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Sept. 27, 2005 On September 26th, there was a big program on TV celebrating the life and work of the musician Bob Dylan, which included sections about other 1960s artists such as Joan Baez. Those hippy-era singers are dangerous people, when you think of the overall effects on our society. What? Musicians dangerous? Is this some kind of Fascist paranoia? Well, I'm certainly not a Fascist, and I hope I'm not turning paranoiac in my old age. I have lots of LP records of Dylan and Baez, and my wife and I still listen to them once in a while, with pleasure. We enjoyed the musical part of the retrospective TV show, although I was angered by the political parts that came along with the music and the announcer's commentary. Those words "with pleasure" and "we enjoyed" are the key to my concern about the whole thing. The hippy-ish artists of the 1960s were creative geniuses, innovating new sounds and poetry that gave great pleasure to millions of people, including me. They were typical of the great American phenomenon: fantastic creativity. With the exception maybe of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, almost all of this great music and poetry originated in the U.S. So where's the beef? Well, once the artistic part got ahold of you, the political part injected left-wing, hippy philosophy right into your heart muscle. The political message was that capitalism, corporations, and our Government were evil, but Communism, the hippy life, and anarchism were just fine. Do we really have to fear such thoughts, and aren't we confident enough to let the artists' political messages just bounce off our mental armor? My answer is that teenage kids, and even college students, have very little mental armor. They have been quite susceptible to leftist propaganda, when it was carried along by attractive art. I'm not suggesting censorship, but our mass media should be providing young people with more input from the other side of the story. So what harm has it really done, and could it still do? For one thing, the hippy-ish music was completely sympathetic with worldwide Communism, while so many people were dying in the "wars of liberation," and while Stalin was killing 20 million people in Eastern Europe. And China is still Communist and still a powerful threat to us, in spite of the fact that the newly-capitalist aspects of their country (mainly in their coastal cities) are prosperous. They still have enough long-range rockets and hydrogen bombs to destroy our civilization. If they have a suddenly-disastrous famine or drought, they might still start a nuclear war. If they lose 300 million people in such a war, and so do we, then the U.S. will be gone from the map, but China will have a billion people left. It's not likely, but it's not impossible either. We need all the military strength we can muster, but the eddy currents of Dylan and Baez that swirl around in modern rock and roll, and also rap, are still tending to weaken us. Speaking of "weakening," that hippy philosophy which also is carried along by popular music has caused enormous harm. Oh yes, it has led to improved civil rights and broadened our perspective, but the pervasive drug addictions among young people, and the huge numbers of unwed mothers are causing uncountable problems in America and Europe. Even the high unemployment in Europe is partly attributable to the excessive taxes and worker entitlements that leftist artists have promoted by their anticapitalist attitudes, indirectly but powerfully. I don't blame all this on Dylan and Baez, but they did creatively provide a philosophical backbone, which the worker bees then fleshed out, in a large part of the world. ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email: shanefield@ieee.org Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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