Right wing Bob?

American Masters, the PBS series that may be the finest program on television (an honor it claims quite easily in this age of reality based shows about fat people losing weight, and narcissistic showcases like American Idol), spotlighted Joan Baez in a recent episode. Baez, who turned 71 this year (she shares a birthday with Richard Nixon), was a bestselling recording artist and the subject of a Time cover story when Bob Dylan was still a struggling Woody Guthrie wannabe. He was writing songs and making quite an impression in Greenwich Village folk clubs, but, it could be argued, his success was assured only after Baez dragged him on stage to sing with her. Soon, he was the “voice of a generation” that protested the Vietnam War and followed Martin Luther King’s lead in demanding equal rights for blacks. Dylan would reject that role and even snicker at those who marched and carried signs, but Baez was and would remain an activist, jeopardizing her life and career. She spent time in jail and visited the war zone while bombing was in progress. It was, she noted, the kind of situation that could even make an atheist believe in God. She came from a family of Quakers and was brought up to be a pacifist, something Dylan never claimed to be. The man himself, looking old and grizzled, appeared several times. He said he was flattered to be the subject of her self-penned “Diamonds and Rust,” though in her biography she claimed it had been written about her husband, David.

It was my interest in Dylan more than Baez that made me tune in to the American Masters segment. If Baez is a typical leftist, Dylan is not, assuming he’s a leftist at all. A website called Right Wing Bob makes the case that he's quite the opposite. Despite having praised Barack Obama, there is evidence to suggest this voice of the counterculture (when there was such a thing) is something of a conservative. In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan claimed his favorite politician, circa 1961, was Arizona senator Barry Goldwater who accepted the 1964 republican presidential nomination with his now infamous speech extolling the benefits of extremism (“Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.”) To the liberal camp supporting Lyndon Johnson’s reelection, Goldwater was a warmonger and a right wing extremist whose conservative principles were woefully out of touch with the modern world. To Dylan, whose songs like “Masters of War” seemed an indictment of such a man, Goldwater was reminiscent of Tom Mix, the all-American cowboy of dozens of B westerns in Hollywood’s silent age.

Even when Chronicles appeared in 2004, a good 40 years after Goldwater’s overwhelming loss to LBJ, some readers obviously liberal in their politics, dismissed Dylan’s statement as disingenuous. Clearly, the man who wrote “The Times They Are-A Changin’” was joking, right?

Dylan didn’t seem to be joking in a 1968 interview with Sing Out when he refused to be pinned down on the Vietnam War. “I know some very good artists who are for the war,” he said, and cites a painter friend, a man he admires, who even considered enlisting to fight in the jungles. When he says he never argued with his friend about his stance, the interviewer pressures him, but Dylan refuses to budge, eventually asking a question of his own that undoubtedly raised eyebrows of readers on the left. “Anyway, how do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

One thing that definitely separates Dylan from many of his left leaning admirers is his belief in God. Even before his very public conversion to Christianity in 1979, God was in his songs and his thoughts. In 1978, Dylan told Phillip Fleishman, “The whole world is a prison. Life is a prison; we’re all inside the body. . . Only knowledge of either yourself or the ultimate power can get you out of it. . . Most people are working toward being one with God, trying to find him. They want to be one with the supreme power, they want to go Home, you know. From the minute they’re born, they want to know what they’re doing here. I don’t think there’s anybody who doesn’t feel that way.”

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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FIve Easy Pieces and the tone of the times

Before the 1992 release of A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson delivered the much quoted line, "You can't handle the truth," his most famous screen moment was probably in 1970's Five Easy Pieces, the first film in which he claimed top billing since being noticed with his supporting role in the previous year's Easy Rider. It's the chicken salad sandwich scene that was chosen to represent the film during the clips from the best picture nominees at that year's Academy Awards.

Nicholson and Karen Black, as his sort-of girlfriend, stop at a diner with two hitchhikers they've picked up. Nicholson orders toast which is not on the menu, and a contentious exchange follows in which he explains to the waitress how she can fill his order without breaking the rules that she insists on following.

"You have bread, and a toaster of some kind?" he tells the frustrated woman, then instructs her to "hold the chicken," bring him a check for the chicken salad sandwich "and you haven't broken any rules."

"You want me to hold the chicken?" she asks in a tone of defiant sarcasm.

"I want you to hold it between your knees," he sneers.

With that remark, the waitress orders Nicholson and his companions to leave, and points to a sign that states the management's policy ("We reserve the right to refuse service").

"Do you see this sign?" Nicholson says, then violently clears the table of its glassware and metal utensils.

More than 40 years later, Nicholson's character looks more like an obnoxious boor than the rebel he may have seemed originally. He's a rude bully abusing a low-wage employee who is, after all, only doing her job. In 1970, when the film was released, it played a little differently, its rage colored by the tone of the times. To the young people of what would have been called the "counterculture," Nicholson's character wasn't merely abusing a waitress, but taking on Nixon, Vietnam, the assassins of JFK, RFK, and MLK, along with all the pointless rules of our straight-jacketed repressed society. He was "stickin' it to the man," challenging the "system," kicking the Establishment's ass, and putting down the whole rotten "scene" (add a "man" after "scene" for added hipness, 1970's style).

Nicholson's character was the rebel seizing his freedom and ignoring the "sign" that the waitress points to in her defense. A hit song by a group called the Five Man Electrical Band titled "Signs" that hit the airwaves in summer 1971 ("Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?") may have even been inspired by the scene. Once Nicholson and his companions leave the diner, one of the hitchhikers praises his miniature act of rebellion. He's less impressed with himself than she is, and recognizes the futility of, shall we say, fighting the system. In regard to that toast without the chicken, he says, "Well, I didn't get it, did I?"

A movie, like any creative work, does not exist in a void. It reflects its time, but time moves on while the work of art is static, frozen on canvas, on a page, or on frames of film. If its truths are universal, the art transcends the time in which it was made and communicates as effectively to its own generation as it does to those that follow. Five Easy Pieces, like that previous Nicholson movie with "easy" in the title, is probably a satisfying film to watch even now, four decades after its release, but its power has almost certainly diminished. In 1970, some of its strength was in its symbolism, which may not have even been deliberate, but what it symbolized for many members of its original audience has changed. Nixon is gone, Vietnam is over, and our government, though actually more oppressive than ever, is seen as less corrupt and authoritarian, certainly by filmmakers, most of whom lean left politically and are inclined to see a democratic president as a man in a white hat, especially when he's black.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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