Disease of Conceit

I need a shower.

For reasons I can't explain even to myself, I decided to actually go and read some of the Rightwingnutteriness on the blogosphere, and thought I'd start out with Newsweeks' fave, Powerline.

The same people (whose curious "handles," as noted before, such as "Hindrocket" and "The Big Trunk," as T-Bogg might say, bring out the inner Beavis in me...heh, heh) who recently claimed that former president Jimmy Carter had "gone over to the other side," are now daring to quote Bob Dylan.

Well, it's not "Desolation Row," but at Harvard they're selling postcards of the hanging. Everybody sing along:

Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.

What a maroon. Stick that "hindrocket" down your "big trunk" and fire, you idiot. You are not witty, erudite, or "cool." You do not have faintest clue what Dylan is getting at with that stanza.

As Michael Grey wrote in Song & Dance Man III, "Desolation Row" displays "a chaos of language, an amalgam to some degree of blues vernacular, impressionism, allegory and more." Still, the references are clear enough that I think that joking about "They're selling postcards from the hanging," a common enough bi-product of lynchings earlier in the 20th century, and including a reference to the "riot squad" being "restless," an extremely prescient idea, Gray also writes, for someone to take note of three years before the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, just underscores the depths of your Republicreep ignorance and your inability to actually think about the art you are defacing.

You are not "hep," or "with it." In fact, you "large pricks" who constantly claim treasonous ex-presidents are trying to sneak up your "hindrocket," listen to the rest of the tune 'cause this passage pretty well illustrates your world view.

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

But, of course, nothing suits these mouthbreathers quite like this.

There's a whole lot of people dying tonight
From the disease of conceit,
Whole lot of people crying tonight
From the disease of conceit,
Comes right out of nowhere
And you're down for the count
From the outside world,
The pressure will mount,
Turn you into a piece of meat,
The disease of conceit.

Conceit is a disease
That the doctors got no cure
They've done a lot of research on it
But what it is, they're still not sure

There's a whole lot of people in trouble tonight
From the disease of conceit,
Whole lot of people seeing double tonight
From the disease of conceit,
Give ya delusions of grandeur
And a evil eye
Give you idea that
You're too good to die,
Then they bury you from your head to your feet
From the disease of conceit.

Or, harkening back to an era and mindset with which these bloviators would feel more at home, how about trying on something more your size.

Well, I wus sittin' home alone an' started to sweat,
Figured they wus in my T.V. set.
Peeked behind the picture frame,
Got a shock from my feet, hittin' right up in the brain.
Them Reds caused it!
I know they did . . . them hard-core ones.

Well, I quit my job so I could work alone,
Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes.
Followed some clues from my detective bag
And discovered they wus red stripes on the American flag!
That ol' Betty Ross . . .

Keep your lying hands off of Bob Dylan, you asses. He signs off on no man's agenda; certainly not yours.

[End of rant]