The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Bits and Pieces

12.16.04 @ 12:01AM

(Page 5 of 6)

Tucker solves the enigma in his (positively) 4th paragraph: Rolling Stone Magazine has a proprietary interest in self-promotion. The editors never pretend their ranking is anything but subjective. Of course they decreed "Like A Rolling Stone" the best rock song ever. If I were Jann Wenner (what a horrible thought for the both of us) I'd have done the same thing.
-- Anthony Trauring
Atlanta, Georgia

The only thing that William Tucker proved in his dissection of Rolling Stone's Choice of "Like A Rolling Stone" as the greatest rock song ever is that he actually knows very little about Bob Dylan or his music. While he claims Dylan came from a folk tradition, he actually became passionate about music listening to and emulating Little Richard, Elvis, Buddy Holly, etc. While Dylan used the folk medium to launch his career, his musical background was far more diverse. Perhaps he would do well to evaluate some of what Dylan has written, sung and said over the past forty years and reconsider his dismissive caricature of Dylan. He may find that, in addition to slightly more nuanced and accessible lyrics, Dylan has never seemed to be inclined to lend his image to many political causes. Instead, most of his 'finger pointing songs' in fact take more of an outsider's view, attempting to highlight individual events or recurrent themes without placing blame or claiming moral superiority. Perhaps the greatest legacy of Dylan's music is that it brought social issues to youth culture without TELLING them how to think.

As for dismissing Dylan's career success as a "media phenomenon", come on, pal you don't endure as long as Dylan being propped up by the "media." The Rolling Stone List was not titled the 500 "Most Popular" rock songs, so citing chart positions and record sales lend little credibility to that argument. It's likely Britney Spears could [burp] continuously for 45 minutes and sell more records than Dylan will with his next album. Popularity is and has never been a barometer for artistic merit. If anything, most who have been labeled as true geniuses in their medium have never enjoyed as much popular appeal as their peers. Dylan's lessened commercial success could likely be attributed to his refusal to cater to the Fox Television-lowest-common-denominator formula.

In attempting to summarize Dylan's post "Highway 61 Revisited" career, Tucker seems to have listened to a copy of his "Greatest Hits" once or twice and deemed himself fit to comment of the scope of Dylan's work. Perhaps Mr. Tucker should give a listen to "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," "Desolation Row," "Love Minus Zero / No Limit," "Most of the Time," "Love Sick," "Don't Think Twice" or "It's All Right Ma." In such songs I'm confident one would find more than simplistic put-downs or "endless rants." Instead, many of these songs deal with the classic conflicts of our society: love vs. desire, social concern vs. political reality, justice vs. financial clout, etc. Better than anyone, Dylan has been able to juxtapose the personal with the political. His songs often fight the battle of what should be vs. the way it is.

"Disillusioned words like bullets bark / As human gods aim for their mark / made everything from toy guns that spark/ to flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark / easy to see without looking to far / not much is really sacred.

These lines from "It's Allright Ma, (I'm Only Bleeding) certainly dig deeper than Tucker would like everyone to believe by referencing "It Ain't Me Babe."

If Mr. Tucker is so sure that Dylan's "cult" is comprised solely of Hippie Relics from a bygone era all he need do is attend a concert. I think he would be surprised to see a curious mix of old, young, rich, poor, conservative, liberal etc. Fact is, Dylan's music has become part of the fabric of our time. Denouncing him as unfit to tune Elvis' PROP guitar is both obtuse and idiotic. The songs he has written transcend even Mr. Tucker's very obvious political orientation. Perhaps he should stick to singing Toby Keith songs and leave the rest of us alone.
-- Patrick MacFarland

READER'S RESPOND
Re: Jim's letter ("Riding the Third Rail") in Reader Mail's Big Matters:

Jim in South Carolina had some interesting comments on David Hogberg's Social Security Softies that I think are indicative of how conservatives are not communicating economic policy ideas to the public nearly as well as those people who believe in a socialist economy. The socialist idea that government is free and the free market costs money has been pounded into the heads of school children since the sixties and conservatives have not only failed to place other arguments into the debate, they have totally ceded the floor of the debate to the left.

I would like to relate to Jim just a couple of things for him to consider.

In order for me to practice my profession I have to be registered with the State. Two weeks ago, as required by law, when I moved I mailed an affidavit of my new address to the State. Yesterday the State sent me a letter telling me that my new address did not exist. The State mailed their letter to me addressed to the address that they said did not exist.

So, the first thing I did this morning was have the Internet draw a map from the State's office to my new address. Then, I wrote the State a letter and explained that the address did exist. I sent the letter on top of the map to the State. All of the time that I spent on this task was overhead to my company, but required by law in order for me to practice my profession. The State was not required to think, check or admit error for not knowing what "Yahoo Maps" had known for years. The State did not care and has no responsibility. The work had to be done but the cost for it will be spread out as overhead to all of my clients. Those clients will then spread the cost to Jim when Jim buys something from my clients. He just won't know that the cost of fixing a stupid bureaucratic error is part of his cost because in the arena of economic ideas postulated by the political left he has only been told that rising costs are the result of greedy businessmen and government is free.

I have twenty years experience in my profession. Ten of those years were in the private sector and ten years were in the public sector. I went to the public sector from the private sector, now I am back in the private sector. On my second day on the job in the public sector I went and told my boss I was not going to report to him anymore because I felt more comfortable handling projects on my own. He said, "okay," because he didn't care. I told him that because after one day of working with him I realized he was a dolt who would reduce my productivity if I involved him in my projects. Two weeks later, a delegate from the rest of the employees came to me and asked me, in the name of all of the employees, to slow down my workload because I was making all of them look bad. I spent ten years like that and I can regale you with stories for hours that are similar.

Over the twenty years experience I have in my professional field I have always worked on both public and private projects simultaneously. It is fact that government projects always cost twenty to thirty percent more then privately funded projects. I have constructed small projects to large project, from hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars in size. No matter what size the project, just having the government involved adds at least twenty percent to the bottom line cost.

Now, if Jim is concerned that my personal pre-tax dollars will go into a regulated market fund where the fund will charge me a half percent to three percent to manage, depending on the size of my fund and the competition in the market place, tell him not to be. I will pay one percent any day not to have to pay the twenty to thirty percent the government costs.

Letter to the Editor

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