A Nobel Prize In Literature for Bob Dylan? Give Me A Break!

60s song writer Bob Dylan deserved recognition - maybe a ifetime Grammy - but not a Nobel in Literature.

Okay, let's get serious here: Bob Dylan is a great musician, one of my favorites from the 60s and the Vietnam War era - who's earned many kudos e.g. for songs like 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man'. . But a Nobel Prize in literature? No way, that's like awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics to Bill Nye, the Science Guy for all his popularizing contributions over the years. Nye's popular expositions have been useful to advance public learning and appreciation but don't warrant a Nobel. Not when so many excellent physicists like Steven Weinberg and Arthur B. McDonald might be waiting in the wings. In the same vein, Dylan's popular rock songs have done much to advance consciousness - using a musical medium - but don't warrant a Nobel, even given his more recent work.

So I agree with the New York Times op-ed take ('Notebook', Oct. 13):

"Yes, Mr. Dylan is a brilliant lyricist. Yes, he has written a book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Yes, it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan’s writing is inseparable from his music. He is great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.

As reading declines around the world, literary prizes are more important than ever. A big prize means a jump in sales and readership even for a well-known writer. But more than that, awarding the Nobel to a novelist or a poet is a way of affirming that fiction and poetry still matter, that they are crucial human endeavors worthy of international recognition"


Many will object, but the truth is that reading is taking a hit, and a celebration of actual literature would have signaled respect for reading, without conflating it with music or entertainment.  Yes, folk rock hits like Dylan's as well as Joan Baez, did do a lot to implant peace memes in a war era, but they succeeded because of also being entertaining and great to listen to. Be that as it may, there were a number of worthy candidates the Nobel Committee for Literature could have considered, including:

Adonis (Syrian poet, essayist)

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Kenyan novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist)

Jon Fosse (Norwegian novelist and playwright)

Ko Un (South Korean poet)

Haruki Murakami - Japanese novelist

Julian Barnes (English novelist and essayist)

Don De Lillo - author of 'Libra' - a fictional portrayal about the setting up of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Kennedy assassination

Margaret Atwood (Canadian novelist- author of 'The Handmaid's Tale')

Most Americans would not have heard of any of these, but that's the point. They might, on learning of the award, been enticed to read their works.  Moreover,  no black authors have won the Nobel since  Nigerian Wole Soyinka in 1986.  So why give it to a 75-year old white guy who has accumulated all the fame he needs?

In fact, I would argue that Margaret Attwood deserved the Nobel in Literature before Dylan,  simply for her novel,    'The Handmaid's Tale'. This was  a cautionary future tale about what transpires when evangelicals take over the U.S. government, outlaw abortion and force pregnant women to carry to term - or be severely punished.

Each of the above, in my humble estimation, would have been  more suitable for a Nobel Literature award than Bob Dylan.  The Literature Prize has also often gone to writers who have been punished for fighting for civil rights, and all three (Ko Un, Adonis and Ngugi ) have been imprisoned.  Adonis and Ngugi have both lived in exile. What has happened to Dylan? Was he sent into exile in Canada for trying to avoid the draft in the 1960s? Nope. Was he ever imprisoned for taking a stand? Nope.  He just produced some terrific poetry set to music for which he merits props and maybe another special music award, but not a Nobel.

The Nobel, in whatever area -  let us agree - represents the ultimate 'winner take all' prize. That win is nearly entirely invested in fame and gravitas that can propel a hitherto unknown career to greater heights. The ultimate 'winner take all'  aspect means you don't award it to a guy who already has a ton of (music) awards and all the global recognition one can conceive.  

Beyond that I have a problem with awarding the Nobel to a guy whose work you can just listen to on an Ipod. How difficult is that? Reading any good literature ought to take time and effort, and also compel the reader to put his smart phone away at least for a bit to commit to the page. No selfies, no texts, just reading the masterful work of another. Giving the Nobel to a glorified rock singer does nothing to change that, and believe me the percentage of readers is getting lower.

As recently as two years ago The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann noted:

The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.”

This is absolutely incredible! But it also helps to explain why so many polls taken recently appear to show the mindlessness that Thomas Jefferson worried about in terms of citizen responsibility. A lot of this mental regression is tied to the retreat from a literary culture highlighted by Neil Postman in his book,  'The Disappearance of Childhood'.    As far back as thirty years ago Postman warned how adult Americans were apparently regressing in mentality toward childish pastimes and preoccupations.

Postman’s main contention (so germane today with the digital youth generation) was that only adults are privy to the secrets locked into the printed word. If a supposed adult wanted to emphatically separate himself from the world and concerns of the child, he had to demonstrate it mentally - by his reading fare. That meant accessing a realm in printed material that the child mind wasn't equipped to process or understand. Tweet and snapchat all you want and "friend" a million buddies on Facebook, you're still a de facto, intellectual child.

Now, go read the first chapter of  Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. If you succeed - meaning you can answer comprehension questions about it later- we will reconsider your status. (University degrees may or may not count given how inflated most grades are today, because of the teacher evaluation system).  Any person can basically access an electronic medium if they apply even minimal effort.  That includes cell phones, tv, video games and twitter. Any person- even a ten year old kid-  can also employ those media to blab nonsense, gossip or indulge in aimless chatter. But what defines the adult mind is whether it can tackle a serious print work such as William Shakespeare's King Lear.

In his Chapter Seven (‘The Adult Child’), for example, Postman lays out a summary of his thesis on the disappearance of childhood in tandem with defining the modern conception of “adult” and what it has evolved (devolved?) into after the emergence of video culture. As he puts it, the modern idea of the adult “is largely a product of the printing press.” Further, almost all the attributes we associate with adulthood “are those either generated or amplified by a literary culture”. These include:


- A capacity for self-restraint

- A tolerance for delayed gratification

- A sophisticated ability to think sequentially and conceptually

- A preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future


Want to know in a nutshell why the Trump backers are so devoid of facts? Well, consider all the attributes above and ask yourself when was the last time you recall seeing any embodied in the Donald.  This is a character who wouldn't even read his daily press briefs during the primary campaign. (He might now, but given how many red herrings he's spouted one wonders.)

Postman then goes on to note that as electronic (visual) media assumed center stage “different attitudes and character traits come to be valued and a new, diminished definition of adulthood begins to emerge”. This new stunted version of the adult reaches its apotheosis (nadir?) in the adult child having arrived with the television-video age - which primary characteristic flattens out all differences between ages. (If Postman were alive today he'd doubtless identify Trump as the ultimate "man child".)

In other words, one required literary heft and markers - say in ability to read weighty fictional works(like James Joyce's Ulysses , or Milton's Paradise Lost, or Leo Tolstoy's War and Peacce) to finally separate adults from children, adult minds from childish imitators.  Thus, literary culture and mature works provided the truest litmus test to distinguish an adult from a child. Coloring books? Not so much because any kid of five or six could do that.  Today, we are lucky to be able to see the average adult read even light fictional fare, say like Jonathan Franken's 'Freedom', or Don De Lillo's 'Libra'.

The Nobel Literature Prize award to Bob Dylan did nothing to stanch the flow of millions to more electronic - social media titillation, net addiction and twitter, selfie storms. It did nothing to halt the flood of more adults to what my psychologist friend Pat Banister called the "child subculture". That enclave where magical thinking and fanciful flight from reality reigns, and too many adults prefer the refuge of coloring books to reading a book like Franzen's 'Freedom'.

The Nobel Lit Committee muffed it  by giving its award to someone who didn't need it, as opposed to a long time writer whose recognition might have spurred greater interest in actual literary fiction.. In effect, the Committee snubbed all real writers, including the ones listed above. Whether people will take even less time to read as a result of this snub  remains to be seen. What we do know is there is an exponentially increasing obsession with electronic devices - whether for 'Pokemon GO', distracted texting or just watching youtube videos of kittens punching doggies.

The Nobel cognoscenti had the golden opportunity to introduce people around the world to the vast diversity of literature they might access - say via a Google search.  In effect, providing the potential to enhance their mental maturity as opposed to feeding more childish obsessions. Instead, the Literature Nobel went to a guy mainly known for 50- year old folk rock songs that have already propelled him to multiple music awards including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A sad day for those who appreciate genuine literature and would have liked to have seen it recognized!

Another Hack Who Misfires On the 60s

Iconic image from 1960s: Jack Ruby guns down Lee Oswald at Dallas PD. Many of us knew then the ruse was up and the cover-up had begun.


It's truly incredible how many bloviating hacks have spouted opinions and ideas on the 60s who either never lived through that decade, or - if they did - were essentially comatose the entire time. I already noted this syndrome with former great folk singer Bob Dylan, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/has-bob-dylan-totally-lost-his-moorings.html

As well as P.J. O'Rourke

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/p-j-orourke-wants-60s-taken-off-life.html

In Dylan's case he just couldn't comprehend why people kept making a "fuss" over a decade that saw two signal pieces of legislation passed (The Civil Rights Act in 1964, and Voting Rights Act in 1965) that conferred the practical basis for the exercise of rights to a minority that hadn't been manifested for over 100 years.  Oh, and then there was the legislation that gave us Medicare,  which nearly 45 million seniors currently depend upon and without which they'd likely be dying in ditches, unattended and impecunious.  Dylan also evidently didn't see the fuss in all the anti-War protests for which his songs provided anthems. Not to mention his being oblivious to the rioting that erupted(in inner cities- since 'peaceful' protests weren't getting anywhere to advance civil rights-    and the four major political assassinations.  Dylan clearly missed the memo that the 60s  marked the most tumultuous decade in U.S. history.

I was so flabbergasted by his piffle that I had to ask if he was stoned the whole time.

Then there was uber hack O'Rourke who related (in a TIME essay)  how he was driving his daughter and 3 classmates to school and asked them if they realized it was the day President Kennedy was assassinated - and none of them had a clue. I noted at the time:

"I'd have been ashamed to admit such a thing in a widely circulated medium, even TIME. It reveals the author to be defunct (as a parent)  in his own contributions to his daughter's education, in failing to provide what her school didn't.  It also says more about the currently deficient high school history curriculum than it does about an event O'Rourke presumes is passé. It again, shows that if today's kids are being denied knowledge of this defining event (which likely saw a coup d'état and our nation's future course permanently altered) than they really do need to avail themselves of other sources i.e.  via the Kickstarter project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1450964693/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-the-graphic-adaptation"

But alas, both examples show how easy it is to be oblivious when people are not conscious enough  to actually appreciate the periods in which they live. No one is saying you need to use a note pad to document every event and your response, but you should be open enough to the living experience to faithfully recall it years later - as opposed to corporate media telling you what it was about!

Fortunately, some of us are able to do this - as well as being obsessive about the details of history - including how the Neoliberal imperative has sought to distort or revise it.

Enter now Bloomberg scribe - or hack - Sam Tanenhaus, who penned an essay about commencement speeches in the Perspective section of the Sunday Denver Post. While opening with complaints about academic "correctness" - i.e. in the examples of assorted speakers pulling out of their speeches under protest, he eventually ended up pontificating on the 60s - as I suspected he would.

After quoting Joan Didion (from a 1975 address to the class of the same year at University of California - Riverside):

"We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what's really going on".

He then jumps to her remarks on the 1960s, as she invited her audience to "look through her eyes at 'a generation still in thrall to that darkling plain we call the 60s'."

Adding Didion's words:

"Which seems when we look back on it, a decade in which everyone lived in an entirely imagined world; when everyone operated from an idea and all the ideas got polarized and cheapened."

But WHOSE fault was that exactly?  Was it the fault of the people living at the time - many of whom had just lived through one of the most earth shaking events in modern history: the assassination of a beloved President, and seeing his whole agenda washed away?  Destroyed under the lies and subterfuge of one Texas varmint named "Lyndon" - who set up his own commission to conceal his earlier crimes as well as the crime of the century and worse, concoct the pretext for a conflict that would eventually claim 58,000 American lives, and millions of Vietnamese.

I don't blame the people who zoned out in the aftermath, I blame the crass political elites, their media and power structures which mind fucked them to a far- thee -well to the point most were no longer capable of thinking clearly.  Because ultimately, the reasoning capacity and truth-seeking barometer of a population hinges on the information - the knowledge it receives from the knowledge "minders"  - on what's "really going on". Ultimately those knowledge-minders and dispensers failed the American people and big time.

Yes, some of us saw through the ruse, and thirty or so years later (after actual files to do with the JFK assassination were finally released) we saw how so many had been played, by Johnson, his bogus Commission and its fabricated lies, and distortions of history. But few saw it at the time, because hell, everything - all the key evidence was being "handled" and much of it covered up. The so-called commission wouldn't even release the actual autopsy photos for view, fearing they might incept thousands of nervous breakdowns.

From the "unspeakable" lies of the Warren Commission there then issued a foul pestilence that permeated the body politic and set  up the toxic polarization seen today. The further assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy - with the accompanying lies on how they happened, merely added to the then extensive mind fuck. By the time Bobby was assassinated in June, 1968, nearly everyone from a generation had tuned out - resigned to the belief that all hope for change in the world, at least in the country - was destroyed.

That despair then led to the so-called "counter culture" because so many believed the system as it was couldn't be trusted to produce real change for the better. It was too corrupt from the inside, the politicos too in the maw of a money-dominated bribery system.

All that mistrust was subsequently proven true when the Watergate conspiracy erupted in 1972.  It was further reinforced when Gerald R. Ford (he who altered the bullet path descriptions in the Warren Report) then pardoned the perpetrator. A pardon, a looking the other way, that enabled the Iran-Contra conspiracy barely 15 years later.

So Tanenhaus has some nerve when he writes that:

"Americans had collectively lost the ability to think and judge".  And, quoting Didion,  "the whole country was like a cargo cult".

But again, in general the ability of a people to think and judge hinges on the quality of the information they receive to know and recognize the world (and nation) they live in. But through the 60s the American people were let down, and over and over again, by their own media - which recklessly lied to them about everything from Vietnam (originally) to Kennedy's assassination. Many of the lies in the latter case kept alive via an operation called "Mockingbird" we only learned about when Frank Church opened his CIA investigations a decade later.

Indeed, few at the time recognized that the virus of false consciousness was the name for what citizens had been subjected to, so no wonder so many were unable to think or judge. A false conscious person can no more do that than a drowning man can breathe.

 

'False consciousness' is the term given to a false information system that's been absorbed in part or whole, osmotically or via direct mental ingestion, by the majority of a population.  It has specific uses in the Corporatocracy to mislead a population about how things actually work. In the political system, for example, ' democracy' is the rhetorical term, but corporate dictatorship the reality. In the economy 'free market' the rhetoric, but controlled markets the reality,  and so on. If people's understanding can be obfuscated, and attention deflected to specious distractions and titillation, then the people can be disempowered and their thought processes undermined. They can even cooperate in their own economic (or social, political) subjugation.

Are the people to blame for harboring erroneous perceptions and rendering "false judgments"? Not at all. As noted by  Maxine Baca-Zinn and D.Stanley Eitzen (p. 371, 'In Conflict and Order', 1991):

"The United States is undemocratic in many very important ways. The people, although they do vote for their representatives every few years, are really quite powerless. For example who makes the really important decisions about war and peace, economic policies and foreign policy? The people certainly do not. The record shows that many times the American people have been deceived when the object was to conceal clandestine illegal operations, mistakes, undemocratic practices and the like."

 

Also as Charles Reich has pithily observed ('Opposing the System', p. 15)

"Today much of the system by which we are governed is invisible, because it is either not seen at all, or seen incorrectly. The system that we 'see' is democracy and a free market. But if we really have such a system, why have people's efforts at change failed over and over again? The answer is that we are actually governed by a system that we cannot see - an *invisible* system."

 Too many citizens from the era of the 1960s then, had been left essentially like blind men by the institutional media powers on which they depended for facts, honesty. Worse, they'd been victimized by an unseen system they couldn't even track or parse on account of its draconian secrecy rules -  but which wrought untold havoc on their lives. And Tananhaus seeks to blame them?

 

He even goes beyond that by extolling no less a Neoliberal tool than Milton Friedman, referring to his 1975 University of New Hampshire address where he spoke about "the fragility of freedom" and "America at a crossroads".. It was at a crossroads, all right, a crossroads in which one path led to the Neoliberal domination by markets we're all experiencing now. Markets ex machina!

 

As for Friedman, Naomi Klein pegged him perfectly in her book 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' (2007).   In  her chapter on the Russian capitalist "experiment" (pp. 282-87) she documented how a  cabal of gangster capitalists under the IMF and the "Chicago gang of Milton Friedman" attempted to brutally re-make the existing Russian centrally planned economy into a Neoliberal free market outpost of  the West. The process was long and painful, entailing first getting rid of Mikhail Gorbachev - who through his glasnost and perestroika did far more than Reagan to render the world more peaceful, never mind the propaganda.
 

Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz (p. 283) called Russia's pro-capitalist market experimenters  like Milton Friedman "market Bolsheviks". As Klein put it (ibid.):

"However, where the original Bolsheviks fully intended to build their centrally planned state in the ashes of the old, the market Bolsheviks believed in a kind of magic: if the optimal conditions for profit were created - the country would rebuild itself- no planning required."

 

The sad facts on Friedman's Russian experiment? After only a year of Neoliberal thuggery and "market therapy" millions of Russians had lost their life savings when the ruble lost nearly all its value (similar to what happened to Germans and their Deutsch mark, thanks to von Hayek). Adding insult to injury, abrupt cuts in government subsidies meant that millions of workers had not been paid in months. Consumption? The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than 1991 - and they weren't even consuming that much in '91!

The very fact a financial hack like Tanenhaus can hold a character like Friedman up for adulation, shows he is part and parcel of the same disinformation establishment that brought us the original mind fuck of the Warren Report. not to mention Operation Mockingbird and in toto - the entire thrust of false consciousness that's dogged us since the early days of Edward Bernays works on Propaganda.

 

Tanenhaus near the end writes:

 

"The truth is, political correctness is just one symptom of a broader malady. Argument itself has all but disappeared from public conversation. The premium is on opinions and points of view.."

 

 

The real truth? The universal aversion to the truth! The reluctance to call a spade a spade - which prolongs false consciousness and compromises minds as it robs of them of the facility to argue based on critical thought. And the debasement of thought always begins with the language distortions and substitutions of euphemisms for reality. Using "passed" for DIED, using "collateral damage" for those killed in a military attack -but unintended, using "scandal" for conspiracy, and enablng "war" for occupation. Once the building blocks of thought have been compromised, thought as a whole is next, which explains why mostly today one finds only "opinions" and POVs.

Unable to recognize facts, including accepted scientific ones, and with a disabled language - founded mostly on PR and euphemisms, it's no wonder so few can engage in sustained argument or incisive, intelligent debate. It's also no surprise why what one beholds instead is the regurgitation of the propaganda sound bites of the corpora-media.  So, of course, all discussion reduces to "point of view"  - Fox's or MSNBC's - with little else to go by.

Those who comment on the 1960s, should at least be required to study that decade carefully minus the corporate filters they may not be aware of using. Those who lived in the 60s, and venture to discuss it, need to ensure they aren't also victims of the Orwellian language manipulations used so prevalently at the time to distort and undermine objective perceptions, and thought.

Has Bob Dylan Totally Lost His Moorings - Or Is He Just Stoned?

That's the question I had to ask as a quote from an interview was replayed on this morning's CBS 'Early Show'. The quote, directly from Dylan's mouth, came in an interview with Joe Smith, mogul of Capitol Records (which makes one wonder if Dylan was simply spouting capitalist pabulum to appease this hotshot, or confirm his own perceptions. It's something one can't entirely dismiss).

Dylan's exact words:

“I can’t imagine people making such a big fuss over the Sixties. Unless things are so dull now they just have to think of some time when times were better.”


Leaving one to wonder if Dylan even lived the Sixties or passed through them in a semi-stoner haze. (Seemingly forgetting that much of his music provided a coherent set of anthems for revolution). Can Dylan be serious, or is it just easier to talk shit now, because nearly 70% of existing Americans never lived during the 60s and likely have no historic memory of this pivotal decade (which has shaped our own history) or even a learned acquaintance, say via course exposure.

I mean yeah, why make a "fuss" over the decade that saw two signal pieces of legislation passed (The Civil Rights Act in 1964, and Voting Rights Act in 1965) that basically conferred the practical basis for the exercise of rights to a minority of the population, that hadn't been manifested for over 100 years?  Oh, and then there was the legislation that gave us Medicare,  which nearly 45 million seniors depend on now and without which they'd likely be dying in ditches, unattended and impecunious.

Let’s also be clear that only an idiot, or semi-comatose stoner fool would opine that people reference the 60s now as “some time when times were better”. Are you effing kidding me? A decade of upheaval with four major assassinations – including of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King – essentially the entire solid core of American liberalism at that time. (Accounting for how we veered into namby-pamby, free market Neo-liberalism as a capitalist, whore substitute for the real McCoy).

Is Dylan even remotely aware that the year 1968 is perhaps the most critical turning point in World history over the past fifty years? Wherein we beheld the flourishing of a youth revolution not only in the USA but overseas, from Paris to Prague to Africa? Is he remotely aware of how that youth revolution was ultimately destroyed in this country, via the vile Nixonian-Hoover established program of COINTELPRO, whereby FBI agents passed themselves off as protestors and actually sabotaged, disrupted the protests to turn public opinion against them?

To be frank: Does Bob Dylan need a re-education class, or more likely, one in remedial American History? Any twit who believes, seriously, that too many people make a "fuss" over the 60s doesn't have clue one about their importance to what events have followed, or how many aspects of American history have been deformed because of failing to support and reinforce the positive changes. Also, the decrepit notion (fostered by the Neoliberal media) that the 'Sixties' are mainly a "Boomer obsession" and are best left to dry up in national memory. A concept and meme promoted by cultural, political and historical Neandertals oblivious to the axiom that "past is prologue".

Is Dylan aware (or does he recall)  that up until the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in August, 1963 we were all subjected to monster hydrogen bomb tests in our atmosphere? (I can still recall a 100 megaton Soviet H-bomb test in Siberia that had radiation traversing most of the globe). Is he freaking remotely aware how the world – the human world – came within minutes of possible nuclear annihilation in October, 1962? That was when we last had a President with the balls – the sheer cojones --- to tell his military Joint Chiefs to put a sock in it, as he ignored their advice to attack and bomb a nation that actually had 93 armed IRBMS aimed at us and ready to fire? (Readers can read more of the background details in this earlier blog: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/01/50-year-old-jfk-tapes-released-what-is.html

How fast memory fades, or maybe it's that Dylan’s success (mostly parlayed out of the 60s’ protest culture, e.g. his song 'The Times They Are a Changin') made him so fat, rich and happy he could afford to forget. Talk about cultural ingrates!  One wonders then if he just jabbered out the words to his various tunes under a stoner haze, and he himself never processed what they meant. Or maybe successive stoner hazes induced a permanent forgetfulness

Then there was the 1963 Kennedy assassination itself, which many corrupt Elites in this country are still trying to sweep under the rug, because they know the perverse subtext underscoring the event: that it meant the violent overthrow of the last truly liberal president in order to open the way forward to a permanent national security –war state. One that has now bled down our coffers to the point of rendering this country one election cycle away from being a third rate banana republic - say compared to China, which has used 14 times less on military expenditures, and now features perhaps the most enhanced economy on the planet (and is one of our main creditors) while it is able to now implement a creditable manned space program - while we're reduced to hitching rides with the Russkies to the International Space Station!

Meanwhile in the same assassination, setting up a working class guy as the stooge, the decoy, the CIA chosen patsy (to protect extremist right wing militarists and disaffected anti-Castro Cubans) and doing so after eliminating Lee Oswald in a planned second hit,  then forming a bogus “commission” to pass judgment after he was six feet under and could no longer speak for himself. And not content with the immediate cover-up, painstakingly constructing an anti-conspiracy meme that conflates whacko plots (like black UN helicopters) with actual conspiracies such as the JFK hit, to discredit anyone who might challenge the orthodoxy handed down from on high.

No wonder I can still recall (and treasure) the words of my dad, a World War II vet, in the last conversation I had with him before he died in July 2009 (after he learned I was writing a book on the JFK assassination):

“Just promise me your book will clear the name of a working class man. Don’t let those murderous bastards have the last word! I didn’t fight three years in the Pacific to have them replace the right to free speech with filth and lies to kill a president they hated!”

I promised Dad then I was committed to the fight, and I have been so since I have myself beheld the vile actions of the ideological spawn of those vermin: blowing 73 innocents out of the skies off Barbados in 1976. Once you’ve seen the filth and vermin, you KNOW who is responsible – not only for Kennedy’s killing, but how much of this nation has been destroyed in its wake because of the resultant fear and loathing of government because of its complicity and dishonesty.

Plot if you will, the trajectory of government distrust (in polls) since the Kennedy assassination, and you will behold a steady downward slope that over 50 years is almost negative exponential, say approximating y ~ x * exp(-3/2). Little wonder then that the Neoliberal Elites and their lackeys, PR mavens, disinfo specialists and media hacks quiver and quake and contemplate all manner of propaganda ruses and subterfuge by which to keep the American people in the dark on this pivotal event - abetted by the National Archives no less!

Anyone who doesn't understand the signifcance of this singular event, and how it hurled this nation off a more moral and edifying path, has no business blowing smoke about the Sixties or accusing others of "fussing" over them. The critics are more akin to immature frat boys tossing turds into a high class party to which they're not invited. And yes, btw, they can join those other CIA-supplier cliques (mostly Yalie frat boys ....e.g from 'Skull & Bones') who have sought relentlessly to spread lies and disinformation about those critical years and the events that transpired ...mainly concerning the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X.

For those with a serious as opposed to dilettante interest in the Sixties, get hold of and read the book 'The Sixties' (Oxford University Press, 1998) by Arthur Marwick. If you are just interested in the Kennedy aspect, I have written more than ample blogs since 2009. Or, you can purchase my book, The JFK Assassination: The Final Analysis.

As for Bob Dylan, it appears perhaps he lived in the decade but didn't really live it. Maybe he took the words of one of his ditties ('Everybody Must Get Stoned') too literally in the sense of being stoned all the time!