If you haven’t seen it, the complete text of the Douglas Brinkley / Bob Dylan interview, as originally published in the print version of Rolling Stone and later in the U.K. Sunday Times, is available at this link. I have to assume that website has permission to publish it.

One quote we haven’t already covered here:

Like the dour-faced farmer in Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, Dylan seems to have the American songbook in one hand and a raised pitchfork in the other, aimed at rock critics, politicians, Wall Street financiers, back-alley thieves, the world wide web – anything that cheapens the spirit of the individual. His nostalgia is more for the Chess Records 1950s than the psychedelic 1960s. He believes that Europe should lose the euro and go back to its old currencies – “I miss the pictures on the old money,” he says. If Dylan had his way, there’d be Sousa bands on Main Street and vinyl albums instead of CDs. Teenagers would go on nature hikes instead of watching YouTube. “It’s peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with mobile phones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games,” he says. “It robs them of their self-identity. It’s a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that’s got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.”

Those are exceedingly wise remarks by Bob, I think. (Leave aside for a moment the fact that Sonia Sotomayor says that “there can never be a universal definition of wise.”)

…

With all the focus in the media on the bad things coming out of North Korea (and can there ever really be a universal definition of bad?), don’t miss this recent nugget from the official North Korean news service, on the medical benefits of polarized light devices.

Polarized light devices displayed at the recent 12th Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair attracted interest of visitors for their medical function.

The wrist watches, rings and other goods, which were manufactured by making use of the special polarized light of natural Iceland spar, are used for the prevention and treatment of various diseases.

They were proved highly efficacious in the treatment of hypertension, arteriosclerosis, hyperlipemia, obesity, headache, insomnia, benumbed limbs, skin diseases and stress.

And I don’t know how I missed the opportunity to set up a booth at the Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair. In North Korea, the can-do spirit clearly lives on.

It’s easy enough to laugh at the insanity coming out of the DPRK, but the laughing should also be mixed with crying, as in this other story from their official news service this week, entitled “Advice To An Old Man.” It’s a story about an alleged incident in 1955, when the current dicator’s father — Kim Il Sung — ruled the land, and he is said to have stopped his car to get out and speak to an elderly farmer:

Going up to him, the President asked him gently what he was sowing.

The old man answered it was foxtail millet. Smiling, the President said why didn’t he turn the land into a paddy field where water was expected before the rice-transplanting season.

The old man frankly unbosomed himself, saying he would do so, working all night through, if he could see water flowing there, but he was not sure he would see water so soon.

Never minding his words, the President turned to the officials accompanying him and said his words hinted how much he had suffered from the lack of water. Then he told the old man the water would come certainly in more or less half a month and told him to boldly turn the land into a paddy field and make preparations to grow rice.

Deeply touched by the words of the President, the old man said he would not fail to make it a paddy field.

After the President left, the old man kept to his words with confidence.

Irrigation water flowed into the field soon and heavy ears of rice drooped on the stalks in the former foxtail millet plot.

Looking at the stack of rice in the yard, the old man recollected with deep thanks the advice of the President.

Consider, if you would, all that is going on here, that we should in 2009 read this absurd and harrowing story, passed down in some didactic fashion for decades, that some helpless and hopeless apparatchik in North Korea had to type last week into a computer, in English, and publish to the internet. It is amusing in its ridiculous way — presenting the dictator as some kind of Christ figure — but it also illustrates a depth of evil that can hardly be comprehended by anyone who is not imprisoned and oppressed in a place like the genuine slave-state that is North Korea. One day, surely, we will hear stories of normal life in that country that will make decent people sob in horror. And we will ask: How could it be?

…

At the revamped First Things website, one of the blogs being hosted is the excellent Secondhand Smoke by Wesley Smith. In a post today he provides a relatively rare piece of good news on the front of defending and valuing the most vulnerable human life; namely, the case of Lauren Richardson.

…

And Yours Truly had a topical post at the new First Thoughts blog today: Do you have a permit for that Bible?

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• Kim to Fidel: “Get Well Soon”
• Turn that thing off
• Don’t do it, Eric