*I missed this when it came out the other day. * *This song, for all its darkness, is a hopeful sign from Dylan—to recognize **hard truths * *is the way forward for us all—and we all **need signs of hope right now, so we can fight* *our way out of this. *
*MCM* Bob Dylan’s Midnight Message to JFK’s Ghost https://www.globalresearch.ca/bob-dylan-midnight-message-jfk-ghost/5708145 By Edward Curtin <https://www.globalresearch.ca/author/edward-curtin> Global Research, March 31, 2020 Region: USA <https://www.globalresearch.ca/region/usa> Theme: History <https://www.globalresearch.ca/theme/culture-society-history> , Law and Justice <https://www.globalresearch.ca/theme/law-and-justice> *“For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.” – Hamlet* *On May 1, 1962, President John Kennedy was meeting in the Oval Office with a group of Quakers who were urging him to do more for peace and disarmament. As he kept explaining the great political opposition he was facing within his own government, they kept urging him to do more. He listened very closely to their words and finally said, “You believe in redemption don’t you.” By the next spring he had turned decisively toward the peacemaking the Quakers had urged upon him, resulting in his murder in the fall by treacherous government forces, led by the CIA, that opposed him all along.* Now that Dylan has burst forth from behind his many masks and gifted the world with his incandescent new song about the assassination, with a title taken from *Hamlet*, from the mouth of the ghost of the dead King of Denmark –“ Murder Most Foul <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18> “– we have entered a new day in an odd way. For those who have wondered over the years if Dylan had “sold out,” here is their answer. For those who have wondered if he would go to his grave reciting the words of T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock – “I am no Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be” – here is Hamlet’s booming response. Not only does this song lay bare the truth of the most foundational event in modern American history, but it does so in such a powerfully poetic way and at such an opportune time that it should redeem Dylan in the eyes of those who ever doubted him. I say “should,” but while the song’s release has garnered massive publicity from the mainstream media, it hasn’t taken long for that media to bury the truth of his words about the assassination under a spectacle of verbiage meant to damn with faint praise. As the media in a celebrity culture of the spectacle tend to do, the emphasis on the song’s pop cultural references is their focus, with platitudes about the assassination and “conspiracy theories,” as well as various shameful and gratuitous digs at Dylan for being weird, obsessed, or old. As the song says, “they killed him once and they killed him twice,” so now they can kill him a third time, and then a fourth ad infinitum. And now the messenger of the very bad news must be dispatched along with the dead president. The media like their Hamlets impotent and enervated, but Dylan has come out roaring like a bull intent on avenging his dead president. He has the poet’s touch, of course, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic that draws you into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truth. In many ways he’s like the Latin American magical realist writers who move from fact to dream to the fantastic in a puff of wind. Dylan is our Emerson. His artistic philosophy has always been about movement in space and time through song. Always moving, always restless, always seeking a way back home through song, even when, or perhaps because, there are no directions. “An artist has got to be careful never to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere,” he’s said. “You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming and as long as you can stay in that realm, you’ll be alright.” Hope Moves In Shadowy And Offbeat Places: Bob Dylan, Death, And The Creative Spirit <https://www.globalresearch.ca/hope-moves-in-shadowy-and-offbeat-places-bob-dylan-death-and-the-creative-spirit/5550823> Sounds like living, right. Sounds like Emerson, also. “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. Thus one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes.” “Murder Most Foul” is Dylan’s soul becoming*. * *Click on the link for the rest.* -- If you appreciate News From Underground, please consider making a donation — either a one-time gift or a monthly subscription: http://markcrispinmiller.com/support/ Thank you for your support. Ways to unsubscribe: 1) send a blank email to [email protected] PLEASE NOTE: you must unsubscribe using the SAME email with which you subscribed 2) go to http://groups.google.com/group/newsfromunderground and click on the "Unsubscribe or change membership" link in the yellow bar at the top of the page, then click the "Unsubscribe" button on the next page. For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "News From Underground" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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