When Timothée Chalamet channels Bob Dylan and sings The Times They Are A Changin’ in A Complete Unknown a rapt Newport Folk Festival audience sings the chorus with him. It’s intended to be a spontaneous and uplifting moment but it just made me sad. The Times, as it happens, never did change. Or, they did but only to become worse.
Dylan’s lyrics were a Post-War, Vietnam era reimagining of The Sermon on the Mount in which it’s finally time for the meek to inherit the earth. The verses each warn the powerful of different ilk to not “stand in the doorway” or “block up the hall” because “the order is rapidly fading”. Dylan coupled each such warning with advice and a shot of hope in the key of G.
That was 60 years ago. One could have been forgiven for daring to believe times were changing. Students who entered college in jackets and ties in 1964 may have attended their final classes just 4 years later in jeans and tee-shirts. The President of the United States actually declared a War on Poverty. The Civil Rights Acts were made law. 250,000 heard Martin Luther King, Jr. describe his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The most liberal Supreme Court in history under Chief Justice Warren tried to protect individuals’ rights, rather than just those of corporations and the wealthy. Dylan and Joan Baez and others provided the soundtrack.
I was a just a kid then but I have a memory of how those times felt, at least to me. I also recall Dr. King being shot, and then Robert Kennedy. I recall watching on TV police beating students at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. And soldiers killing them at Kent State. I was already entering high school when the draft ended, so I paid close attention as one will under such circumstances to the war in Vietnam, and the opposition to it. Dylan was right. The Times were changing. In retrospect, though, it‘s clear now that the Establishment’s response to even the suggestion of change was so immediate, violent, and overwhelming that “the order” not only didn’t fade, it defended itself with such a vengeance that today the meek are not only not inheriting the earth, they’re being jailed. The waters may have grown but it seems Bob didn’t anticipate the rich old order staying dry in their yachts as the waters drowned everyone else.
For every folk singer in the 60’s writing about change, and every listener yearning for it, there were battalions of very angry, very afraid, and very powerful Good Americans hating it more than some of the crowd hated Dylan’s electric amplified band. I‘ve seen hate in my seven decades but I don’t think it‘s ever topped the spit-dripping-from-their-mouths hate I heard from people when Cassius Clay changed his name and refused to fight in Vietnam in 1967. I‘ve seen fear among the privileged but I can’t say it tops what I saw when the Civil Rights movement became more than MLK and became Malcom X and the Black Panthers, too. Today, hateful and fearful conversations about race and immigration and so-called entitlements and so on don’t have to be conducted within the privacy of a board room or a bar. Online, every fear and every hatred has a home and enthusiastic support in communities currently owned by our own defacto President-elect Musk.
Artists have to show us the way and give us hope but real change was only ever going to happen if there was a true opposition political party and that, to say the least, is not something the Democrats have ever been. They‘ve made a career — and a fine living — out of generally being “just slightly not as reactionary as the Republicans” which wouldn‘t even make for a good hat slogan. As a result, first came Nixon (and George Wallace, winning votes in the South and North on a rabidly segregationist platform) then Reagan, promising to protect — you know who — from crime, from Welfare Queens, and from government itself. All of this, always, simply code for a promise to protect your privilege from . . . change. And, from taxes, of course. Why build better schools, or even roads or rails, when the non-poor can buy their own or trucks so big it doesn‘t matter if there even are roads or not?
There has been change, to be fair. The War on Poverty was abandoned more quickly and with far less fanfare than the War in Vietnam. It‘s now an actual crime to be poor and there‘s no wall in our nation’s capital to mourn those victims. The Supreme Court has lost its legitimacy and is simply a political tool for the dismantling of any of last century‘s progress and the preservation of the old order. Billionaires now own more of the nation‘s wealth than the entire bottom half of our people. The women in my law school classes have fewer rights over their own bodies and healthcare than their mothers did. Hate and racial prejudice has been given such license that companies and schools no longer even use the word “diversity”. The nation‘s oil companies and the Congress they own make a mockery of the rest of the world’s desparate efforts to save the planet from catastrophe. And the President was elected after bragging about plans that are fairly described as Fascist.
“The first one now”, contrary to the final lines in the song, will actually never be last. They’ve never been more “first”, in fact, and as long as they own both political parties, the Supreme Court, and the media, they have nothing to fear.
Dylan wrote another song:
Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’,
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
This article appears in Dec 18, 2024 – Jan 16, 2025.