Blowin’ in the Idiot Wind

The co-incidence of these two pieces struck me as particularly interesting for what they say about the boomer generation.

Blowin’ in the Idiot Wind – NYTimes.com

We Don’t Know The Language We Don’t Know – NYRB.com

I had just finished reading Nicholson Baker’s piece, the second one, when I turned to Maureen Dowd’s column on the subject of Bob Dylan’s concert in China, for which he took the money AND the censorship. It always was apparent that Bobby Zimmerman was interested in money. The record deal he got from Columbia was widely reputed at the time to be the hardest bargain any artist had ever driven with the industry, but no one seemed to pay that any mind.

It got me to thinking about Nicholson Baker’s piece and how the leadership of the anti-war protest he attended in Washington consisted largely of the old Vietnam Veterans Against the War. We haven’t had a serious anti-war movement in this country since the establishment of the All Volunteer Army, nor have we heard much on the subject from the great Bobby Zimmerman.

As Maureen Dowd’s column makes clear, there is a very good reason for that. Protest songs are not where the money is any more. It would seem that Bobby Zimmerman was no more the principled protest poet than the average Vietnam War protestor was a principled lover of peace. Zimmerman was simply a poseur songwriting for other poseurs, a generation of me firsters, whose only opposition was rooted in their fear to service by way of the draft. Many of them would later become the  Reaganaut conservatives and chickenhawks, who never met a war, or a tax cut to pay for it, that they didn’t like. Just sayin’.