That Old Black and White

The tune "Bob Dylan’s Dream" has long been on my mental play-list (like so many of his gems, at times purposeful, at others a bit of an earworm), admittedly first quite likely because of the PPM cover (Album 1700). Fantastic tune, terrific lyrics, and a classic bittersweet evocation of gaining of experience versus loss of innocence.

Lyrics start off like this, hopefully all the reminder needed for most:

While riding on a train going west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughing and singing till the early hours of the morn.

Almost a Jungian theme perhaps (as if I knew anything about Jung). I awoke this AM, for example, to a tune with lyrics like “wish I knew way back when what I know now.” And there is the classic Bob Seger lyric “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

Not to mention Bob’s own “ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

But the Dream lyrics have always cut awfully close to the bone for a sentimental romantic sot like me, first in heading east to college and even more so on return to the Pacific Northwest. I cherished tight camaraderie with a handful of college classmates; the inevitable post-graduation separation amounted to the scattering of a proto-commune of fantastic soul-mates. Not that “we never thought we could ever get old,” but at least I may have entertained the thought that “we could sit forever in fun.” Some of that fun centered on a mere card game – the principles in theory at least transmitted solely through absolutely addle-pated demonstration rather than any liturgical stating of rules. Not that there weren’t absolutely dogmatic rules, mind you! It was a great faceoff between stoner and fascist. The rules just were not supposed to be recorded or according to some even stated aloud.

But my freewheeling tonight (inadvertent album title evocation, honest) is more along the lines of whether (horrors!) 43 might down the road be sitting around a pile of burning brush, with similar pondering. What would seem pretty innocent musings for most of us suddenly have pretty nasty cataclysmic implications given our experience with dreamer XLIII. These lines in particular come to mind:

as easy it was to tell black from white
it was all that easy to tell wrong from right

and

where we longed for nothing and were satisfied
talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside

That would be him alright, putting everything in over-simplistic white/black, us/them, wrong/right dichotomies, to hell with facts, nuances, uncertainty, and the real world. And as long as we’re at it, making our own reality and giving the finger to anyone with a different opinion, why not also poke fun at those others who are actually trying to make the world a better place and thus having to deal with subtleties and real life. Now that you've made it this far, thanks to ma and pa barbie having repeatedly paid off the authorities, go ahead and twist those lipless gums a bit and sneer out a few condescending nicknames for old time’s sake?

(I'm going into song-rehab after this to try to recapture my enjoyment of Dream.)

But that’s how you will be remembered, sorry little Mr. Strutter-decider. Clueless and absolutely devoid of any class to the end. A new icon for the odd combination of petulant spoiled brat and trailer-trash loser.

More Connections

I have at least one more Dylan-based cameo on the way. And, having waded through Mr. Tenet's attempt at absolution-between-covers ("At the Center of the Storm"), some commentary on that doorstop is potentially also in the works.

Family connections to the "Show Me" state and connections through close friends to adjacent Kentucky partially explain my interest in the following items.

I found this news from Missouri very invigorating, especially given that this is not what you'd call one of our more enlightened provinces:

Talk about a nasty divorce. In an announcement last month that left Missouri politicos agape, state Sen. Chris Koster, a rising Republican star and chairman of the Senate's GOP caucus, abruptly declared himself a Democrat.

Not only did Koster join the marginalized minority party in Missouri, but he did so with a thundering speech that lambasted his former colleagues as ignoring the needs of their constituents and slavishly following the dictates of "religious extremists."

The former prosecutor denounced several Republican positions he had once supported, such as steep cuts in Medicaid coverage and subsidized family-planning programs.

But Koster reserved his harshest criticism for GOP efforts to overturn a voter-approved constitutional amendment that protects embryonic stem-cell research in Missouri."

The Republican desire is to criminalize early-stage stem-cell research in our state," Koster said in a speech he repeated three times as he hopscotched across the state. "Go to Boston for your Nobel Prize; come to Missouri for your leg irons. And the Missouri Republican Party not only tolerates this lunacy, but embraces it," Koster said.

Days later, one of his staffers updated his website -- by deleting a photo of Koster shaking hands with Vice President Dick Cheney.

Koster's decision stunned Republicans here in his district just south of Kansas City and across this quintessential swing state. "There's no precedent for it in the state of Missouri," said GOP consultant Paul Zemitzsch.

But the move sounded like deja vu just across the state line in Kansas.

Three prominent Kansas Republicans moved into the Democratic column in late 2005 and 2006, voicing similar concerns about the influence of social conservatives. One of those defectors was elected attorney general. Another -- who once chaired the Kansas Republican Party -- now serves as lieutenant governor.

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And I found this post by Bob Hill in the Louisville Courier-Journal very satisfying in a number of ways. He ogles the Big Sky. Who wouldn't! Who doesn't! Just don't inveigle trainloads more of visitors (I say as a sometime visitor myself!). And he strikes a refreshingly lighter and more amusing note on the Craig/Minneapolis Airport embroglio than I could have conceived of under the present circumstances. Wonderful:

The vacation gods had routed my return trip from Montana to Louisville through the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

On a complete whim -- and some are better left unanswered than others -- I asked two white-haired ladies in an airport information booth the obvious and timely question: "Which way to the Sen. Larry Craig Memorial Bathroom Stall?"

It was a busy Labor Day weekend, with some 15 million Americans agreeing to take off their airport shoes or sacrifice the occasional bottle of hand lotion to visit Aunt Gert or Uncle Bert.

As a result, I feared an even-longer-than-normal line outside the fabled stall, endless hordes of stranded Northwest Airlines passengers sneaking a peek, maybe even somebody screwing a plaque into the sacred door.

American history, I was thinking, has been created in even smaller rooms.

The white-haired ladies looked at each other and giggled. One said she couldn't divulge the location. The other couldn't wait to give it up: "Just down the corridor on the right … but be careful in there. …"

The ladies again looked at each other and giggled a little more. I wondered how many times they'd been asked about the stall. I also was in a hurry, as some of the gates at the monstrous Minneapolis airport are in separate time zones.

And yet … surely the travel gods had routed me through there … and on this particular weekend … for some good reason.

It had been a fine vacation. Montana doesn't come labeled "Big Sky Country" for nothing. It's high, wide and handsome. We saw bison, wolves, bears, elk, deer and a marmot. We saw geysers, glaciers, clear and cold streams and bubbly pockets of boiling yellow sulfur. We had a mountaintop snowball fight and traveled in a historic red bus up a steep, curling mountain road to visit the sun.

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Those Old Mind Games

At some point last week I found I had to stand up and confront some Dylan lyrics running through my head. Okay, yes, Dylan-in-head is a commonplace, not every danged day but possibly most. And, indeed, I love him for it. But as I had other things on my mind at the time, I was a titch annoyed that I could not pigeonhole these lyrics with a song title and possibly thus find a way to put that ear-worm temporarily behind me.

If you see Saint Annie, please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot
I don’t even have the strength to get up and take another shot
And my best friend the doctor won’t even tell me what it is I’ve got.

After ten or more mental reprises (you know what a couple synapses can do), I was riffing on the idea of a variant for 43 with “knickers in a knot,” and Laura howling at the moon, but still aggravated at not having the title. Figuring out how the lyric/worm got to me was a bit improbable, even for an optimist like me.

But, like so many things in life, a little of those Time-Passages Al Stewart sang about can work wonders.

I finally established that it was Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues that was terrorizing me. It wasn’t long after that minor revelation that I recalled that I had just listened over the past week or so to an intense audio-book mystery set in southern New Mexico that featured lots of Juarez action (Michael McGarrity’s “Tularoso,” highly recommended, likewise his “Mexican Hat,” which I read in conventional book form earlier). I am convinced that it was the "Juarez" references that set my last few gray cells off.

Of course JLTTB starts off with:

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter-time too

That helped a lot in my yen for tracking cerebral connections.

The next day I was setting up to paint the underside of the carport (honey do!), and trundled out our primitive portable cd-player. I’ll be damned if my second or third disk involved Ms. Ronstadt (recently high on play-list courtesy of reading of Zevon biography “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”) doing a yeo-woman job on JLTTB!

Yowzah!

Keep on playing those mind-games.

We Don't Need No Stinking Goal Posts!

Maybe you too experience an occasional dark moment? Maybe not. One recurrent one for me these last few weeks involves the continual shifting of the goal posts related to the "surge" concept bush adopted in January.

This decision was of course in conspicuous conflict with both the strong suggestions of a semi-bipartisan advisory panel that reviewed the conditions in Iraq as well as the advice of quite a number of senior military. Hence when we hear that the "president listens to his generals" and such-like claptrap we need to carefully postscript that he either doesn't listen well (quite plausible, given notorious petulance and listening deficiencies) or willfully chooses to defy their advice (again the un-parented brat comes to mind, determined to demonstrate that he is independent and not subject to coaching).

I have been concerned that by the time we hear the Official Line on the state of affairs in Iraq later this month the goal of the surge may have been reduced to getting the troops to Iraq.

That isn't much of a stretch, frankly. There were all sorts of milestones supposedly set up that had to be met to deem the surge a success. Recently leaked report (General Accountability Office?) calls "Fail" on 15 of 18 milestones. Too late - the white house had already shifted the goal posts such that all that is needed for the surge to now be called successful as their new game rules have it is that conditions be more secure or there be fewer deaths in some isolated region than was the case before the surge.

Never mind that apparently every month since the surge began there have reportedly been more deaths than in the corresponding month last year.

But then here's another exciting proposal for re-writing the rules, courtesy of Newsweek as reported at TPM:

For all the debate this week about civilian casualities and sectarian violence in Iraq, Newsweek's Babak Dehghanpisheh and Larry Kaplow provide some often overlooked context.

Thousands of other Sunnis like Kamal have been cleared out of the western half of Baghdad, which they once dominated, in recent months. The surge of U.S. troops—meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital—has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually "has increased the IDPs to some extent."

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias' cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they've essentially won.

As Matt Yglesias added, "Maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced. Or maybe someone can explain to me again about how we can't leave Iraq because of the ethnic cleansing that'll happen without us around."