Bob Dylan released “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in 1965, on his Bringing It All Back Home album. This would be the first Dylan album with an entire side composed of rock music, and a prelude to Dylan being booed during his performance at the Newport Folk Festival, for being accompanied by electric guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Barry Goldberg of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper on organ. The horror!
“Subterranean” envisaged troubled times ahead and also pointed directly to the past few weeks in America where small businesses have been burned and looted by progressive vandals who “took their handle,” their livelihood and their faith in American government. All gone in a month.
Another problem not covered by the MSM is businesses trying to rebuild their handle but not being able to get insurance to protect their investment. Many insurance policies won’t cover the present riot damage and destruction due to arson and looting. There is also no way that insurers will cover these businesses again in the same risky locations.
“Subterranean” became an unlikely pion to the ending of the beat generation and heralded the coming folk-rock and hippie era because the song was a unique blending of the emotions of the Beat Generation displayed by Alan Ginsberg and the angst of Black blues music, tipping Dylan’s hat to Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf. At that juncture, many young people were attending or recently graduated from college like today’s youth, being brainwashed by leftist professors and becoming disillusioned by what was happening socially and economically--—“Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift.”
Like that generation, this generation doesn’t have a plan, just a lame rejection of all that came before. That song reflected the alleged personal turmoil of their miserable lives. As music historian Tony Attwood said, the song linked the future to the past and back again, finding new models, new expressions, new ideas, even if no one knew what they meant.
Turning the clock ahead forty-five years, the summer of 2020 has been a reprise of 1965 with race riots and mayhem premised on the deaths of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. These events are the weathervane that is showing young Americans “which way the wind blows.” It is also the thanks older Millennials get for sending their children to college with the flagrant brainwashing that takes place there. As President Trump said in his 4th of July speech to America, “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.”
Unlike in 1965, 2020 has seen politicians conspiring and even marching with the protests. Feckless lower-case republicans like Mitt Romney virtue-signal by marching with protestors in our Nation’s Capitol and spouting right along with the usually suspect Congressional Democrats who took a knee to honor George Floyd on Capitol Hill, that “we need a voice against racism, many voices against racism and brutality and we need to say that black lives matter.” This despite contradictory FBI data showing white-on-black homicides dropping over the past two years, while black-on-black homicides climbing.
You don’t have say or believe that black and all lives matter to understand that the BLM organization does not have America’s best interests at heart and is led by antiestablishment socialists. Apparently for this whole lot or concerned politicians, only BLM matters since at least four police officers were killed and more than 400 officers injured across the United States during this rioting and looting. Attorney General William Barr said it much more accurately than Romney and his fellow travelers, "voices of peaceful and legitimate protests have been hijacked by violent radical elements" and that they are working to "pursue their own separate, violent, and extremist agenda." It is a real crime that many in Congress are following this criminal lead.
The entire MSM has come unglued, joining them in reverence, cheering the New York Times on as they accepted the resignation of Editorial Editor James Bennett despite Times publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, affirming his belief in the “principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with.” Obviously, it was a journalistic crime to permit Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion to be presented in the rag of record.
As Max Diamond wrote in Quillette, “A serious defense of intellectual diversity in the press cannot simply reiterate that there are problems with delimiting legitimate perspectives; it must establish a principled standard of acceptability.” That standard now is if it’s conservative “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Just ignore it or double down against it. For many small-r republicans, it was indeed a race to the bottom, followed closely behind by corporate America, professional athletes, actors and singing groups like the Dixie Chicks, rechristened “The Chicks.” This virtue will stand as long as the feminazis don’t raise themselves up in almighty protest. Perhaps won’t since this is proper virtue-signaling against racism in America. Lady Antebellum has also changed their name recently to “Lady A,” that, while no longer racist, may still be sexist since they are women, damn it, not ladies!
The only good that could come of this 2020 reprise of Subterranean Homesick Blues is if small republican, virtue-signaling Mitt Romney, announce that he feels so bad about his tenuous link to conservative America that he’s changing his gender, and becoming trans-Mitt.
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