So, on a TV show last night on the History Channel called “The People Speak: Democracy is Not A Spectator Sport,” Bob Dylan was featured performing Woody Guthrie’s song Do Re Mi, accompanied by Ry Cooder on guitar and Van Dyke Parks on piano. The performance was great, in my opinion; both towering and poignant. The precise and delicate nature of the accompaniment matched Dylan’s superb vocal. Who could hear him do this song and maintain that he can’t sing, or that his voice is shot beyond redemption? Dylan takes whatever his 68-year-old vocal cords throw at him and uses it, wringing out every bit of resonance and complexity that he can find. His voice was always a technically limited instrument whose weaknesses he exploited and transformed into strengths, and a performance like this one shows that his ability to do so seems to have only improved to match the increased limits of the voice. Guthrie’s song is not too complex: a bitterly ironic reflection on Dust Bowl refugees heading for California only to find rejection and additional hardship, with a jaunty melody as a counterpoint to the underlying woe. Dylan’s singing, however, found nuance in every syllable — a la George Jones, you might say — even in the very names of the states to which the travelers are being told to return: “Beyootiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.” Dylan also apparently contributed a performance of Woody Guthrie’s Vigilante Man which wasn’t shown last night. All of this could lead one to conclude that, for Dylan, it was about having an opportunity to do these Guthrie songs, and to really focus in on them as the singer he is today, and to pay one more tribute to the man who was so pivotal to his life and his vocation. It’s certainly hard to figure what else could have prompted his involvement with this particular project. (I don’t know who asked him to do it or what kind of coaxing was involved.)

Indeed, one certainly has to hope that it was all about the music for Bob, because when it comes to the show’s content, the degree of nuance was about inversely proportional to the degree of nuance in Dylan’s singing. It would be foolish of me, however, to even attempt to grapple with the monstrosity that is the legacy of Howard Zinn when it’s been done so well by others. Read Ron Radosh’s superb post, “The Zinning of America,” and don’t miss a piece to which he refers, the concise take-down of Zinn’s book “A People’s History” by Michael Kazin (who incidentally is not coming from the Right but from the Left). “This is history as cynicism,” Kazin at one point observes.

Ironically, if I’d been at home I wouldn’t even have seen the show as I don’t get the History Channel on my boob-tube. Because I’ve been traveling, I was able to see it, and that certainly counts as a mixed-blessing, life being as short as it is. My impression of the two-hour show itself was that it was radicalism as fast-food. I guess that to the extent Zinn’s approach is one of combining selective truth, half-truth and outright BS in his abuse of history as a tool for his agenda, then that was only amplified by the medium. After the first few minutes of adulation for Howard Zinn himself, and the clip of his devoted advocate Matt Damon dropping his name in “Good Will Hunting,” the history lessons began, and the parade of stars doing their readings progressed. There was undoubtedly some good material in there, albeit selectively presented. However, with only two hours in which to do damage it wasn’t long before Zinn’s prism became clear, and by the end we were being slammed in the face with his vision of all American history and all human destiny circling around racism, militarism and bitter economic class conflict. It became likewise clear that his prescription for all of these ills is a global workers’ paradise. Nothing very new here, in the end; actually, it’s the most tired old stuff of all.

It’s not Dylan’s world-view, not remotely; if we didn’t know that from his body of work we’d know it from his remarks on such matters. So I think it’s a shame that he lent his credibility to this project, and thereby encouraged people to watch it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so, and thereby ruined my Sunday night. It’s hard to believe that he and Cooder and Van Dyke Parks couldn’t have found a better venue for that great rendition of Do Re Mi.

In Chronicles: Volume One, commenting on the political views of Dave Van Ronk and others in that milieu in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Dylan remarks, “I wasn’t that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble.” One can’t help but wonder who or what seduced him into having his performance surrounded by such in this TV program.

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