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I can't help but come back to: A South politician preaches to the poor white man "You got more than blacks, don't complain You're better than them, you been
by kristianc 10y ago
I can't help but come back to:
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin" they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KY2lQV3ADfc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KY2lQV3ADfc
As it seems especially relevant today. It's a song about the killing of civil rights activist Medgar Evers by a poor white farmer in the 60's. Dylan addresses the civil rights movement in a way that avoids laying the blame squarely at the feet of the angry racist who pulled the trigger, instead placing the blame with politicians who sow hatred, insecurity, fear and division for their own ends and don't care what mess they leave behind.
When I see Trump rallies today full of angry people complaining their country has been 'taken from them' I can't help but think of that song.
- 1337biz 10y agoIt is about time to officially introduce the 'Reductio ad Trumperum'.
- kristianc 10y agoNot quite - as a strategy by Republican politicians (and Democrats before that) it predates Trump by quite a long way.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago> it predates Trump by quite a long way Are you suggesting history existed before I was born?
- rdiddly 10y agoI hear a whooshing sound. Reductio ad Trumperum or something similar (I'm not real 'up' on my Latin grammar) would presumably mean "reduce to Trump." You know, like summing up a complex & nuanced issue in terms of how it supposedly relates to Trump. You're saying people have been doing this -- as a -strategy- mind you -- since before Trump existed?
- kristianc 10y agoThat's not what it means. Reductio ad 'X' means assigning guilt by association to X. I don't feel like I really need to make the actions of the Republican Party in the 1960s in the south (yes - southern strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) any more wrong by associating them with Trump. Lynchings kind of speak for themselves. Do I think that Trump is drawing on the same political tradition by 'othering' Mexicans, LGBTs, Blacks to win political support? Do I think that most of Trump's political constituency comes from the 'base' that the likes of Karl Rove built? Do I think that 'liberal political elites' is a dogwhistle for 'progressive social change I don't like' - you bet. Edit: By reductio ad 'X' I mean in reference to Reductio ad Hitlerum (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum), which as commenter below points out is actually a bastardization of Reductio ad Absurdum
- HSO 10y ago> Reductio ad 'X' means assigning guilt by association to X. Not really. Reductio ad absurdum is a common proof strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
- triangleman 10y agoI think what 1337biz was trying to point out is that mentioning trump sullied your point. Perhaps it was impossible to make your original comment without mentioning trump, but now you have "Godwin'd" your argument in a way, and have precluded any room for nuance in either discussing Bob Dylan, or the current political environment. Now it's all Southern Strategy -> Bob Dylan -> Trump. Sure, Trump has tapped into a certain political current that has long existed in American life (since at least Andrew Jackson), but there are other reasons for his (un)popularity and are worth understanding in their own right.
- rdiddly 10y agoSince I'm probably getting some downvotes that belong to Trump, I think the dude stands for nothing in particular; he's been boring me since the 80s when I first heard the name, and he's pretty much the last thing I'm interested in talking about. Looks like I got the literal translation of "reductio ad something" right though. Also seems like the spirit is the same between me and Leo Strauss about how said reduction results in something pat, neat, simple and intellectually lazy. That's what I experience every time someone tries to tie up something interesting & complex with a nice Trump ribbon. It has been "reduced to Trump."
- mundo 10y agoNot for nothing has "demagogue" been in use for hundreds of years...
- dexterdog 10y agoIt's funny because when I think of "politicians who sow hatred, insecurity, fear and division for their own ends and don't care what mess they leave behind" I would first think of the Democrats.
- ghostly_s 10y agoSo you just roll a 20-sided die to come up with your opinions, then?
- dexterdog 10y ago?
- arrosenberg 10y agoHe's pointing out that the Republicans are objectively the more divisive party in 2016. To be fair, it goes back and forth - 10 years ago I would have agreed with you.
- kristianc 10y agoWithin the context of the song in 1964, Dylan was also objectively talking about Republicans (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy). But, as you say, it goes back and forth and in the 19th Century it was the Democrats who were known for this. Neither party has a great history with race.
- cdelsolar 10y agothat is objectively false.
- dexterdog 10y agoIs it? Tell me what has objectively improved for blacks in the last 8 years.
- marcoperaza 10y ago>When I see Trump rallies today full of angry people complaining their country has been 'taken from them' I can't help but think of that song. Give me a break. "Taking our country back" is talking about wrestling power back from the political and cultural elite that has emerged in the last half-century. This elite formed when 1) all of the smart kids started going off to college together and forming their own social bubble, 2) they began invariably marrying people they went to college or work with (while in earlier times, the successful were typically married to very average middle-class people they grew up around), and 3) the economy shifted to highly rewarding intelligence while wages for lower-skill work collapsed. This has led to the splintering of American society. It has nothing to do with race. I recommend Charles Murray's book Coming Apart, which is a thorough sociological study of this phenomenon and its effects.
- v64 10y ago>This elite formed when all of the smart kids started going off to college together and forming their own social bubble. You say that as if it's a bad thing.
- BurningFrog 10y agoIt is if they run your country and you're outside the bubble.
- v64 10y agoWho would you rather have running the country? The alternatives aren't even viable.
- sbmassey 10y agoIf that is the case, we should consider splitting the country up into more homogenous chunks
- marcoperaza 10y ago
- cb18 10y agoIt is a well documented strategy for left-leaning politicians to import voters through unchecked immigration in an attempt to create an unassailable electoral base. In this case, the politicians who "sow hatred, insecurity, fear and division for their own ends and don't care what mess they leave behind," are the leftists. See the rapid, shocking, galling decline of civil society in some western European countries in recent years. These mass immigration leftists sow hatred and insecurity when they act as if the natives of the western world(genetic Europeans,) are somehow in debt to the rest of the world for past sins. Strangely overlooking the fact that the entire modern world with all its convenience and affordances, huge improvements in health and nutrition etc. etc., are more or less entirely the product of Europeans. All peoples can look at some past actions with regret, but Europeans have clearly been a net positive on the world at an unprecedented scale. These mass immigration leftists sow fear and division when they support the importation of huge population groups with the bonkers notion that these groups will then start behaving along the societal norms of the country they've been imported to, rather than the country they came from. So the Trumpers are right, their country is being taken from them in this way. But before we get too far in the weeds on a patented HN thread of only the most tenuous relevance, Congratulations Bob!
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoWhen I click on link bait I feel like a pawn.
- cb18 10y agoAnd another example of how wrong you are about rising tensions in the US, how many times in recent years have we seen some huge clusterf*ck about a supposed murder in cold blood that turns out to be perfectly justifiable? (Where is any coverage of frequent and horrendous, totally unjustifiable black on white crimes?) It's gotten to the point where we see all pretence dispensed with and we now see regular race riots in the US when someone is justifiably killed by the police. All thanks to a get out the vote effort of Democrats and their media compatriots in the form of falsely portraying blacks as victims and stoking racial tensions, encouraging the tensions along with violence in many cases. And a deafening silence in public discussion about the huge disconnect in rates of black on white crime vs white on black. One must wonder, what is the endgame for these people? Facts can't stay hidden forever.
- jxramos 10y agoI like that pithy statement, Facts can't stay hidden forever. I have big dreams about big data proving various forms of rhetoric false and enumerating all the counter examples. For the time being I think we'll have to manually aggregate the examples like Heather MacDonald often does.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agoRandy Newman says that racism and bigotry are not just limited to southern politicians and that it is a universal problem, at least that's what he says with 'rednecks'; i think that Randy would really deserve the price, but you can't get one for humour/satire, as satire is considered to be a minor muse. My guess is that Dylan got the price because his generation is aging and they want a statement of that it all really mattered in the larger sense.
- Ma8ee 10y agoIt did matter in a larger sense. This is a so much better world than it was 60 years ago. We still have a long way to go, but imagine if we wouldn't have taken all the small steps that actually were taken, and imagine if we wouldn't have had the leaders and singers that gave us a direction.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agothe counterculture was very vocal and very interesting phenomenon, did a majority of the young people of the day subscribe to it? I don't think so. Did they really change things in a larger sense? Don't know, might be 'too early to say'.
- nl 10y agoI've often though Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changing was analogous to Barlow's 1996 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace[1] (not that I thought that was a great document, but it is a convenient symbol). The optimism and feeling of change was the same. The Altamont concert[2] was the end of that feeling in the 60's, just as the 2016 US election campaign has been the end of it now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independence_of_Cyberspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independe... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert