Between Maureen Dowd and Pinch Sulzberger, you really get the sense that the last people on Earth who still believe in the myths of the 1960s are hold up in their redoubt at 620 Eighth Avenue. Here’s Dowd shocked that Bob Dylan would cave to Communist China’s censors in order to make a few bucks performing in Beijing:
The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.
Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.
AdvertisementIconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.
“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.
A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”
But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.
But Maureen, it’s the other guy’s country.
Related: What would Sebastian Cabot do?
Ed, I’m all for making a few bucks! It’s the AMERICAN WAY! (Check out the picture I’ve included with my post on Dowd’s Dylan!)
http://dave-lucas.blogspot.com/2011/04/dowd-blows-in-dylans-wind.html
Leaving aside the unquenchable fury – at the fact that there seems a dearth of good-looking, rich, thirty-somethings trying to get into her Depends – which informs every paragraph of this rant, and the fact that she can’t stand it that Rush Limbaugh has more listeners in a week than she has readers in an entire career, we’re left with … well, left with a notion that she is unaware that Hurricane, released by the buzz caused by the song, “Hurricane,” promptly committed a crime like the one he was originally convicted for.
Also brings to mind one of Heinlein’s favorite phrases: “Don’t mention rope in the house of the hanged man.”
Another principled liberal…like Michael Moore and his non-union camera crews.
Guess Mo-Mo’s boss Punchy didn’t clue her in to how he wants his “newspaper” to be all about perspectives other than those of western hetero white males. So whatever the Chicoms see fit to do should be copacetic with the Times, one would think. I’m sure Commissar Friedman (what an ironic surname for a totalitarian-lovin’ dingbat) would approve.
It’s not Freedman, it’s Friedman. As in Kentucky. Rolled in pre-seasoned pre-packaged opinions then immersed in the hot, fetid maelstrom of the NYT echo-chamber.
After selling his franchise Harlan Sanders commented that the chicken was a mushy pablum, the breading was a damn dough ball, and the finished product bore little resemblance to chicken. Very much like what happens to reason after it goes through the NYT kitchen.