ADVANCE NOTICE EVERYONE...
I am working on a one-act play. It has its origins in 'Stonehouse' Detterling's faking of his own death.
I suppose you could say it's Pinteresque. Then again, you could say it's Rattiganesque.
Cheers,
GENE
We live in a world of systemic evil. Asian and Latin American drug cartels produce and transport their merchandise with impunity because they have bought off or killed the public officials who would stop them and the journalists who would expose them. On the other side of the world, corner dealers battle for turf to sell to the wretched addicts who stumble and sleep on the sidewalks of American cities. Sex traffickers in Thailand entice vulnerable girls and boys into sex slavery and bribe politicians to turn a blind eye, as they sell perverse fantasies to thousands of wealthy Western sex tourists. Pharmaceutical companies conduct drug trials on unsuspecting Africans and collude with health regulators to cover their tracks. For most of our history, the United States deprived blacks of liberty, dignity, and political and legal rights.
Such injustices can’t be resolved by moral exhortation or by rescuing individuals, as important as exhortation and rescue are. Global systems are organized for the benefit of greedy brutes, and justice won’t be done until these systems are demolished. This is what creation longs for:
May the sea roar and all it contains,
The world and those who dwell in it.
May the rivers clap their hands,
May the mountains sing together for joy
Before Yahweh, for he is coming to judge the earth;
He will judge the world with righteousness
And the peoples with fairness (Ps. 98).
From Abraham on, the promise of justice is integral to Israel’s Messianic hope. “I have chosen Abraham,” Yahweh says on the day he announces Isaac’s birth to Sarah and discloses the fate of Sodom, “that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (Gen. 18:19). Abraham’s household is the anti-Sodom, a people that escapes the fire from heaven because it welcomes strangers instead of sodomizing them. Under the monarchy, Israel’s hope for justice focuses on a Davidic king who will judge the afflicted, save the needy, and crush the oppressor until justice falls like rain on mown grass (Ps. 72). Israel hopes for a king whose justice will brighten the fields like dawn after a night rain (2 Sam. 23:1–7), a king on Yahweh’s throne in Zion who will shatter murmuring nations like pottery (Ps. 2).
The monarchy ends in disaster, as Judah becomes another Sodom (Isa. 1). Yet the prophets hold out hope for an Abrahamic house of justice, ruled by a new David. “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,” Isaiah prophesies, and this royal child will establish the kingdom with justice and righteousness (Isa. 9). Girded with the belt of justice, the shoot from the stump of Jesse will be filled with the Spirit of wisdom to judge the poor and afflicted and to bring peace to God’s holy mountain (Isa. 11). Anointed with the Spirit, the royal Servant of Yahweh perseveres until he establishes justice in the earth (Isa. 42).
These are the hopes that animate Zecharias, who sings of God’s promise to Abraham and looks for deliverance from enemies, so Israel can live in justice and holiness (Luke 1:67–79). It’s the hope that inspires the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of revolution:
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever (Luke 1:49–55).
Advent commemorates, celebrates, and kindles hope for the justice of God. King Jesus has come and his Father has raised him to Zion’s throne to reign with a rod of iron until his enemies are made his footstool (1 Cor. 15:25; cf. Ps. 110). The promise of Advent is the promise of public justice. Advent announces the coming of the Lord who breaks the arms of the sex traffickers, the drug lords, the arms dealers, and all their respectable collaborators. It’s the hope that God will overturn worlds built on oppression and violence, and will rescue and raise up their victims.
The only good news that meets the needs of the world is the good news of God’s judgment. That’s the gospel of Advent, the joy to which the angels of Advent summon us: Rejoice! Shout joyfully! For the Lord comes to judge the earth. He has come; he will come; he will judge the world in justice and all the peoples with equity.
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute.
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By Philip Pullella
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© Reuters/REMO CASILLI Pope Francis holds weekly general audienceVATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis appealed on Sunday for authorities to "respect the humanity" of migrants and strive to help them, after Britain and France traded barbs over the deaths of 27 migrants as they tried to cross the Channel.
Francis dedicated nearly all of his Sunday message to the defence of migrants, telling several thousand people in St. Peter's Square that he felt pain over recent tragedies.
"Let us think of how many migrants are exposed in these very days to very grave dangers and how many lose their lives on our borders," he said.
"I feel pain when I hear news of the situation in which so many find themselves, those who died in the Channel, those at the border of Belarus, many of whom are children, those who drown in the Mediterranean," he said.
Francis raised his voice when he said "children".
After the drownings in the Channel, French President Emmanuel Macron told Britain it needed to "get serious" https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-interior-minister-cancels-meeting-with-uk-counterpart-french-media-2021-11-26 or remain locked out of discussions over how to curb the flow of migrants escaping war and poverty.
France later cancelled an invitation to British Home Secretary Priti Patel to attend a meeting on the issue on Sunday in Calais.
"I renew my heartfelt appeal to those who can contribute to the resolution of these problems, particularly civilian and military authorities, so that understanding and dialogue finally prevail over every type of exploitation and so that they direct their wills and efforts toward solutions that respect the humanity of these people," the Pope said.
Francis, who has made defence of migrants and refugees a cornerstone of his papacy, condemned traffickers. Migrants that had been returned to North Africa, he said, were reduced to slavery, with women sold and men tortured.
Brrr! Old Gene's Almanac comes this year with a winter warning: Prepare for a season of shivers. This winter will be punctuated by positively bone-chilling, below-average temperatures across most of the Britain.
“This coming winter could well be one of the longest and coldest that we’ve seen in years,” says Delia Detterling, editor of Old Gene's Almanac.
In some places, the super cold of the coming winter will also bring lots of snow. This extreme wintry mix is expected in all areas of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
In 1964, Bob Dylan penned a letter that reflected on the sudden fame he found himself thrust towards. His poetic script began: “[Sic] A LETTER FROM BOB DYLAN / for sis and gordon an all broads of good sizes / let me begin by not beginning / let me start not by startin but by continuing / it sometimes gets so hard for me — / I am now famous / I am now famous by the rules of public famiousity / it snuck up on me / an pulverized me… / I never knew what was happenin / it is hard for me t walk down the same streets / I did before the same way because now / I truly dont know / who is waitin for my autograph…”
He then poetically postulates: “I dont know if I like givin my autograph / oh yes sometimes I do… / but other times the back of my mind tells me / it is not honest… / for I am just fulfilling / a myth t somebody who’d actually treasure my / handwritin more’n his own handwritin… / this gets very complicated for me / an proves t me that I am livin in a contradiction… / t quote mr froyd / I get quite paranoid / an I know this isn’t right / it is not a useful healthy attitude for one t have / but I truly believe that everybody has their fears / everybody yes everybody…”
This very notion would be one that Dylan mused on throughout his explosive 1960s period, culminating the full regress of New Morning, his 1970 record that disavowed all the political prose and ‘voice of a generation’ posturing for which he had become known. He had only been 23 years old when the weight of the world landed on his shoulders and this step aside was a move that helped to reclaim his youth, as he once sang: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger now.”
In short, as one of Dylan’s favourite songwriters, the masterful Randy Newman once wrote: “It’s lonely at the top!” However, when you’ve been perched at the lofty peak for a while, you can be a bit more wily with the way you navigate it. In the end, Dylan eschewed the full glare of fame and found a way to do Dylan things all the same.
During his born-again Christian phase of the late 1970s / early 80s, he embarked on a particularly singular hobby. When Dylan was delving fully into the realm of Christianity, Keith Green was the foremost musician in this circle. In fact, Green had even been described as the Christian John Lennon.
In the Biography No Compromise: The Life of Keith Green, there is a section when Green’s wife, Melody, recalls that Dylan would drive around with her late husband. “He told us that he loved to pick up hitchhikers and tell them about Jesus. They never recognised him because they drove a beat-up old car and he wore a knit ski hat over his famous curls,” she writes.
With a dented fender and the car strewn with a hoarders slew of knick-knacks and throwaways; the unsuspecting hitchhikers overlooked the driver sharing Dylan’s voice of sand and glue or else they found the whole thing a little too wild to reconcile. Thus, Dylan was free to simply plough along the long roads with his friend extolling the world of Christ as he pleased. You can only imagine the wry smile he would’ve sported if he had popped up on the radio.
Not long after Covid-19 began its insidious spread, Bob Dylan struck. At nine minutes past midnight on March 27, 2020 the 78-year-old singer-songwriter released his first piece of original music in nearly eight years: “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute long song-poem (it doesn’t really have a melody) about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It was counterintuitive marketing to say the least. For a world contemplating the imminent catastrophe of a global pandemic, Dylan offered a raspy rap about a distant catastrophe that redirected the course of history when most living Americans were unborn. A savvy promoter, Dylan saw “Murder Most Foul” become his first No. 1 song on the Billboard charts.
When I asked Yale literature professor David Bromwich about “Murder Most Foul,” he called it a palinode, a poem of retraction, written against the hopes raised by the 1960s and by Dylan himself. I never knew the term but it fits. In the course of a quarter of an hour, Dylan retracts his first thoughts on the subject of who killed JFK, which he uttered when he was just 22 years old, a rising star from Minnesota via the coffee houses of Greenwich Village.
The back story of “Murder Most Foul” begins three weeks after the liberal president was shot dead in Dallas under suspicious circumstances. In early December 1963, Dylan appeared at the banquet of a left-liberal group, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to accept an award for his musical contribution to the civil rights movement, Dylan shocked the respectable crowd by saying he saw something of himself in the man accused of killing Kennedy. The young Dylan didn’t doubt the official story of a lone gunman. He embraced it.
“I have to be to be honest,” he said. “I just got to be, as 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.” [Boos and hisses] As he took grief for his careless comments, Dylan retreated from the unwanted role of generational spokesman, plugged in his electric guitar, and the rest is rock and roll history
The critical reaction of “Murder Most Foul” echoed the familiar range of responses from “He’s over the hill” to “He’s still a genius.” NPR took note of Dylan’s encyclopedic command of American popular music, listing 72 songs that he namechecks while brooding about the impact of JFK’s assassination on himself and on American culture. The New Yorker’s critic dismissed Dylan’s dirge as “a doggerel version of Don McLean’s eight-and-a-half minute pseudo-epic ‘American Pie,’” with aspirations to “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Is our poet laureate historically correct about JFK? I think so, but thanks to the CIA’s refusal to obey the law, the question cannot be definitively answered.What annoyed Kevin Dettmar and other critics is that Dylan has changed his mind about the annoying question of who killed JFK. The Nobel Prize laureate has landed, once again, on the wrong side of respectable opinion. The older and wiser Dylan no longer assumes Oswald was guilty of killing the president. In fact, he doubts the supposed assassin killed anyone on November 22, 1963. On this, the 58th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, “Murder Most Foul” is a richly imagined reminder of what we do and do not know about the causes of Kennedy’s death—and why we do not know.
Dylan opens with a portentous cliché that packs a presidential punch.
Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63
A day that will live on in infamy
Dylan is channeling President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, declared “this is day that will live in infamy.” Now an elder statesman of American culture, Dylan urges us to recognize that November 22, like December 7, was an attack on the American nation. And if that claim makes you uneasy—if you want to believe the reassuring official story that Kennedy was killed by one man alone for no reason—he has achieved his purpose.
“Murder Most Foul” is a worthy addition to Dylan’s catalogue of songs about murder and justice undone. It’s a theme—almost a genre—that the ten-time Grammy award winner has returned to time and again. From “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” to “George Jackson” to “Hurricane” to “Blind Willie McTell,” Dylan wailed about the cruelty of racial injustice in America. To be sure, “Murder Most Foul” is not a song about systemic racism. Rather, it is a meditation about racism’s kissing cousin, unchecked power.
Dylan, the troubadour, plants his listeners in the presidential motorcade snaking through sunlit downtown Dallas.
President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high
Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die
Dylan, the poet, dares to put us inside the doomed president’s head as the motorcade enters Dealey Plaza.
Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb
He said, “Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?”
And Dylan, the prophet, leaves no doubt where he stands in the perennial conspiracy debate.
Of course we do, we know who you are
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car
Dylan refers ten more times in “Murder Most Foul” to the “they” whom he believes killed Kennedy. He doesn’t pretend to know who was responsible, doesn’t name names. He’s a bard, not a conspiracy theorist. He can only identify JFK’s unknown assailants their most obvious traits: their evident desire to end his presidency, their arrogance (“we know who you are”), and their clandestine powers.
The gunfire on November 22, Dylan moans, was an act of prestidigitation.
It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
Greatest magic trick ever under the sun.
Dylan doesn’t wrap up his JFK obsession in a tidy package labelled conspiracy or tragedy. His watches Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination and is disgusted with himself.
It’s vile and deceitful
It’s cruel and it’s mean
Ugliest thing that you ever have seen.
He channels Oswald, who denied shooting the president before he was executed in police custody. “I’m just a patsy, Like Patsy Cline / never shot anybody from in front or behind.” And he shares the bafflement of any sane person who has studied November 22 with care. He might be talking to the bottom of his whiskey glass when he sighs, “What is the truth and where did it go? / Ask Ruby and Oswald, they ought to know.” And the critics ask, who cares what this old man thinks? “If they weren’t written by Dylan,” Dettmar wondered, “would anyone take lines like these seriously?”
In excavating the murders in Dallas, Dylan merely makes sense of American history and his own work. November 22 was a crime, not a tragedy. (“Take the rag away from your face/Now’s not the time for your tears.”) The truth was inconvenient to the powers that be. (“The newspapers, they all went along for the ride.”) And the deceptions November 22 damaged the country. “What’s new, pussycat? / What’d I say? / I said the soul of a nation been torn away.”)
The second half of “Murder Most Foul” morphs into an extended plea to Wolfman Jack, the reigning radio DJ of Dylan’s youth, to play songs that somehow evoke the life and death of President Kennedy which Dylan weaves into a historical tapestry of Hollywood, the blues, classic rock, and civil war anthems to ask, what is justice undone? And so his lament coasts to its sanguinary end.
Play darkness and death will come when it comes
Play “Love Me Or Leave Me” by the great Bud Powell
Play “The Blood-stained Banner”
Play “Murder Most Foul”
Yet the JFK assassination story goes on. Last month, late on a Friday night (when White House media managers take out their smelliest garbage in hopes the stench will pass by Monday morning), the Oval Office issued a letter from President Biden saying the CIA and other federal agencies would not release the last of their secret files related to JFK’s assassination until December 2022, at the earliest. Covid was to blame, it was said.
Poof. “It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise / Right there in front of everyone’s eyes.” The CIA had made its JFK files disappear once again! For the second time in four years, the Agency dodged its statutory obligation under the 1992 JFK Records Act to release all assassination-related material within 25 years. Portions of more than 15,000 JFK files, most of them held by the CIA, are still off-limits to the citizenry, These files are known to include information on CIA assassination plots, Oswald in New Orleans, surveillance techniques, and “black operations” in November 1963.
Which makes you wonder, if the CIA is still hiding its JFK files, is it actually possible that the 35th president killed by enemies with clandestine powers within his own—our own—government? It’s a radical thought. The preponderance of evidence supports Dylan but all the facts are not yet available. Is our poet laureate historically correct about JFK? I think so, but thanks to the CIA’s refusal to obey the law, the question cannot be definitively answered.
Dylan’s purpose is plain. He takes his title from Act I of Hamlet, in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells his son that he did not die a natural death, that he was poisoned—assassinated—by his ambitious wife and her lover. The mind-boggling treachery of a “murder most foul,” says the ghost, must be avenged. Hamlet must act, he says.
I am thy father’s spirit
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night.
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purge away.
Dylan, the Shakespearean, has cast himself in the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Now 80 years old, rich as a king and launched on his “Rough and Rowdy” tour, he sure sounds like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Who cares what he thinks? A senior citizen and a grandfather, Dylan still cares about “the foul crimes done in my days of nature,” and he wants us—the Hamlets of the next generation—to care, to act, to somehow avenge this unsolved crime.
Dylan returns this November 22 as a visitor from a past many can’t remember (and others don’t care to remember too closely), a spectral presence haunting the halls of power where the last of the JFK files are stashed, perhaps permanently, beyond the view of the American people, the greatest magic trick under the sun.
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