William Rivers Pitt: Hey! Woody Guthrie! I wrote You A Song.

Martin Scorsese has just finished compiling and directing a 3 1/2 hour film on Bob Dylan for PBS. It's great, by the way. Full of great live performances, lots of interesting interviews, and moments of real genius and inspiration. See it if you get the chance.

The film's first part was shown last night. This evening, as Part Two concluded and the credits began to run with Dylan, alone with his guitar, playing in the background, I came to the computer to see what had come in on the feeds and in e-mail. The first thing I pulled up was this article by William Rivers Pitt via TruthOut. I actually felt a little chill up my spine as it opened up on my screen.

In the first line, the title line, the name "Woody Guthrie" jumped out at me. Then I saw that the title itself was actually a line from a great Bob Dylan song called "Song For Woody". Further down, but before the body of the article itself, was this quote from that song:

" I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seein' your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny old world that's a-comin' along.
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn,
It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.

-- Bob Dylan, "Song for Woody"

It seemed like a moment of "serendipity", or "Fate", or (a couple of you will get this.....) Syzygy. Then I read the article, with Dylan in the background, and I had that distinct feeling of being seventeen years old again, as if I'd been transported back about thirty years. I also knew I had to pass this article on.

I moan and bellow a lot about how it seems we're being forced, by those with no respect for history (or even reality, I might add), to re-live history that happened within my lifetime, and that any fool with moderate eyesight and mediocre hearing should be able to remember and analyze. Pitt has said the same thing often. This article lays the truth out bluntly, but it also foresees a coming sea change in public opinion and the resultant political reality. He speaks of the nearly 500,000 people who descended on Washington D.C. over the last few days to join various groups in different locations for several days of anti-war protests and demonstrations. He also references all of the outrageous scandals now coming home to roost in the White House and at GOP Headquarters.

He concludes with the observation that the anti-war movement, which the Administration and the GOP are dismissing with Johnsonian myopia, has gained strength and momentum very quickly. His inferred hope is that, perhaps, the period between the rise of the anti-war movement and the actual ending of the war and re-shuffling of the political deck, might be shorter than the last time we went through it. He also intimates his feeling that the beginning of this great change might be just around the bend, might be, in fact, beginning right now.

Perhaps he's correct. At least, I hope he is.

LINK