Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
So starts Bob Dylan’s seminal song “My Back Pages.” The complex bard of the mid-20th century tells the complicated story of his own evolution amidst his involvement in the Civil Rights movement. The unadorned guitar behind his trademark nasally voice gives the entire song—and the underlying message—a raw potency.
Anyone listening to this song will very quickly pick up the underlying emotion Bob Dylan sets to music in his own inimitable way—disillusionment. As beautiful as any paradox, Dylan’s line “Ah, but I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now” defies any simple explanation but points us toward the idea that reality becomes more complicated as our experience in it deepens. Importantly, this can be accepted without slipping into moral relativism. Grasping the truth of life’s gray tinges doesn’t mean falling into a general apathy amidst meaninglessness, but rather points the way to a more robust ethical perspective. Moral calculations immediately become more complicated (and interesting). When we aren’t only faced with Manichaean battles between uniform evil and homogeneous good, we can appreciate the fine-grained nature of goodness and badness.
Bob Dylan was, and is, acclaimed as the voice of a generation. He eloquently put words to the frustration and fears of the youth of the Sixties, and shouted down the prejudices of Jim Crow and racial oppression. Notwithstanding the nobility of many movements, especially the struggle for Civil Rights, there are certain tendencies in nearly every movement that tend toward self-destruction. In Wendell Berry’s essay “In Distrust of Movements” he speaks of the necessity of “getting out of movements—even movements that have seemed necessary and dear us—when they have lapsed into self-righteousness and self-betrayal, as movements seem almost invariably to do. People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent.”
Bob Dylan nearly never said, or says, what you would expect him to, and true to form, expresses himself in a surprising way as he writes of this era in his memoirs. Of this time, and his need to escape from the movements that he supposedly led, he writes: “Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it. I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of the Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. What the hell are we talking about? …All code words for Outlaw.”
Hints of this disillusionment famously surfaced when Dylan accepted the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee—a recognition of his work for civil rights. In his acceptance speech Dylan said, referencing the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where, what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too, I saw some of myself in him.” He was then vigorously booed.
Though not his most shocking, Dylan’s most visceral description of the inevitable tensions in movements (and ourselves and our reality), even undeniably righteous ones, is contained in a later verse of “My Back Pages.”
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
The martial metaphor of pointing in a “soldier’s stance” almost invites you to imitate such a movement and feel, in part at least, the excitement of righteous anger. But then the line “fearing not that I’d become my enemy/In the instant that I preach” gives us pause and re-frames the soldier’s stance and the aimed hand in a more ominous light. The line between good and bad blurs, especially because the phrasing seems to imply that the very act of aggressive confrontation blurs that line.
Now let’s return to 2022, to the scorched earth political battles of the culture wars—a democratic society seemingly less shaped by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Washington, and Abraham Lincoln than by social media giants, Newt Gingrich’s congressional legacy, and cable TV chyrons. The culture wars seem to feed off of the worst tendencies of movements—the insularity, the stark dualism, the sense of constant embattlement. There are likely many reasons this is the case—we can all likely think of a few—which we could explore in depth, but instead I want to point toward someone who transcended the political movement, and moment, they were a part of.
Almost a month ago, Utah Governor Spencer Cox vetoed a bill that prevents transgender girls from competing in girl’s high school sports. Though his veto was subsequently over-ridden, his stance was deeply meaningful. In his letter to Utah legislative leaders Governor Cox wrote: “I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion." Politico explains that “there are four transgender players [in Utah] out of the 85,000 who are competing in school sports after being ruled eligible by the state’s high school athletic association.” Referencing this, Governor Cox continued, “Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day…Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live.”
Governor Cox demonstrated, in stark relief to many in the legislature’s Republican super-majority, a deeper understanding of life’s complexity. Even if one was to accept the absurd claim that transgender athletes are an existential threat to high school athletics, it would seem difficult to deny there is a more pressing moral issue here. It’s one of seeing a group—and a movement—as more than a theoretical combination of faceless people. It’s zooming in and acknowledging that there are real and frail human beings behind the slogans and acronyms.
On this issue Spencer Cox channeled the rebelliousness of Bob Dylan to buck his party and, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, become a majority of one. No matter our partisan priors, we each will have many opportunities to do the same. And perhaps then one day, after many years of working hard to bank and cool our partisan ardor and narrow-minded prejudices, we too will say “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”