Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (83 page)

This country is just too fucked up about color. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity and it will hold any nation back, or any neighborhood back. Or anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if [whites] had their way, they would still be under the yoke. And they can’t pretend they don’t know that.
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Dylan would take to the young, black and eloquent candidate. Judging by the news coverage, the fact that the artist was even prepared to say so counted as a surprise, but the reaction was naive. His distrust of machine politics ran very deep, but so did his understanding of American history. Besides, Obama was not the average politician. Dylan, by his lights, had plenty to say. Interviewed by
The
Times
in the summer of 2008, he would remark:

Well, you know, right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up … Barack Obama. He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out.

Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to … You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.
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On election night in 2008, Dylan and his band were playing at the University of Minnesota, the college to which he had given a few rare moments of his precious time almost half a century before. Perhaps that memory influenced what became the closest thing the artist had given to a political endorsement in many a year.

Tony [Garnier, Dylan’s bass player] likes to think it’s a brand-new time right now. An age of light. Me, I was born in 1941. That’s the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. Well, I been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are gonna change now.

A year later, talking of his new president as ‘Barack’, Dylan would come up with a dizzying, near-poetic description of his reasons for being ‘intrigued’ by the black man who seemed to have fulfilled Martin Luther King’s fervent hopes. The artist, that insatiable reader, had come across Obama’s book,
Dreams From My Father
. True to art, Dylan had responded first to the story. In the interview, a history lesson followed. What had ‘struck him’ about Obama?

Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real.

First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas, though, but with deep roots. You know, like ‘Kansas bloody Kansas’. John Brown the Insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, guerrillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace.

And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot-type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean, it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that, though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey, except in reverse.
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In the years to come, Dylan would resist every attempt to persuade him to offer anything as banal as a real celebrity endorsement. In 2012, a
Rolling Stone
journalist would put his tortured head against a metaphorical brick wall in a doomed effort to extract a statement from the artist. Of Obama, Dylan would concede only, ‘I like him.’
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This citizen would do things in his own way. On a Monday night in November in Madison, Wisconsin, just after an Obama rally in the city and just before voters were due to pass judgement on the president’s hopes for a second term, the usual ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ encore was interrupted.

Thank you everybody. We tried to play good tonight, after the president was here today. You know, we just had to do something after that. It’s hard to follow that. I think he’s still the president, I think he’s still gonna be the president … Yeah, we know … You know, the media’s not fooling anybody. It’s probably gonna be a landslide.

A renewal of his all-knowing roving prophet’s licence was assured when Dylan predicted the result in a race that had left pollsters and pundits floundering. Most of them were still maintaining that the contest between Obama and Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger, was far too close to call. On the following day, the artist activated the Facebook account he had hitherto ignored to repeat his statements and ensure that no one had misunderstood him.

In Madison, the audience would cheer Dylan’s prognostications. In contrast, the ‘white nationalist’ fascists of Stormfront would commence an online discussion under the rubric ‘Jew Bob Dylan Predicts Obama Landslide’. That wasn’t even the half of it. The artist steered clear of party politics: this much was known. But in picking out the black candidate with the ‘interesting background’ in 2008, and by sticking with Obama in 2012, he had placed himself on one side of a deep divide. The loathing that had engulfed Bill Clinton was as nothing to the passions aroused in one part of the American soul by the sight of a black man in the White House. The more the president’s opponents denied that their contempt had anything to do with race, the more obvious the motivating force became. In coded terms mystifying to the average European, some tried to accuse the commander-in-chief of ‘socialism’, but the tactic was a feeble distraction. Certain things didn’t change, even if civic America had a horror of ‘the race issue’. Each halting discussion was hedged around with euphemisms. Yet as the votes of minorities flooded in for Obama and swept away the complacency of a white conservative world, the reaction was furious, transparent and ugly. For Dylan, some old memories must have been awakened. Half a century had passed since he had performed ‘When the Ship Comes In’ beneath the shadow of Lincoln’s marble memorial, but the path picked out by the March on Washington and Obama’s election still went by some old, dark and muddy roads.

The statistical evidence would arrive in due course. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an ingenious Harvard economics scholar pursuing his PhD, would set aside what dishonest people told the pollsters and look, first, at their Google searches and the language they used, then at how the votes fell. In March 2013, the researcher would publish a paper to show that ‘Continuing racial animus in the United States appears to have cost Obama roughly four percentage points of the national popular vote in both 2008 and 2012’. What’s more, the black man ‘lost substantially more votes from racial animus … than he gained from his race’.
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Publishing in the
Journal of Politics
, meanwhile, an assistant professor at Brown University on Rhode Island named Michael Tesler would assert that the sight of a black president had produced the effect, in one grim sense ironic, of reawakening ‘old-fashioned racism’ – the biological ‘superiority’ kind – in a non-trivial portion of the electorate.
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In 2008, Obama’s campaign would be approaching its end just as capitalism in America and around the world seemed to fall apart. Dylan’s ‘Workingman’s Blues’ would turn out to have been more prescient than most economists. The baby boomers were hitting their 60s as all the familiar American dreams of prosperity passing between the generations began to unravel. A historic national debt that had been condemned by Obama in 2007 when it stood at $9 trillion would explode after 2008. Families whose real median income had fallen by 3 per cent between 2000 and 2004 (in ‘the good times’) were about to be crushed as the bills came in for Wall Street’s sins.
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A few, a very few, were immune to dread: the phenomenon began to be noticed. According to estimates published by
Forbes.com
in September 2007, the 25 richest people in the country, few of whom made or built things for a living, had a collective ‘net worth’ of $490.8 billion.

The crisis caused by banking’s robber barons would be international. In terms of jobs lost and national wealth destroyed, some European countries would suffer more profoundly than the United States. Nevertheless, in Dylan’s country, in the country whose collective memory he tried to preserve in his songs, the psychological scars ran deep. Obama would be entitled to claim credit for relative success in propping up the system and coping with the slump, but he would receive few thanks, least of all from Republicans who began to talk as though debt had nothing to do with bankers and everything to do with minimal welfare spending. For Dylan, modern times must have contained innumerable echoes of the past. But that was how history functioned, or so he had long believed.

His imagination had first been set aflame by the songs of Woody Guthrie, quintessential witness to the Great Depression. In many places in America, and for much the same reasons as in the 1930s, the old sour smell of hard times had returned. For all that, the parallels were not exact. Dylan’s awakening had come late in the gaudy 1950s when the country was still rich, powerful and generally admired around the world. Just before the banking crash of 2008 the Pew Global Attitudes Project was reporting that, thanks chiefly to Bush, the United States was mistrusted abroad if it was not despised. By then, the reaction to the exercise of military power had spread far beyond Muslim countries. In Germany, for one example, ‘favourable attitudes’ towards America had slipped from 78 per cent in 2000 to 37 per cent in 2007. Among the British, those most reliable of allies, the equivalent figures were 83 per cent and 56 per cent.
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Like some mythical island lost in a peculiar fog, America seemed to be drifting off from the rest of the world. There was no longer a consensus over the values being disputed or defended. It was not just a question of military might and its uses. One finding by the Pew researchers might have struck Dylan and his compatriots as odd, for example, but in Europe it seemed to explain a great deal. A majority of Americans (58 per cent) believed their country was ‘not religious enough’. Among the Europeans, American religiosity was regarded as a defining problem. As one result, the hope promised by Obama and his election victory on 4 November 2008 was greeted with frank relief in Europe and beyond. Millions chose to believe that somehow America had come to its senses. No one could quite say what they meant by that, however.

As pandemics of optimism go, this one would prove brief. During his 2008 campaign Obama had promised to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba where America was holding numerous ‘detainees’ without charge or trial amid its war on terror. When the president then failed to keep his word, and continued to fail to keep his word, ‘liberals’ and assorted supportive believers began to suffer doubts. When Obama then seemed reluctant to do much more than lecture those responsible for the banking crisis, the idea that he embodied change started to look a little implausible. Fear of Romney, the Republican alternative, would win the president his re-election in 2012, but that victory would serve only to conceal a larger crisis, political and moral, within the administration. Dylan and many others would discover that ‘redefining the nature of politics from the ground up’ had not meant much more than presidential business as usual.

In May 2013, Obama would give a speech to explain that he meant to alter ‘what has been a global war into a more targeted assault on terrorist groups threatening the United States’.
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He would say that he also intended to ‘curtail the use of drones’, the robotic airborne devices that had become the vehicles for his presidential ‘signature assassinations’. George Bush had ordered 52 of those drone attacks. By 2013, Obama had selected personally the targets for 318 assaults, most aimed at individuals and groups in Pakistan. By mid-2011, according to one study, 385 civilians, 160 children among them, had died thanks to these remotely controlled weapons.
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Four American citizens had also been assassinated by their president, his ‘kill orders’ and his drones. To many, there was no moral justification for any of this. Nevertheless, in his May address at the National Defense University in Washington DC, Obama would still feel able to invoke the theological doctrine of the just war.

A lawyer’s training would be of little use to the commander-in-chief when it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service had been victimising his opponents in the right-wing Tea Party movement, or when it was disclosed that his justice department had been seizing the telephone records of Associated Press journalists. Even progressive sorts, specialists in disillusionment, would find it hard to explain how their liberty-loving candidate had turned into a president bent on extending the arm of the state into every corner of life. Yet if May 2013 would come to feel like the cruellest month for Obama’s fans, June would be worse. On this president’s watch, the headlines would say, the National Security Agency had been given licence to spy upon the communications of hundreds of millions of Americans. ‘Prism’, as this vast attempt at digital martial law was called, collected data from every major telephone, internet and GPS network in public use. The charge would be one of mass covert surveillance with the thinnest of legal justifications. As even the liberal media would notice, it went against every ethical and constitutional principle that Obama, the liberator, had ever espoused. He had never said, ‘Yes we can … hack your phone.’

Dylan had written ‘Masters of War’ as his response to Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings against the military-industry complex. Half a century later, he had spoken up, if haltingly, for the young black president who was going to change everything. Instead, the artist had given his backing to an architect of what was better described as the national security-industrial complex. By 2013, according to one estimate by budgetary analysts, ‘defence’ in its various manifestations would be costing America $931 billion a year, a sum approaching 25 per cent of all federal spending.
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The young singer who had once turned his back on political idealism and fine-sounding hypocrites might have been right all along.