Almost as charmless and didactic as the thing at the World Socialist Web Site that I mentioned yesterday is this piece by Ian Buruma in The Guardian, headed “Silent Protest: Why are we still turning to Dylan for the soundtrack to our demonstrations?”

He’s mourning the lack of a powerful contemporary “protest culture.” Of-course the reason why Dylan’s songs have survived is because they go so far beyond mundane protest. When they’re sung at the barricades these days, used to provide a soundtrack to some Bush/America/Israel bashing protest or other, the people abusing them are only hearing a sliver of what they’re about (and a distorted sliver at that), but are at the same time feeling in some way their inherent timeless power, and drawing energy from it.

The writer of this piece deals with Dylan’s own rejection of the use of his songs as political polemic this way:

The irony of Dylan’s status as an iconic protest singer is that this is not what he ever wanted. As we know from Martin Scorsese’s brilliant documentary, No Direction Home, Dylan was baffled, annoyed, and upset when the media built him up as the “voice of his generation”, whose protest songs would change the world. In live performances, he would pronounce “protest songs” with the exaggerated drawl of derision. To him, they were songs. He was an artist, not a spokesman or a politician. Protest was one of the idioms he used, because it was an outlet for his musical passion.

Or so he claimed. There was perhaps a certain disingenuousness [RWB's emphasis] about his statements. Unless he was a total cynic, which I don’t believe, it wasn’t just opportunism that made him stand on the same platform as Martin Luther King, in front of more than 250,000 people gathered in Washington DC in 1963 to demand civil rights for black people. His songs had a profound message for those people.

So, we have the constantly recurring theme that Dylan is “disingenuous,” i.e., he lies, when he rejects specific political purposes to his songs. On the contrary, I think since the young Dylan’s contemporaneous reactions to the usurpation of his material are consistent with the remarks of Dylan in the present day, in the No Direction Home interview and elsewhere, we can pretty sure he is being sincere. That, and the fact that his own understanding of his songs is perfectly compatible with the nature of the songs themselves, once you study them without wearing leftist blinkers.

As for the 1963 March on Washington (where MLK Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech), RWB gets rather tired of hearing this thrown up like some kind of trump card demonstrating that yes, after all, Dylan was or is inherently a man of the left. For cryin’ out loud, folks, it ain’t inherently left-wing to favor voting rights for black people, and to oppose segregation. And it wasn’t then either. A greater proportion of Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats. (As an aside, Senator Barry Goldwater, R-Az, whom Dylan described in Chronicles as being his “favorite politician” circa 1961-’62, voted against the Civil Rights Act. However I think any reasonable commentator would allow that this was not due to bigotry, but rather to his very strict and principled understanding of the concept of states’ rights.)

So, drawing the conclusion that because Dylan obviously had sympathy for oppressed blacks in the early ’60s, that he then must have actually secretly supported the greater panoply of “hate America first” protest movements that gained strength as the decade wore on, is, I think, utterly groundless and belied by the historical record.

And, since it’s now been dealt with, I trust we won’t ever have to see it again in print …

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