Recently in Reason Magazine, Brian Doherty wrote an article bemoaning the tendency of some to judge art by its political content, or to compel art into political categories, or to project their own politics onto art (you’re free to read it and decide what he’s actually bemoaning). A case in point, for him, was the article by yours truly in the Weekly Standard of October 2nd: What Dylan Is Not.

Doherty never bothers to quote from my piece, although he keeps referring to it. It’s far easier for him to attack the straw-man version he’s apparently concocted in his head, rather than dealing with the actual text. I have no problem quoting him, however. Here’s some of what he said related to my article:

One recent and telling case in point is a recent article by Sean Curnyn in the Weekly Standard that attempted to explain that Bob Dylan ain’t no goddamn liberal.

Trying to shift the massive cultural figure of Dylan in any particular political direction is a task so difficult it seems to challenge everyone to try it; Dylan’s greatest constant was a lack of settled authentic identity, despite a certain pop understanding of him as a “protest singer,” a jacket he’s been trying to escape since he was first fastened into it. Even at his most “political” his narratives were far more angry about individual acts of injustice than ones that had standardly political solutions, and post-Beatnik, post-electric Dylan has been mostly evading even that sort of story, except for the occasional lament for gunned-down gangsters or imprisoned pugilists and shows of annoyance with oil-selling Arabs. (Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that the best fitting ideological label for the modern Dylan is paleoconservative.)

So while there’s a case to be made for Curnyn’s thesis, he reduces it all to the most, not even political, but merely partisan level, and thus fails: his evidence for Dylan’s non-liberalism doesn’t even come up with, say, Dylan’s very neocon allegorical defense of Israel’s right to self-defense, “Neighborhood Bully” …

…

Dylan tries hard to make this sort of political appropriation of him difficult, but it scarcely matters. By his studied efforts to not seem concerned with what side people think he’s on, he makes it all the easier for the Curnyn’s of the world to attempt to body snatch him as ideological trophies for their side.

In the course of the above paragraphs, you’ll notice that Doherty does three things: (1) He criticizes me for “body snatch(ing)” Dylan for the conservative side (2) He criticizes me for not going far enough in doing the above; i.e. neglecting to use Neighborhood Bully in an effort to paint Dylan as a “neocon” (Doherty evidently defines “neocon” as anyone who advocates for Israel’s right to exist) and (3) He himself labels the “modern Dylan” as a “paleoconservative.”

I suggest that it would be hard to find a better example of writing that is believed by the author to constitute a rational argument, but where the end effect is one of total incoherence. The problem is apparently that Doherty doesn’t know what he actually believes — so it’s easier for him to just attack from all sides at once.

At no point in the Weekly Standard article do I label Dylan as anything, of-course. The piece is called “What Dylan Is Not,” after all, and it simply provides a sufficient number of examples to illustrate why no one could reasonably label Dylan as being of the left (although many have done so and continue to get away with doing so). It is by no means an exhaustive list of evidence, nor is it intended to be. The piece also begins to make the case that Dylan’s work is best understood by those who see the consistency in it, rather than those who see it as splintered and riven with contradiction. It ends with the assertion that the politics of Dylan’s art has always been on an entirely other level.

Even on this more rough and tumble website, where my pieces are self-published without the scrutiny of an editor, I think anyone would be hard pressed to find instances where I am labeling Dylan as being conservative. I provide examples of cases where the more conventional leftist interpretation of his work is, to my mind, incorrect; and I also give examples of elements of his work that might especially resonate with people of a politically conservative mindset. But none of that is to hang a label on the man himself, because that would obviously be a fool’s errand. He’s explicitly rejected those labels time and again, and his work is much broader than any partisan political agenda.

It’s odd to me that Doherty even picks Dylan as an example for this piece which worries about the dangers of too much consideration of the politics contained in art. After all, people have reacted to the politics (and perceived politics) of Dylan’s work for over forty years — for as long as he’s been making records, in other words. In the vast majority of cases, it has been the left which has sought to appropriate Dylan’s work and narrow its application to their cause-de-jour. It is hardly an inappropriate area to analyze. To pretend that Dylan’s work doesn’t affect people in that part of the brain where politics also resides would be absurd. It’s worth asking questions about why that is, and to what extent some people have missed the truth in the songs in their rush to brandish them as anthems. It’s only one of the many angles of Dylan’s work that reward analysis, of-course.

It’s funny: Dylan has been casually and persistently referred to in the media as a “protest singer,” as “anti-war” and “anti-establishment,” and so on and on, for decades, and despite his own rejection of those labels. Yet, let a conservative-type just start to try to break down some of those fallacies, and the howls begin: “Get your politics out of my art!”

The double-standard is predictable enough, I guess.

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