There would be nothing much else they could do, but obey Trump.  And he would likely play the tough law and order president, ordering Congress be retaken by force.  We've seen such scenarios play out other places.  The hostages die.  

We're not out of the woods.  Trump is still president.  A weak willed "opposition" party has dithered, rather than immediately impeach him (they adjourned!).  And, his followers are still out there, radicalized.  

There are good people out there, who have been slowly converted to this cult of personality.  They've been told for 40 years, by politicians, pundits and preachers that they belong to the party of God.  They are against abortion.  They are intolerant of any form of sexuality that they believe deviates from the Old Testament.  They are told they are the patriots because they adore all things martial:  guns, police, the military.  Then they were told that science was iffy.  The preachers taught that evolution was false and the politicians said they didn't know; they weren't scientists.  In the meantime, radio, FOX News and the internet propagandized millions, on a daily basis.  For the last year, good, intelligent people have aped Trump's denials of the extent, contagiousness and morbidity of the coronavirus.  This weekend, even after all that we witnessed on Wednesday, January 6, they believe Trump was cheated out of the election and that he is some kind of victim because a social media site has banned him after years of his violating their terms of service.  There is a word for mindless, militaristic, authoritarian, violent anti-intellectualism:  fascism.  

It's not coming.  It's here.  

Wednesday was, as Nancy Pelosi pointed out in her speech that night, the Feast of the Epiphany.  There are no wise men coming to save us.  Millions of Germans had scales on their eyes for nearly 15 years.  They were deprogrammed through a denazification program that included trials and reeducation.  That education regarding a failed fascist past, the necessity for democracy and racial tolerance continues, 75 years later.  We need to get started.  The stormtroopers are among us.