Sundown on the Disunion of Fact and Opinion: open letter to Karl Erik Andersen

Dear Karl Erik

Earlier today, Saturday 3 July 2010, you told me your site is really for news1, not opinion; in reply I
pointed out to you some inconsistency there in terms of the blogs and other updates you regularly
accept links to. Not that that bothers me much; people do contradict themselves (and I might even
be a person – but not a naked one because that might make me a poem).

Now you are accepting links to the opinionated critic Robert Christgau – of whom I'd never heard. It
just so happens coincidentally that I had just come across his album reviews last night. Now it
could be argued on the one hand that your links to him are random and pertain to the opinion
category rather than news. On the other hand, it could be argued that his album reviews are
relevant because of the news item about his stepping down from the Consumer Guide.

As for resolving that one, who cares? But, moving swiftly on, get a load of the following critical
contradictions, whose gravity can only increase (in my mind at least) as we get closer to the 25th
anniversary of Live Aid on 13 July. Also note that the other day I started a Dylan World
Contradictions of the Day, which included Sid Griffin effectively endorsing someone's comment
that Dylan is/was the 'guiding spirit of a generation', a notion we all know Dylan repeatedly rejects
– however disingenuously. But, short of paradox, someone must be wrong.

So let's start with Christgau on Infidels (to be followed by AJ Weberman, Clive Wilshin and Jonath-
n Cott – amongst others):
Infidels [Columbia, 1983]
All the wonted care Dylan has put into this album shows--musically, "License to Kill" is the only dud. His
distaste for the daughters of Satan has gained complexity of tone--neither dismissive nor vituperative, he
addresses women with a solicitousness that's strangely chilling, as if he knows what a self-serving
hypocrite he's being, but only subliminally. At times I even feel sorry for him, just as he intends.
Nevertheless, this man has turned into a hateful crackpot. Worse than his equation of Jews with
Zionists with the Likud or his utterly muddled disquisition on international labor is the ital
Hasidism that inspires no less than three superstitious attacks on space travel. God knows (and I
use that phrase advisedly) how far off the deep end he'll go if John Glenn becomes president. B-
AJ Weberman to me in December 2009:

Paul

http://dylanology.org
http://rightwingbob.org

Dylan turned out to be a sicker piece of shit than I ever pinned him for. I suggest you purchase RightWing
Bob via Amazon as it is the last book I will ever write about this sicko. How much precious time of my life I
wasted studying Dylan when a great deal of his message boils down to "niggers eat shit." I could get the
same message off any Klan or Nazi website. Rolling Stone, Blowin in the Wind, Sub. Homesick Blues and
other poems contain this subcontext. Who would have ever thought? Not me. I was looking for an anti-racist
leftwing message when I began this journey in 1966. He did has some periods of normality Planet
Waves, then Neighborhood Bully and License to Kill but they were few and far between. As for my
syntax, at one point I was questioned about it as I was a suspected Soviet black agent who had been sent to
the US with false legend. My handwritting was examined for traces of cyrillic writing. But I convinced the
dudewho was assigned to evaluate me I was a domestic dissident by selling him toll fraud devices....

In the volume of TELEGRAPH essays called All Across the Telegraph (1987) there is an article
called ‘Charity is Supposed to Cover Up a Multitude of Sins’ by Clive Wilshin. Wilshin says on p
223:
1
This in connection with a post I submitted on a 1978 garbled intro to 'Masters of War' where Dylan says hello to
Phil Spector and mutters something about 'people call me Judas, but [he's/ here's??] a [the?] real Jew [Judas?]'. Is
Dylan referring to Spector as a Judas or rather to the global military industrial complex of which Eisenhower
warned? 'Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive ... '
... and there is a similary [sic] xenophobic Zionism firing off furiously all through 'Neighborhood Bully'. But
Dylan's argument in the latter song is one easier for the left to sweep impatiently aside than to answer, while
the anti-Arab stance of those lines from 'Slow Train' is simply unworthy of everything the real Bob Dylan
stands for.

(I is another.) Er, AJ is left wing (whatever that means) and, it would seem fair to say, a left-wing
(atheistic Jewish) Zionist – although I would be the first to say that the widespread labelling of the
third song on Infidels as Zionist serves little purpose other than to display the ignorance of the
term's sweeping imprecision on the part of its users. (For AJ's 'Zionism' see, for example, his
commentary on 'Levee's Gonna Break'. He reads Ha Aretz newspaper every day and posts links to
it on Facebook.) Dylan with Kurt Loder for the 1984 Rolling Stone interview:

In “Union Sundown,” the Chevrolet you drive is “put together down in Argentina by a guy makin’
thirty cents a day.” Are you saying he’d be better off without that thirty cents a day?

What’s thirty cents a day? He don’t need the thirty cents a day. I mean, people survived for 6,000
years without having to work for slave wages for a person who comes down and . . . well, actually, it’s just
colonization. But see, I saw that stuff firsthand, because where I come from, they really got that deal good,
with the ore.

Wilshin p 224:

This has been a widely-miscomprehended song.

Matt Ciabula in Ink Blot Magazine (on the web, or was a few years ago):

But this is just as much an album about America as Israel. "Union Sundown" is a surprising piece of anti-
union sentiment from former U.S. Lefty #1, but it's more against unions capitulating to companies who move
American jobs overseas than against the working man, so it's okay. (Great piece of anti-NAFTA propaganda,
only about 15 years before NAFTA was signed.) "License to Kill" is aimed right at the heart of the American
gun-nut thing and the man's-dominion-over-animals thing, a country ballad that would never survive at the
Opry.

Do the unions capitulate as a consequence of their companies’ greed or of their own – or were
they not greedy? Derek Barker at bobdylanisis.com, reviewed Mike Marqusee’s Chimes of
Freedom: Bob Dylan’s Political Songs:

Dylan’s politics haven’t always been clear. The late John Bauldie once said [possibly partly in jest] that it
would be impossible for anyone to follow Dylan without voting Labour. Although I can see where he was
coming from, it’s an incredibly simplistic view that bears no resemblance to the complexity of Bob Dylan or
his work. When so many people completely misinterpret songs like ‘Masters Of War’ and ‘Union
Sundown’, it’s maybe time to look again at Dylan’s sentiments and motives. Marqusee pins down
“Masters…” perfectly, but surprisingly, only makes a fleeting reference to ‘Union Sundown’. There are
other places in the book where slightly more song analysis might have been helpful.

Jonath-n Cott second-guessing Dylan in his book Dylan (1985), p 228:

… a diatribe against greed, in this case of the American labor unions—neglects to take into account the
recent loss of many union jobs, forced cuts in union pay, the continuing exploitation of migrant workers and
the reemergence of sweatshops in our larger cities.

Where in the song does Dylan say ‘unions’? Once. (Let's not get into the it's-really-about-the-
Union-of-States-but-people-just-didn't-get-it thing; as a Brit, sort of, I didn't think of it back then –
but a friend of my mother's, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, starting singing
along derisively and with zero interest, 'good ole USA'. But there is in any case a third level of
meaning, overlooked by the perspicacious. Another issue is Dylan's progression through the
refrains from 'and what's made' to 'that was made' and whether he fluffs it at one point on the way,
and the fact that Lyrics and bobdylan.com, both made in the USA, predictably have 'that was
made' all the way through.)
Michael Gray, Song & Dance Man III (2000) pp 468-9:

In contrast2, and far more interesting, is the political content of ‘Union Sundown’. This is a genuine
protest song in the Woody Guthrie tradition, and an honourable addition to it: a real ‘state of the union’
survey of contemporary American life; not an unfocused third-hand generalisation but a specific analysis of a
specific new development – something you couldn’t have written about in the 1960s or the 1930s: the huge-
scale switching of traditional factory-work and manufacture away from the West to the slave-labour markets
of the Third World. ‘Union Sundown’ explores a real theme here, and one that wasn’t there to be explored in
the decades when most of Bob Dylan’s political ideas were forged.

Wilshin goes on to quote from the Loder interview, which includes talk of the Minnesota Iron Range
where Dylan grew up, then says, p 225:

Dylan comes close here to putting into the mouths of the mining bosses the very words he attributed to them
in his 1963 lament for the town of his birth, 'North Country Blues':

They complained in the East

They are paying too high
They say that your ore ain’t worth digging
That it’s much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing

Almost for nothin'. Thirty cents a day. These two songs, though separated by more than two decades, seem
companions, and show the clear consistency of a significant strand in Dylan's thinking.

Fact or opinion? Each commentator is contradicting at least one other on what 'Union Sundown' or
'Neighborhood Bully' are about, and/or how either Dylan is wrong or someone else's interpretation
is wrong. You suggest, Karl Erik, I start a blog where people have the opportunity to comment?
Well, my Scribd is set to allow comments. The fact that it just so happens that you cannot comment
if you have not signed up to Scribd, two minutes of a job, effectively serves as a filter – a little like
your character-recognition thing at ER's webmaster page, though that was not my intention.

Also I have read plenty of published Dylan stuff in hard copy where I cannot correct mistakes I
spot. So I figure what goes around comes around. But, hey, join Scribd and shoot me down.

Now along the lines of the Guthrie-and-'Union Sundown' theme, a broad charitable pasture of
plenty into which Wilshin incorporates Live Aid (1985), I have, as I told you, some material from a
book on Robin Hood which mentions Woody Guthrie and the ballad 'Pretty Boy Floyd' in
connection with – well, read a short excerpt:
The context here is the dustbowl eviction of farmers from mid-west America in the thirties, when banks ruthlessly
foreclosed on the mortgages of bankrupt farmers and evicted them and their families.

Now the 25th anniversary of Live Aid on 13 July is a fact – unless Wikipedia and Clive Wilshin got
the date wrong; I only remember it was June or July, about a month after Empire Burlesque came
out. As for Dylan's comments on the plight of the farmers, fact or opinion? Ditto Bob Geldof's
comments on the comments of his hero (whom he listens to every day including in the car).
Wikipedia:

This article's Criticism or Controversy section(s) may mean the article does not present a neutral
point of view of the subject. It may be better to integrate the material in those sections into the
article as a whole.

Bob Dylan's performance generated controversy for his comment:

"I hope that some of the money…maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe…one or two million,
maybe…and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the
banks…"

2
to the songs of Infidels Gray rejects
He is often misquoted, as on the Farm Aid website,[4] as saying:

"Wouldn't it be great if we did something for our own farmers right here in America?"
In his best-selling autobiography, Is That It? (published in 1986), Geldof was extremely critical of the remark;
he states:"He displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid…. Live Aid was
about people losing their lives. There is a radical difference between losing your livelihood and losing
your life. It did instigate Farm Aid, which was a good thing in itself, but it was a crass, stupid, and
nationalistic thing to say."

I think I've made my point, Karl Erik, and that on 13 July your readers will want to see the excerpt
from the Robin Hood book, even though in an email yesterday the author of the book, with
predictably irony (only perceivable, by definition, by the Dylan world) showed no interest in the Bob
Dylan connection whatsoever, being only interested in selling one of a few remaining copies of an
out-of-print book. Yet he still couldn't be bothered to answer whether it would be in hardback or
paperback. No matter; I found the WORD file that had been eluding me. (Years on, the local
library has dumped the book, as libraries do.)

Now, is my desire to portray Dylan as having acted in a Guthriesque Robin Hood tradition, self-
consciously or otherwise, at Live Aid 25 years ago about fact or opinion?

Sundown on the disunion of fact and opinion. Or on my supposed union, conflation, of the two? In
whoever's opinion.

Yours in opinionated neutrality and objectivity

Paul Kirkman

ps: I don't trust websites or blogs not to waste many hours of my time. Websites require a lot of
messing about with formatting. I had a site I started at google. Then when I came back, it had,
predictably, been 'moved' from google docs to google page creator or some such. With Scribd I
retain the original docs and formatting on my own pc without losing any time investment on site
creation (other than uploading and basic settings) if the site provider, in this case Scribd, screws
with my content (within the terms of their small print or outside it).