Daily Ramblings:
Conceit Is A Disease ...06/05/2005 09:58:47 pm
I was just leafing back through Chronicles,
and on page 170 I came across Dylan's little passage
on the song Disease Of Conceit, from
1989's Oh Mercy album. It seems that Dylan
wrote the lyric in 1988 - he doesn't provide many
dates in his memoir, of-course, but he writes of
something that he was paying attention to in the news
around the time he composed it - namely the
"defrocking" of the preacher Jimmy Swaggart by the leadership
of the Assembly of God.
Jimmy was Jerry
Lee Lewis's first cousin and was a big TV star,
and the news came as a shock. He'd been linked to
a prostitute, caught on camera leaving her motel
room in sweatpants.
...
The story was strange. Swaggart clearly wasn't in
good shape, hadn't looked at the road. The story
didn't make any sense. The Bible is full of these
things. A lot of those old kings and leaders had
many wives and concubines and Hosea the Prophet
was even married to a prostitute, and it didn't
stop him from being a holy man.
And so, without in any way saying his song is
"about" Swaggart, Dylan is willing to risk
that misinterpretation by giving away some of what
was floating around in his mind at the time.
More interesting to me at the moment, however, is
the tone of his remarks on Swaggart. It's
what's not there that sticks out - namely, the
condescension and contempt that would epitomize a
typical East or West Coast view, not only of
Swaggart, but of anyone who could be called a
"tele-evangelist." The term itself is
essentially a term of abuse amongst the enlightened
and secular elite (and the not so elite). Even to say
someone is "like a tele-evangelist" is
tantamount to saying that they are a charlatan.
And yet, these are individuals who have huge
audiences across the nation - audiences who are
certainly seeking God, whether or not they are
ultimately finding Him through the words of these
small-screen preachers. While they provide easy
targets for the knowing sneers of the wise and the
prudent, there is no sneer detectible in Dylan's
writing on Swaggart and his fall from grace. Instead,
in an analogy that someone as steeped in the Bible as
Dylan has to realize the audaciousness of, he brings
up the Old Testament prophet Hosea.
And from the first chapter of Hosea is this:
When the LORD
began to speak through Hosea, the LORD said to
him, "Go, take to yourself an adulterous
wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the
land is guilty of the vilest adultery in
departing from the LORD." Hosea 1:2
You might interpret this as God using Hosea to
send a message to the people of Israel about
themselves. Is Dylan obliquely implying the same
thing about Swaggart?
In any case, his take on the tele-evangelist
reminds me also of this quote from his Biograph interview
in 1985: "Pop music on the radio? I don't know.
I listen mostly to preacher stations and the country
music stations and maybe the oldies stations ...
that's about it."
And the image of Bob Dylan lying back listening to
Christian radio is reminiscent in its turn of certain
sequences in his 2003 film, Masked &
Anonymous. It opens to the voice of a preacher
on the radio, declaiming in a completely over-the-top
tone (actually the voice of the director, Larry
Charles, apparently). One's first instinct is that
this guy is nuts, and his words are only there to be
mocked. Like a lot of one's first instincts with
regard to scenes in this film, however, you might
find yourself questioning them after repeated viewing
(some would say your sanity should be questioned if
you sit through this movie more than once, but that's
another story and another argument). The initial
tirade of this preacher - he is also audible later in
the film - ends with these words:
Will man
destroy the earth to move on? Is that his
destiny? Ask yourselves a question, people: Are
you humble before God?
(This is followed by the dulcet tones of the
Magokoro Brothers singing My Back Pages in
Japanese.)
So, Dylan's handling of the Swaggart story in Chronicles
seems to show that despite his special affection for
New York City, he was never overtaken by the smug
cosmopolitan cynicism that many there possess. It
also, I think, displays his kind of rough and tumble
sense of faith and Scripture; God can make His word
shine through the thickest fog and turn human flaws
(and flawed humans) to His ends. The same is
underlined by his own taste for radio preachers, and
his desire to put something like that in front of his
film audience and challenge them to question their
ears (should I be laughing or is this the one person
in this movie who is making sense?).
Too much can be read into all of it - and
of-course that's why RWB is
here. Nevertheless, it's an example again of Dylan
being both surprising and in another sense remarkably
consistent. The threads can seem disparate until you
start lifting them up and finding that they're all
joined together after all.
Preacher was a talkin' there's a
sermon he gave,
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved,
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied.
PS: And no, I wouldn't dismiss the
notion that Dylan handles Jimmy carefully out of a
healthy fear of Jerry Lee.
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