Well I hope that you die
and your death will come soon.
I will follow your casket
in the pale afternoon.
I will watch while you're lowered
down to your death-bed
and I'll stand by your grave
'til I'm sure that you're dead.
Bob Dylan, "Masters of War"
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Fully or less than fully human? On a scale of one to ten, say?
Also, give an estimate of the extent to which young Bob was getting jerked
around by psychich testosterone at the time of composition (in all
probability quite a bit, I should say; in which case, yay for psychic
testosterone).
Anecdotes about what an asshole Dylan was anyway to the usual address
(/dev/null).
And here's an anecdote from my own precocious childhood: someone, either my
mum or my dad, had put Country Joe and the Fish on the record player, and I
was five years old and singing along cheerfully to the chorus..."don't ask
me, I don't give a damn"...I asked my dad what the song was about and he said
it was about the war in Vietnam; this would have been in about 1979, so
fairly fresh memories at the time. I said that if there was another war,
could I go and be in it please; my mum and my dad both told me not to be so
stupid, and that people in Vietnam had all the skin burned off their bodies
by burning napalm, and did I think I would like *that*? Which pretty much
shut me up.
Stick around and I'll tell you about when I was eleven and read my way through
an Amnesty International pamphlet documenting torture techniques used by the
Chilean secret police. Goes some way towards explaining why I want both
Pinochet and Saddam lowered down to their death-beds Pretty Damn Quick.
Dominic
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