Wednesday, July 22, 2009
It would be interesting to try and expand on the idea, but I probably won't. Even so, I'll throw it out there: Sarah Palin lives in something closer to the "old, weird America" that Greil Marcus says is Dylan's great subject than any of us do. Dylan may be an Obama fan, but Palin is closer to his subject matter. There are divides in his work, when you think about it. "Like A Rolling Stone", "Positively 4th Street" "She's Your Lover Now" -- songs like that, directed at former lovers, versus the more tender, rueful songs is one such, and although it is fun to think about a Dylan song about Sarah Palin in the vein of "Idiot Wind" that's not how I think he'd approach the topic. She's more like someone who might appear in "Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", or a character he might have run into when he was workin' for a while on a fishing boat outside of Delacroix. He could capture her in a couplet in "Maggie's Farm", and it is tempting to try and come up with what that might look like.
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