I had just turned 16, and my father had planned for years to take me on a cross-country road trip when I could drive. So we set out on an 8000-mile, 25-day trip with 10 CDs in the car. Three of them were Bob Dylan. Two were the best of and the third was “freewheeling.” Musically, I was familiar with Hendrix, the Stones, and the Animals from my father’s record collection, but I hadn’t yet listened to Bob Dylan.
At first it grated on me. It was 2000, and I was a teenager and growing at least somewhat interested in the angry music that was popular at the time, like Slipknot. At first, Bob Dylan didn’t appeal to me, but then “masters of war” came on.
From the first notes, the song seethed with anger in a way I had never experienced before. Bob Dylan himself said the song startled him.
Often, antiwar art can be misinterpreted by its audience. As a young man, I was completely blind to the messages in movies I loved like “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon.” But as a critic said, it was “the bluntest condemnation in Dylan's songbook, a torrent of plain speaking pitched at a level that even the objects of its bile might understand it”
I was particularly struck by the line “..for threatening my baby, unborn and unnamed..” His son Jakob was familiar to me for his own hit “one headlight” with his band The Wallflowers, and something about the connection between Bob Dylan and his concern for his unborn child struck me particularly clearly.
This was one of the first times I Imagined that our military and its wars could affect us here at home, and it was one of the first moments my mind opened to the idea that one could be strong, and even angry, yet prefer peace to violence.
It took me many more years and countless revisitations of this song, but each time I find it more rewarding. That song was recorded in 1963, and nearly 60 years later the song is every bit as relevant today.
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
We are in the midst of a multibillion dollar update to our nuclear arsenal, while tensions with nuclear armed powers escalate and arms treaties expire.
Even more now than in the 1960s, war seems sanitized and our weapons have lost their stigma of fear, becoming normalized. When our soldiers die, they are boxed up, draped in a flag, and sent home with honors/
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
The truth is that even if there are fewer “unknown soldiers’ buried in the mud,’ death is every bit as ghastly. And even if it is sanitized for the cameras, the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in these wars still suffer and are buried in shallow graves.
We must all see through the mask again and refuse to accept the sanitized vision of modern warfare.