It’s always nice to get an e-mail from someone who can take issue with my writing without resorting to blurted condemnations and scatological metaphors. Such a happy case is below, from a correspondent named Felicity in Australia, and my reply also follows.

Hello Sean,

Have just discovered your site and am a little confused. Does Bob belong to anyone? I always thought a poet’s work was open to interpretation. We all love Bob and want to think his work reflects our own position, but as you say, he has always made clear his desire to express opinions, beyond politics or ideology.

I can’t tell you how to interpret Bob - you are American and he tells your story, but I’ve always thought that was what he was, a story teller, musician and poet, and very much his own person.
I wonder is this project your way of justifying your own conservative values- and just what does “right-wing” mean to you? Here in Australia left/right conflict is getting very ugly and I just feel that we are all caring and thinking people and maybe these divisions don’t do ourselves or our values justice. I think Bob demands of us only that we think for ourselves and beyond labels. You quote Bob saying as much, that “left and right don’t mean much to me” so I wonder what does it mean to you?

Respectfully yours
Felicity —-

My reply:

Hi Felicity,

Thanks for your email (apologies for my slow reply).

Of-course as you say a poet’s work is “open to interpretation.” I don’t think that means, however, that there is never such thing as a bad or a wrong interpretation. Dylan himself, in Chronicles, talked about his songs being “subverted into polemics” in the 1960s. Surely you’re not unaware of the degree to which his songs have been adopted as anthems for the Left, stretching back forty years — despite his general resistance to such distortions. Primarily what I intend to do is dispute the conventional wisdom that his songs are or ever have been inherently of the Left. Dylan is indeed “very much his own person” and I don’t claim that he or his music is actually “right wing.” Nevertheless, I do like to draw attention to ways in which people with a more conservative mind-set can particularly enjoy his work, and I would go as far as to say that I think his work can ultimately make more sense to an average modern American conservative as opposed to a committed leftist. E.g.: Dylan’s work uses the Judeo/Christian Bible as a fundamental source — not just of phrases, but of truth — and I would suggest that most committed leftists think of the Bible more as tool of oppression than a source of wisdom.

I think you’re right that his work is ultimately “beyond politics or ideology,” and yet it inevitably stimulates argument and discussion of those things. In Rolling Stone magazine in 2001 he said of the songs on “Love and Theft”, that they, like most of his songs, deal with “business, politics and war, and maybe love interest on the side.” I think you first have to understand that statement as a joke, of-course — because you’d have a very hard time finding topical references of any kind on “Love and Theft”. In another sense, though, Dylan knows that his songs cross into those areas at a very deep level — way beyond this morning’s headlines or last year’s elections.

As to the whole notion of the labels of Left and Right causing ugliness and division: sure they do. And I think that Dylan is right (that is, correct) when he’s said that he thinks political labels have limited meaning, because what they really mean varies by time and place. (A “conservative” in Moscow in 1987 would believe very different things to a “conservative” in Washington the same year; likewise a “conservative” in Tehran today would share few opinions with, say, Bill Kristol.) Nevertheless, we (at least you and me) live in liberal democracies, where people do largely have the right of free speech and free association. Naturally people will find common cause with others who have similar world-views, and will organize themselves accordingly. The division that we call “Left/Right” is one that seems always to be there, or always seems to be used to characterize the conflicting ideologies, though what it means in different situations can vary. It’s a shame when people fall into the trap of becoming more loyal to the ideology — or the person who represents it — rather than the pursuit of truth and positive results. It’s a pitfall that will always present itself. Yet, as ugly as the democratic process can be, it’s preferable, I think, to a situation where violence is used to assert a false agreeability over the body politic. Like, say, in North Korea right now. That might seem extreme, but, if there’s another way to guarantee eliminating the acrimonious debate that comes out of our Left/Right divisions, then I don’t know it. Everyone has the option of holding him or her self separate from it, of-course, or else criticizing both sides a la a gadfly, but generally human nature will compel people to take sides.

So, that would be my view on the issues you raised — thanks again for the note.

(By the way, John Howard kicks ass!)

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