The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Dylan in China: And now John Waters is using ‘we’… April 16, 2011

The bad news is that the habit of Irish Times columnists to rope us all in in an effort to spread guilt and culpability continues to proliferate.

Apparently – I hadn’t heard – Bob Dylan is playing China and has agreed to amend his set list to suit the wishes of the Chinese authorities. I’m not sure what to make of that. It seems an odd one, with at least some contradictions.

Anyhow, here’s his current take:

‘HUMAN RIGHTS activists” have pronounced as “shocking” the refusal of Bob Dylan, during his recent concerts in China, to speak out on behalf of detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was arrested in a renewed crackdown on political and artistic dissidents.

Got to love the inverted commas around the term human rights activists. And…

We in the West are happy to save money by buying goods stamped Made in China, indifferent to the probability that they have been made by prisoners in some labour camp, whose “crimes” most likely relate to their origins among the “bourgeoisie” or in loose statements delivered in the wrong company.

We wear T-shirts bearing the image of Mao, eat in restaurants named after him, and chuckle when politicians or celebrities tell Marian or Jay that they used to be Maoists.
But we demand that artists such as Bob Dylan make us feel better about all this by delivering slogans from the stage behind which we may claim cultural asylum from our own consciences.

I’m not at all keen on his use of the word ‘we’ there.

But beyond that once upon a time Waters wasn’t averse to referencing China both in terms of its own abuses but also contradictions in the West that flowed from same.

Which makes his current thoughts as to the political meaning or otherwise of Dylan a little strange…

His songs, even the most ostensibly “political” of them, are not about society, but existence. Listen to an early version of The Times They Are A Changin’, and then to the way Dylan sings it these days. Without making anything of it, he has attached an irony that directs the song back into the faces of those who used it as an anthem half a century ago: Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.

Our age is preoccupied with literal, crude gesturing and sloganeering, concepts anathema to Dylan’s music, which exists at the level of irony and ambiguity. The songs’ very titles make it impossible for Dylan even to introduce one of his songs without going far beyond political statement.

Dylan not political? Dylan? Wait a second. It is Bob Dylan we’re talking about – no?

It’s impossible for me to listen to Dylan and believe that his songs aren’t about society – and that some of them are not merely ‘political’ but overtly so [albeit not party political] pointing up not merely existence but the structural aspects of same that oppress. That Dylan has foresworn the ‘political’ sits uneasily with the contents of many of his songs. It’s like, well, why write The Hurricane if you don’t want to comment on certain aspects of US political, societal and cultural life? It sure sounded political to me the first time I heard it as a teenager. As did A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, as did…

As for the idea that Dylan’s music isn’t sloganeering. Well, you know, c’mon. Sloganeering isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Though Waters doesn’t appear to see the slight irony in the fact Dylan will not – if the reports are accurate – be able to introduce some of his songs. Ooops.

Once upon a time though, and not that long ago, Waters wasn’t averse to using Maoist as a negative term.

Last year in a piece on childcare by social services in the UK he quoted approvingly the following:

In a rare instance of a judge refusing to acquiesce in such procedures, Lord Justice Aikens expressed concerns that the authorities were using trumped-up allegations to take children from good families to meet adoption quotas, describing the actions of social workers in Devon as “more like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China than the west of England”.

In 2009 speaking of his own writings on family law he noted:

Later on, I had my own experience of family courts, here and in England. Because of the in camera rule, which forbids discussion of family law cases, I cannot speak of those experiences, but I do say that very little I encountered reassured me about the quality of justice in either jurisdiction. Thirteen years ago, I tentatively started writing about these matters, tiptoeing between the law and the truth. I was thereafter inundated with the stories of men who told of being brutalised in a manner suggestive of China under Mao rather than Ireland under Reynolds, Bruton and Ahern. Once aware of what these men had experienced, it would have been bizarre and wrong not to bear witness to what I knew.

Which implies that he would expect others in – say – the context of China to bear witness to what they know, no?

Or how about this? In a long, and not bad piece, from 1998, on TV advertising aimed at children, he notes:

The Irish toy market is worth in the region of £100 million each year, with Christmas accounting for more than two-thirds of this figure. Most of these toys are produced in countries like China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. The work is done mainly by women and children, working in sweatshop conditions. Average wages are between £1 and £2 a day for working days of between 10 and 20 hours.
In some cases we’re talking about children of 12, 13 and 14 working 20-hour days, seven days a week for less than £10. A Chinese worker would have to work three months to earn as much as is spent in this country on toys for one child at Christmas.

In Bangkok some years ago, a child worker in a toy factory who lost a hand in a machine was given £15 compensation and let go. In 1993, a fire at the Lader Industrial Company in Thailand killed 188 workers and injured 500. An inquiry found that faulty design, lack of fire exits and poor safety practices meant that workers were unable to escape. The main door was locked and there were no fire extinguishers. The Kader factory produced many toys on sale in Irish shops, including Cabbage Patch dolls and plastic replicas of Bart Simpson.

The advertising industry argues that the loss of £1 million to RTE would result in the diversion of this money to other channels. It claims that no evidence has been presented to show that these adverts actually have an influence on the volume of toys sold. The question then arises: why bother advertising toys if advertising has no effect? E television, demanding its money back.

And he continues:

The toy and advertising industries, of course, are fond of pointing out that there is no public outcry against advertising aimed at children. Thus, it is suggested, this issue is not a problem. Bob Quinn points out that 59 per cent of the Irish audience feel that, in general, there is too much advertising on television, while 57 per cent believe the medium is overwhelmingly influenced by the agendas of the companies that advertise.

And unlike his article on Dylan in China he clearly sees problematics about China.

To the extent that he agrees with Bob Quinn about:

…an alliance between aid agencies, poverty agencies, parents’ groups, trade unions and churches to create social resistance to the continued exploitation of children in this manner.

Of course, he’s entitled to change his mind, but it seems odd that he would wheel Mao in as the epitome of evil hardly a year ago, and this week seem, well, sanguine about it.

There’s a further oddity. Not a few weeks ago he was lambasting ‘liberals’ [and leftists] for lack of moral fiber in relation to the latest intervention in Libya, apparently they weren’t calling for sufficient intervention – if any. There, of course, because he’s then attacking ‘counterculturists’ liberals et al are dismal because they’re supposedly relativist in their approach…Indeed he was explicit when he wrote:

The truth is that the international community is immobilised not by military issues concerning intervention in Libya, or by any argument concerning the justness of such an initiative, but by a cultural paralysis that has rendered the western “powers” powerless in the face of tyranny and evil. The ideology promulgated by liberal western media is the most significant cause of this paralysis.

And:

He kills his own people in air-attacks and strikes back at rebel insurgents with force and confidence, promising an “amnesty” to those who leave down their weapons and abandon their burst for freedom. Their surrenders – in effect their suicides – ought to shame the West, its leaders and peoples, except that, due to the influence of its dominant generation of leftist agitators and opinion formers, our cultures are too choked by hypocrisy to any longer have any shame about these matters.

And:

Employing a spurious calculus of carnage that factored out the million Iraqis killed by Saddam, the ageing counterculturalists of the West have conducted an eight-year trial of the only western leaders who have been prepared to face down tyrants on the basis of moral principle and human empathy.

Whatever ones views on the intervention in Libya, it seems somewhat strange that here he’s entirely happy to issue Dylan an existential pass.

And what about politics… y’know, ‘politics’. Well, when it comes to attacking the left, or liberals or counterculturists his complaint is that they don’t do politics…

Obama is the elected representation of the postwar generations who never understood that politics is about choosing the lesser of evils. Even had he the personal courage and determination to act against Gadafy, Obama could not do so, because the commitment to do nothing in such situations is central to the unwritten contract he has made with those who delivered him to what was once the most powerful political position in the world.

Whereas with Dylan…

Art is gratuitousness, beauty for beauty’s sake, a sign of Something Beyond. The point is not to “say” something, but to create something that exists as a witness to life.

What matters is the artist’s existence, gaze and repose, not his attitude, which is merely the grain of grit on which the pearl forms.

Political freedom amounts, simply, to the right to be let alone with life’s mysteriousness, which is not a political gift but an existential event.

This is the “statement” Bob Dylan makes whenever he opens his mouth to sing. By his very presence in China, he was saying something that could only have been reduced by a speech: that a song is not a placard or a pamphlet, but the fullest enrichment of the human breath.

Hmmm… is that what ‘political freedom’ amounts to?

I’ve spent more than enough time around elected politicians to know how power tends to distort. Christ knows what it’s like with political structures that are only loosely representational, if at all.

And perhaps if we can strip away the cod-mystical stuff Dylan’s not saying anything at all. Perhaps he’s just playing a gig and he’s not that fussy about who he plays in front of or who amends his set list – and to be honest that’s the most obviously noxious feature of all this – assuming it’s correct, and it may not be. One thing to play in China, but another thing entirely to be censored while doing so, which seems to take all meaning from it – were there any there to begin with.

But this isn’t really about Dylan, one way or another. I’d be the first to admit that there’s a complexity to all these issues. There’s a broader question about China that has to be addressed by leftists and progressives. But… the first thing is to acknowledge the complexity, not to dismiss it, or worse still to pretend that everyone is equally culpable or to attempt to malign the attitudes of others, as he does from the off with his blanket ‘human rights activists’.

What’s fascinating is that he does precisely what he accuses others of when he writes… “But we demand that artists such as Bob Dylan make us feel better about all this by delivering slogans from the stage behind which we may claim cultural asylum from our own consciences.”

Just as a musician who built his career on intrinsically ‘political’ critiques of society is expected to have at least some regard for the ramifications of same further down the line, so columnists who lecture others about their supposed failings should have some regard for the ramifications of their own stated views. Perhaps someone is trying to bring in all of ‘us’ in to claim asylum from his own conscience.