Bob Dylan's 1965 Time Magazine Interview and How it Speaks to >>>>>2020

In a memorable scene from Don't Look Back, the 1967 documentary which followed Bob Dylan during his tour of England in 1965, he sat down with a Time Magazine writer Horace Freeland Judson. Instead of respectfully answering the questions from the esteemed culture journalist, Dylan turned the tables. He dared to be irreverent towards a respected publication that considered him to be a curious fad.

Many focus on Dylan's alleged cruelty towards Judson, but that's a misrepresentation at best. Some recent takes claim Dylan was calling out the fake news media. That's a simplistic interpretation as well. If you listen closely something else entirely was going on.The exchange was a clash was over ideas about art and the media. Dylan despised being subjected to a patronizing write up in Time about him being a folk singer who spoke for his generation. Dylan's defiance towards Judson led to a deconstruction of what Time Magazine represented. 

Their verbal spar moved the interview into surreal territory. Dylan criticized the magazine's approach to reporting world news, pointing out how they make the news simple and concise, like a consumer product you might say. He states the magazine had "too much to lose by printing the truth." When questioned further on what constitutes the truth, Dylan casually suggests the truth is a "plain picture" and that collages of "tramps" and "Mr. Rockefeller" would make more sense.

I imagine Time magazine in 1965 as being run by Ivy League/East Coast establishment types, cultural gatekeepers with deep networks into all sectors of American life. Dylan was calling out the magazine's sanitized presentation of reality, one out of touch with the emerging counterculture. The reality represented by Time did not resonate with the experiences of young people - so they created their own media and culture.

The exchange got me thinking about today. This past week a group of 150 respected members of the establishment composed of writers and academics (overwhelming majority over age 40) signed a petition in Harper's Magazine decrying so called "cancel culture" without naming it specifically. The "letter" generated a lively debate online. Those who signed the letter see an "illiberal" attitude among the younger generation. As many have pointed out the letter says more about gatekeepers in a shaky political climate. What's viewed as an attack on freedom of speech from the left is more of a new accountability they view as persecution. If Dylan was moving faster than the culture at large in the 1960s, the young must move even faster these days. They have no choice considering the state of the world.

Another tactic is to demonize youth (woke) culture as a new form of McCarthyism. The logic being that if one makes an offhand comment on race or gender, their career will be derailed. A twitter mob will be unleashed. Off to the gulag then I presume? Or maybe a lucrative speaking tour! It's a dubious comparison and a bizarre rhetorical ploy. The Red Scare of the 1950s targeted free thought, anyone suspected of communist sympathies could be jailed or even executed for treason. Calling out intolerance and bias within institutions bears little resemblance to the tactics of McCarthy, especially when it comes from the marginalized of society, voices typically silenced or ignored in the past. Screaming "New McCarthyism" today would be the same as labeling Martin Luther King an "SJW" or "communist" (many did) for upsetting the status quo in the 1960s and actually having the temerity to call upon white people to reconsider their views on race as he did in his Letter From A Birmingham Jail: 

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose of establishing justice they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress . . . we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

With the safe distance of history, even red state conservatives pay lip service to Dr. King (even though many of their forebears fought passionately against a holiday dedicated to his memory).

Victims of McCarthyism were served subpoenas, got late night knocks on the door, lost their jobs, and faced prison time if they refused to "name names." Anyone who dissented from the consensus of Cold War culture was suspect. It's also well documented people of color, the Jewish community, and gay people were targets of HUAC (House of Un-American Activities Comm). Loyalty oaths were also required for all civil servants allowing for union busting on a grand scale. The extreme anti-communism McCarthyism fomented did not die with him either, but led indirectly to the Vietnam War and resulted in electing a President in 2016 who admires Tail gunner Joe  (yet progressive millennials are labeled the new McCarthyites?). The past is not even past. 

Young people desperate for change have the right to be confrontational. They're also our best hope. Think about the world they inherited. The generation under 30, born after 1990, has experienced the 2008 crash at age 18, an increasing class divide, forever wars, and the rise of authoritarianism. The year 2020 has been one of a global pandemic, another economic disaster, and civil unrest brought on by decades of unchecked police brutality. The status quo is no longer acceptable. As British songwriter Billy Bragg argued in the Guardian, social media now fills the role of pop music in the past as a space for youthful dissent -  and appears to be more effective for the time being. Those who've never had to answer to anyone before now find their sacred conventional wisdom on trial - as it should be. 

Just as many viewed Dylan, Joan Baez, or other luminaries in the 60s as a threat to social order because of their creative expressions and influence on the young, the powers that be of today lament the new critical voices aimed at them and also must live with the knowledge they left a heavy burden on future generations - whether it was by electing Trump, supporting Brexit, or their lack of action on the environment.  They will have to adjust to the changing times, as Dylan wrote:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'