He died in 2005 at the age of 69 and all that concern, all those conversations, all the hours reading and thinking about the political condition, only did one thing: aggravate the man.
While I understand what has happened to the States and while I follow it with a mix of spectator interest and indifference, I am not moved by it. Caring about politics is like falling in love with a goldfish. Indeed, it is worse than falling in love with a goldfish: at least there is a real discrete object of desire in the goldfish, at least, on some level or other, you can say: that is what I love. You can't concern yourself with politics, it is a moving, meaningless concept.
There hasn't been a grassroots revolution in the States since the 1960s, and that revolution occured because teenagers were being conscripted into a lousy war. This lead to an alliance between the nascent Black Rights groups and the middle class.
Since then the American have been lead by bad leaders and lied by everyone. And people care but about the wrong things. They care about fairness, they are always saying: it's not fair. Like that is a surprise as opposed to a constant truth of the human condition. It is both naive and stupid and leads directly to dystopias.
Politics everywhere, including the States, is bad news. When you are being lead, you are a lemming. Your leaders are evil or they wouldn't be leaders. You know why we have cable TV? Because Jimmy Carter owed Ted Turner a favor for getting him elected. JIMMY FUCKING CARTER WAS CORRUPT.
And as for the bankrupting of the States: both sides buggered it up, the Democrats gave bad mortgages, the Republicans lifted Bank restrictions. And both of them were paid off by Wall Street.
Which leads me back to my brother-in-law. Here is something he might have done to express his feelings about the Palestinian cause: he might have taken a lithograph of the Palestinian flag and filled it with tiny Swastikas. It would have been worth all the words in the world. Because art responds to concepts the way strident political discourse fails to: it transforms rhetoric into a different more understandable medium: where the this is what I believe turns into, this is what it looks like.
I was having an argument with a friend of mine the other day, he claimed that his political passion was worth vastly more to the human condition than my passion for music. I've heard this argument before. The Pope spent a fortune having Leonardo da Vinci paint the Sistine Chapel in the early 15th Century. Why was the Pope wasting resources on painting a ceiling in the hell that was Europe? Why wasn't he sharing those resources with the indigious starving masses? But what is left from that time? Only art. The politics are completely irrelevant, the dead are forgotten. Only art survives.
Politics is there. But in life there is only two things worth giving yourself too
Love
Art
We live in a consumer society and we work to consume and if we are lucky our work is our passion. That is the coldness of life. It is true but it doesn't matter. We have been robbed blind, there are people graduating college today who will never have a job, there is music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air, but it only works through the refraction of art. The politics is too staid, it is a one party rule disguised. It won't change.
The kids Occupying Wall Street started as grassroots but will be pre-emptied by the political machine exactly the same way the Tea Party has been.
Do you want a fight? Will there be blood on the streets? Maybe. Tolstoy claimed that political change occurred because of either
a) Great men
or
b) organic mass movement. Let's call it memes.
If you're a great man able to change the States, be my guest. Otherwise, memes occur organically, so what's your beef?
When Dylan dropped protest he knew instinctively that "the ghost of electricity howled in the bones of her face" said more about the human condition, the way it felt to be alive, than protest ever could. It dug deeper, it was more important, it changed thought, it mattered.
"I Wanna Hold Your Hand" was a purer exaltation of the human spirit, of love, innocent, desire than "Power To the people, right on" ever, ever could be. "Yeah, yeah, yeah" freed more people than Ronald Reagan did IN HIS WILDEST DREAMS. The USSR fell because of "yeah, uyeah, yeah". When people are happy, when they are free, when they are in love, politics and life goes hand in hand for them.
I reject politics at its very roots. It is a corrupt, money fueled, power based lie in the face of humanity. We need to watch it, we need to change it, when a Dubya changes the rules, we need to replace him. But we don't need to live it, or breathe, or care about it. We rule our lives through love and art and we are ruled through the political system.
Where do you stand?