Bob Dylan, 1960's obsession, and Iraq
Is it just me, or does all of Anglophone culture seem to be overdosing on Bob Dylan nostalgia? Most of this media saturation is due, of course, to Martin Scorsese’ new biography of Dylan, in what must surely be one of the better run PR campaigns of the new millennium. Oddly, most of the media discussion has followed faithfully Scorsese’ narrative of Dylan’s life: from obscurity to his peak moment of fame, culminating in an act of rebellion (Dylan’s famous interaction with the “Judas” heckler), and ignoring many of Dylan’s later (more complex) artistic works. To me, having grown up in the perpetual political and cultural shadow of the baby-boom generation, all this seems a bit hedonistic and self-congratulatory. It’s part of a general 1960’s obsession that both the right and the left share.
This obsession is particularly dangerous with Iraq. The central metaphor driving all discussion is “Iraq = Vietnam.” Liberals are happy to drive home this metaphor to increase public opposition to the war in Iraq. Conservatives reify the metaphor by so insistently denying it. Everyone in the U.S. seems to base their arguments on it. While this is understandable, given the psychic scars to Americans from the Vietnam debacle, it seems ludicrously odd to those in other countries. The domino theory of communism has given rise to the reverse domino theory of democracy, and while this argument may make sense in America because of the Vietnam experience, it seems bizarre elsewhere.
There are substantial differences between Vietnam and Iraq, in the geopolitical realities, in the mode of combat, and in the terrain. I worry that Americans are so caught up with the Vietnam metaphor that we are blind to ways in which it is untrue. And by tying into the metaphor, the anti-war movement has reignited some of the cultural issues of the 1960’s that simply don’t apply now, when the movement is more age-diverse than in the 1960’s. Truthfully, there is no way the protests against the war will achieve the chaos of those against Vietnam- nor should we aspire to that. I don’t have a solution for this mismatch, except to suggest we put forth other metaphors. Let’s talk about Britain’s experiences in Iraq during their colonial occupation- those experiences are far more relevant to what is going on today in Iraq than anything that happened a generation ago in Vietnam.
