Back to war, and the “anti-war” stance. Part of the conclusion of Songbook #6 was that the stance of songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “New Years Day” could easily lead to despair and overindulgence of anger.
“Masters of War” certainly is a breath-taking display of anger, and even of cold hatred. Freewheelin’ gives us three better anti-war moments: there is the delightful (Bradbury-influenced) comedy of “Talking World War III Blues,” the mysterious poetry/prophecy of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and the wistful idealism of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But just one pretty song after “Blowin’,” we find ourselves in the midst of grimly-sung lines like these:
…you that never done nuthin’
but build to destroy…
You put a gun in my hand,
and you hide from my eyes…
Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive…
…you ain’t worth the blood that runs in your veins…
…I think you will find,
When your death takes its toll,
all the money you’ve made,
Will never buy back your soul…
What justification can there be for this? Well, we could talk in general terms about whether “catharsis” or “shock-tactics” might provide one, but the bottom-line is that there can be no justification for “Masters of War” unless the historicist or Leninist theories about war are true. And they are not true. More specific to the song’s charges, there is no elite with war-loving tendencies who are the ones who really decide when modern democracies go to war. Nor was U.S. policy determined by such an elite in the 50s and 60s.
***********************************************************
The next six paragraphs are for those who want or need this spelled out.
IF liberal scholars can blame the near-miss aspect of the Cuban Missile Crisis on the U.S. military brass being too aggressive (the case factually made by the 13 Days book and film), what does the blame amount to? It amounts to saying that an otherwise as-healthy-as-liberal-democracies-tend-to-get liberal democracy had some poor leaders at a particular time. At worst, it supports a larger case that certain military-industrial establishment dynamics, amplified through group-think, had tended to make our military leaders too aggressive.
1) Now, even in this worst case, were those leaders in some plausible (or justly metaphorical) way “masters?”
2) Did they really love war in a sit back and watch, while the death count gets higher sort of way? Or were not a few of them like the General Patton we are shown in the famous (and quite factual) film, relishing the trial and potential glory of combat, loving the strategic game, certainly not wanting to “sit back and watch,” but still ultimately knowing that this “love of war” in them was not an entirely good trait? Do we really think the top military men and advisors around Eisenhower and JFK were totally unlike this, and thus were simply “chicken-hawk” chess-players? How many of them were in combat in WWII or Korea? Dylan takes the unavoidable discomfort felt by those assigned a behind-the-lines or a decision-making role and makes it into a case, and a generational divide: you hide in your mention, of the young people’s blood. Well, I imagine no officer or leader likes facing the fact that young men are killed by his orders, Patton-and-Lee types included. And so? Their lowering of their eyes is evidence of guilt? Evidence they are like the tactically meat-grinding and military law abusing French WWI generals featured in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory film?
3) Did those who built the weapons for the others to fire become secret promoters of war, for the sake of their own profits? Well, we should remain open to the idea that the profit-motive at work within the military-industrial establishment to some degree caused a) too many weapons to be built, and b) exaggeration of the communist threat, so that a) and b) together contributed to a greater aggressiveness of our military leaders. But there is another step. Causal analysis of key instances of (arguably) too-aggressive strategic decision-making, let us say, regarding H-bomb development, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam would likely place the factor of “military-industrial establishment self-interest dynamic,” fairly low on each listing of the various causes for each case. And so how many American Cold War weapon-makers said to themselves, “I try to cause war for the sake of more money”? And how many wars did the efforts of such types cause? The first number is going to have to be a Joe McCarthy-like guess (that unfairly counts mixed-motive cases and “subconscious-motive” cases in its column), and the second number is zero, or some fraction of causal responsibility very near zero.
So, the song’s charges are: 1) false, 2) false, and 3) not true to any significant degree.
Nearly as shameful, there is nothing in “Masters of War” that suggests that the Korean War or even World War II might be exceptions to the general case being made—that is, the attitude seems to be that even if they were necessary wars, they were necessarily conducted by bad men.
***********************************************************
Once you let one of those “imperialism” or “gold/oil-is-the-reason” or “power-elite” narratives get going in your head, and once in a historicist and yet history-ignorant way you begin meditating on the “insanity” of modern war, you become allergic to careful thought, which in part, is thought that takes care to be just to others. In this song Dylan is not just, nor any sort of “peacemaker.” He paints virtually all of our career military men, all of our strategy-makers, and even all of our defense-workers –you that build the death planes–, as villains.
I grant that the Cuban Missile Crisis made the temptation of this sort of despairing anger more difficult to resist. Citizens were being asked to trust an elite group of strategy-makers to play whatever nuclear game of chicken was necessary to play with the Soviets. This placing of their very lives in the hands of a strategic elite was like the trust that always had to be granted by democracies to their military leaders, such as in ancient Athens or pre-1950s America; it was unlike it in the sheer immediacy of the new sort of death-threat and the practical impossibility of evading it.
In any case, the liner notes of Freewheelin’ show us that Dylan, or somebody at Columbia Records, was actually somewhat nervous about what he had done:
“‘Masters of War’ startles Dylan himself. ‘I’ve never really written anything like that before,’ he recalls. ‘I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out, a reaction to the last straw, a feeling of what can you do?’ The rage (which is as much anguish as it is anger) is a way of catharsis, a way of getting temporary relief from the heavy feeling of impotence that affects many…”
Some other time the Songbook will consider the catharsis excuse; what I want to focus upon now is that Dylan thought he might need an excuse. That hesitancy was a very 1963 phenomenon, a sort of swaying atop the fence dividing the Old era from the New. The 70s punks, the late 80s rappers, and even most of the late 60s hippies felt little need to justify whatever anger and damning they put in their songs. That applies to really just about every pop artist from the early-80s on. Those who had indulged their anger might need to occasionally defend the more egregious murder-fantasies or shock-tactics in an interview, but that was it. Preemptive explanations were beneath them, and the very idea that anger-expression in song might be wrong ceased to occur to them.
Dylan really believed that there was a military-industrial power elite linked to modern capitalism in the way his leftist mentors (Guthrie esp.) had taught him. There was more excuse for that belief in those days, then after the publication of Gulag Archipelago in 1974 or the fall of the wall in 1989. Moreover, he had a reasonable worry that a nuclear war might wipe out civilization and him with it. Dylan said that “Hard Rain” was written during the height of the Crisis as a way to encapsulate many of the songs he feared he might not ever get to write. One can understand how after such an experience, more extreme expressions, more deliberate efforts to shock, might be sought. But one must also note that the fear, especially when amplified into the conviction that “we’re all going to be dead in a few years,” was often used as permission to indulge in extremes artistic, political, sexual, etc. The Counter-Culture needed the Bomb more than it can admit.
Ever since 1991, of course, we haven’t felt the nuclear war fear in the way we had from the mid-1950s up through Gorbachev. Nor do many of us place serious hope in any form of socialism, or in any historical destiny to move beyond war. But many of the once-extreme behaviors and all of the unrestrained manners have remained with us. Indeed, the rock artist feels almost obliged to cultivate them. And many of us still take it for granted that “Masters of War” is iconic in a good way, an example of the sort of passion the socially-conscious artist ought to open herself to channeling.
Of course, if you’re taught over and over by the rock mythology, or even by PBS or the NYT, that the Righteous Artist ought to say the equivalent of “F#$@ You” to the likes of the “military-industrial establishment,” the “system,” or the “Power,” you might assume that you ought to say the words themselves to something a bit more obviously impacting your life, such as your ex-girlfriend. Especially if that’s just the way people talk these days. Well, that seems to be the Dada-Wobbly-“Howl”-“Masters”-Berkely-LennyBruce-MC5-Yippie-Iggy-SexPistols-Soho-SNL-Industrial-DK-Slayer-SpikeLee-NWA-NIN-RiotGrrls-DiFranco-DailyKoz-lizardoid-BushHitler-bullycrisis-CeeLo cultural pathway we’ve been on. It’s a pathway that’s been a dismal cul-de-sac since around 1990, which is why the frontal lyrical offense of Cee Lo Green’s big hit last year (its music is pretty darn good) scarcely raised our eyebrows. Indeed, anger-wise, things are probably a bit better at the moment than they have been for a while, but ours is certainly not the offense-avoiding society briefly glimpsed via Freewheelin’s liner notes, just as it was stepping aside.
Debates about cultural declines and who could have resisted them or not are hard. But regardless, I say that Dylan, for the sake of civilized and civic-minded decency, and yes, also on the grounds of hesitancy about so categorically pitting his young man’s gut instinct against the experienced judgment of men like Kennan and Aron, should have aborted “Masters of War” before it ever emerged from his lips.
Or must you sing every powerful song that comes to you?
June 28th, 2011 | 1:14 am
[...] Or must you sing every powerful song that comes to you? Source – firstthings.com » [...]
June 28th, 2011 | 2:24 am
“Or must you sing every powerful song that comes to you?”
In a word: Yes. Or not sing at all.
June 28th, 2011 | 6:22 am
Perhaps Dylan’s “Masters..” might better be described as a musical codicil to President Eisenhower’s famous warning re: the military-industrial (-congressional) complex. Of course, the nexus between the ‘conservative’, war hero president and the long-haired, anti-war troubadour is more than a delightful irony possible only as a result of the culture of those halcyon days.
While Eisenhower’s warning can be seen as an act of courage, Dylan’s song fulfills the obligations of his unique trade.
And, while Dylan and Eisenhower reach somewhat similar conclusions regarding the ‘complex’, they may also be expressing their concern for the continuing decline of American republicanism and the corresponding rise of empire.
June 28th, 2011 | 8:12 am
Lots of fun to read. The corrective to the Guthrie side of Dylan: Country music. (Dylan at times even knew that.) My own opinion is that the whole military-industrial complex stomping all over American republicanism thesis doesn’t hold up well. I’m more open to the partial truth of the Wall Street vs. Main Street riff.
June 28th, 2011 | 11:47 am
Robert: “empire?” Really?
JD: Can you give us more than a word? Because right now, this sounds like an artist’s maxim that we just have to take on trust. And it sort of sounds like a theory that holds that the artists’ role is to express whatever feelings occur within her that might be made to resonate via song with other’s feelings. Do you really mean whatever feelings? Or do only certain ones make for “powerful” songs?
June 28th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
“The Counter-Culture needed the Bomb more than it can admit.”
Nearly puked when I read that, what a disgusting statement. Maybe that should have been aborted. Obviously if you think like that a song like Masters of War will do nothing for you.
For the record he’s been quoted as saying this was written about the manufacturers of weapons, so if you take it that way most of what you’ve said is irrelevant.
You’ve put a lot more time and effort into “analyzing” this song than Dylan probably put in recording and writing the song, the only difference is that one of you contributed something worthwhile to society, who are you to say that someone’s creative output is false or dishonest?
And if you truly believe there is no deception behind war, then the wool is fully over your eyes.
June 28th, 2011 | 3:15 pm
I’m pretty sure that the military-industrial complex isn’t much interested in ‘stomping’ republicanism these days. Their success in wrecking the fledgling Southern republic has long sent the message that such silliness won’t be tolerated.
The military-industrial complex, in its form and nature, is a creature of empire established on a deformed reality, immanent in nature, and dominated by the libido dominandi, not to mention wealth.
Voegelin makes the point that the strength of the Anglo-Saxon constitutional ‘democracies’ rests on “the eschatological tension left over from the Puritan Revolution which endows the constitutional form with a character of ‘finality’ as the successful experiment in organizing a society with a classical and Christian tradition.”
I’m pretty sure the military-industrial complex is no more concerned with the ‘classical and Christian tradition,’ then the current regime as it toils for the unwashed in providing for the “immanent salvation of man and society.”
June 28th, 2011 | 4:38 pm
Well, Jordan, if it makes you feel any less queasy, I’ll add that the 30-40 year nuclear staredown b/t the USSR and the USA was good for the more fundamentalist/prophecy-interpreting segments of evangelical Protestantism, too. So the drama of “the bomb,” the all-this-could-be-gone and the what-do-you-want-from-your-life focus it could give us, could be used for various purposes, various Counter-Cultures.
And Songbook readers, beware of any brief statements made by a songwriter of the “Oh, I wrote ‘song X’ about topic Y,” sort. The lyrics themselves indicate Bob wrote “Masters” with more villains in mind than just the weapons manufacturers: You play with my world, like it’s your little toy is clearly addressed to the strategy-makers, for one.
June 29th, 2011 | 9:47 am
Carl Eric Scott: It is an artist/writer/musician’s maxim. It is not intended to be taken on trust, it simply means that you should not hobble your talents. For any reason. Would you counsel a track and field runner to run slower? A cook to make food that was only slightly inedible?
“This is the right armour of genius–
‘Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.’
Only then pour out your heart.”
Petronius
(Although I wouldn’t deliver the accolade of ‘Genus’ to Dylan, he comes close at times)
JD
June 29th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
JD, thanks. A Socratic approach to your runner example would be to ask what the poetic equivalent is to “speed.” I.e., the excellence of the runner is easily measured, but artistic excellence is not, because judging it inevitably involves asking what sorts of emotions and thoughts it is good to take a human soul through. Otherwise, on the grounds of sheer “does-it-move-them?” emotional effect, the best pornographers or horror-movie makers would likely be counted as better than the best poets.
My less annoying response is that I’d advise young artists to focus on the “drink deep” and “only then” parts of Petronius’ verse. Not that they should wait to develop their art until “only then,” but that they should seek out expressions and artistic roles appropriate for those young in the ways of wisdom. That would involve taking the potentially negative moral impact of their work more seriously than young Bob did.
June 29th, 2011 | 12:48 pm
JD & Carl, your little exchange reminded me of the Ion. (That’s a good thing.)
Carl (and Peter), I think we need to be a bit more open to Robert Cheeks’ employment of “empire” in connection with America. After all, Raymond Aron entitled his book on American foreign policy The Imperial Republic. And Pierre Manent labeled America an empire in A World beyond Politics?. I do not necessarily agree with the “Republic” v. “Empire” dichotomy as used by people like Christopher Lasch and Andy Bacevich, but our post-1898 (or 1918) regime and our global economic, military, and diplomatic status are rather complex; we probably need some such word, perhaps “hegemon”?
June 29th, 2011 | 1:07 pm
Of course America is an empire, but the opposite of republic is not empire, we’ve taught the world. Imperial republic, as Mr. Aron wrote, is not an oxymoron. The phrase that doesn’t ring true to me is military-industrial complex. Studies show that one of the two major reasons Britain might have entered Bob’s favorite war on the side of the Confederacy was that a united America was bound to displace her–less by intention than as the inevitable consequence of a huge amount of territory and unprecedented techno-prosperity. So says THE FEDERALIST, Justice Marshall, yada yada. So what’s wrong with paleo etc. view is that we could simply choose not to be an empire (either now or by staying out of WW1 or WW2 or by backing off after WW2 etc. etc.).
June 29th, 2011 | 1:48 pm
BTW, Paul Seaton should be writing here…regularly. I’ve always enjoyed his insightful ‘comments’, even those I didn’t necessarily agree with.
Peter, I don’t think the opposite of ‘republic’ is ‘empire.’ I see ‘republic’ as that form of gummint best able/suited to nourish the desire of men/women to love and be free in the sense of God’s will.
Your comments re: the m-i-complex are in disagreement with Pres. Eisenhower, which begs the question, do you think he was wrong/confused in warning the American people of the danger?
And finally, what’s wrong with ‘choosing’ not to participate in WWI, what reason did we have to involve ourselves in Europe’s madness? The confrontation with modernity’s perverse ideologies is another matter that deserves a deeper analysis.
June 29th, 2011 | 2:22 pm
Bob, we would up for Paul being an actual byline. For now, I agree that WW1 is a tougher call, but we did break the all-consuming tie, after all. The way we screwed up the peace with a kind of imperial idealism is a different story. Eisenhower, who used to be an underrated prez until everyone started to call him that (he might be overrated now), exaggerated the danger–as do phrases like “garrison state,” which were big in those days. You and I are on the side of those who believe the Cold War wasn’t invented by a CIA serving our corporate interests, and as Carl has suggested, virtually all of our wars–even if wrongly or in a screwed up way–were political choices by our elected leader(s). Even if we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, it wasn’t big oil that sent us there.
June 29th, 2011 | 2:58 pm
I tend to agree with Peter, that certain sects (not all) reason as follows: 1) domestic policy is more important than foreign because of the primacy of the moral health of the polity (Straussians connect this with the classics v. moderns divide; cf., e.g., Tom West on Leo Strauss’s Platonic foreign policy views); 2) we don’t like the results of much of 20th century American foreign policy (mainly because it centralized the State, militarized society, etc.); so 3) let’s reread that history and show the wickedness and folly of our “foreign adventures”. At first glance, I find this to be a combination of principle, understandable (over)reaction, and ostrich-thinking. (I’m not willing at this point to go further back in American history, to Lincoln, with Mr. Cheeks, Don Livingston, et al.) Jim Ceaser has a relevant discussion about America assuming global responsibilities in the 20th century in (the underappreciated by Peter) LD & PS.
June 29th, 2011 | 6:38 pm
In defense of Carl’s statement–“The Counter-Culture needed the Bomb more than it can admit”–let me suggest that many counter-cultural heroes have endorsed this view abut themselves or their own times. Terry Southern/Stanley Kubrick stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb in an allegedly ironic crescendo of nuclear devastation at the end of Dr. Strangelove. 20 or 30 years later, Morrissey (egads!) sings in a Smiths song called “Ask”, “If it’s not love then its the bomb that will keep us together”–to which Carl could add keep us together in ritualistic and apocalyptic expressions of rage.
June 29th, 2011 | 6:41 pm
Paul, agreed, and the next songbook entry will contain a brief recommendation to the Porchers of Manent’s conceptualization of “empire.”
If everyone used the term “empire” in the way Manent and Aron do, or in the way that BOTH Jefferson and Hamilton used the term to refer to the U.S’s continental extent, I would have no problems.
But, almost no one uses the term that way. It almost always loaded negatively. As it is for Bob.
And Bob, while I respect much of what you say and thus suspect your conception of empire has more subtlety than meets the eye, the possibility of you and a Porcher and a Paleo and a Chomskyite and a German America-hater and an Egyptian Islamist all agreeing that “America is an empire” makes me queasy.
June 30th, 2011 | 7:38 am
Peter, I’m really not inclined to describe Pres. Eisenhower as a person given to exaggeration. I probably ought to look up the speech and re-read it but if I remember correctly, he was rather serious about this particular warning. I think I remember watching it on our old black and white Crosley. The speech must have stirred a hornet’s nest among the m-i-complex?
Mr. Seaton, I wholeheartedly agree with your No. 1 and mostly No. 2 too, after all the idea of a highly centalized general gov’t is anathema for all good and true republicans, and given the current crisis, for good reasons. Re: No.3 I’m not sure that, in a moral sense, our ‘foreign adventures’ have accomplished much more than needlessly mucking up some primitive cultures who were pretty much minding their own business. But hey, maybe we need those six hundred or so bases throughout the world?
Carl yes, for me ‘empire’ does, indeed, have a negative connotation and while I don’t subscribe to the notion that the contemporary American ‘empire’ follows the typical ecumenic empires so ably described by EV, it does signify an abandonment of the effort on the part of the founders, or some of them, to seek/acknowledge a ‘divine order’ in the American polis. The movement away from these republican principles has resulted in a long series of disordered regimes proudly grounded on a secularist immanentism. We are, currently, experiencing the results of such folly.
Re: your upset stomach allow me to recomend two fingers of Maker’s Mark.
June 30th, 2011 | 11:52 am
John, you and I are on the same wavelength–I thought of that line in “Ask” as well!
(But I don’t see how Dr. Strangeglove can work as evidence of using-the-bomb for the purposes of helping along sexual liberation or justifying extreme politics or expression.)
July 1st, 2011 | 10:32 am
[...] busy, to submit it. Didn’t seem in the Christmas spirit. But with “Masters of War” now on my mind again, and with summer crying out for some excuse to rumble with the Porchers, it’s time has come. So [...]
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