In all of the uproar about how the stinky porta-potty at Bob Dylan’s Malibu compound is making his neighbors ill, has no one stopped to think about the rank (pardon the pun) hypocrisy on the part of Dylan, who made his fortune singing songs about the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the haves versus the have-nots?
In this Red Pepper article reviewing the politics of Dylan’s music during the 1960s, we learn that…
‘Maggie’s Farm’ – booed by purists at the Newport folk festival – fuses class and generational rage in an uncompromising renunciation of wage labour. Here the power of the employers is propped up by ideology (“She talks to all the servants about man and God and law”) and the state (“the National Guard stands around her door”.) The social order is experienced as intrusive, deceitful, inimical to the individual’s need for self-definition. “I try my best to be just like I am/ but everybody wants you to be just like them.”
These themes were also explored in ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’, Dylan’s epic indictment of a society built on hypocrisy and greed (“money doesn’t talk it swears”). Here consciousness is the battleground; it’s where the individual struggles to extract some autonomy from the all-pervading corruption of a society ruled by commodities. (all emphasis mine)
Dylan scholars may be shocked to discover that this outhouse isn’t the result of Dylan’s love of the environment (fellow celebrities Sheryl Crow and Drew Barrymore have both displayed an affinity for more earth-pleasing defecation), but is for the sole use of his employees. Now I understand that maybe he doesn’t want people traipsing in and out of the house day and night, but couldn’t he afford to build a nicer outdoor facility with running water? Seeing as how he was able to bypass handicap accessibility requirements to build a guard house by promising not to hire any handicapped people, surely he could have gotten permission to build a decent restroom for the hard-working security guards hired to protect Dylan from Malibu riff raff.
As an employer, shouldn’t Dylan be using his power for the good of his employees? What about the social order that keeps those security guards from using the nicer facility inside the house, complete with quilted toilet tissue and scented liquid soap? Yet they’re relegated to an outhouse, the smell of which is offensive to Dylan’s well-heeled neighbors. If it smells that bad in the yard next door, imagine how bad the smell is inside the outhouse? And what about that “uncompromising renunciation of wage labor?” It’d be interesting to know how much the security guards are paid and what kind of bennies they receive…
Dylan, like so many other Baby Boomer lefties whose existence was devoted – either violently or non-violently – to tearing down society and sticking it to The Man, seems to have sold out. (Just check out William Ayers, hawking his book in the capitalist system he tried to destroy, and running to the cops for protection, forgetting his terrorist activities meant to maim and kill the police.) Dylan made his pile, moved to Malibu, and is now part of the establishment he so despised back in the day. And like many celebrities, he has plenty to say to the rest of us about how the world should be, but when it comes to his own activities, well, it’s just none of your business, peon.
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