(“…… the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform./An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.” – Weldon Kees.1940)

“IDIOT WIND”	recorded by Bob Dylan

December 27, 1974	50 years old today.

A masterpeice a messterpeice of fractured emotions and traces of deep love (“Sweet lady ……. a lone soldier on the cross (who) won the wars after losin’ every battle ……. Down the road to ecstasy/I followed you beneath the stars/Hounded by your memory/And all your ragin’ glory ……. }

 

What I hear Dylan sing is “Yediot Wind”

What is that? A condemnation of you, the others who are “educated”, is what it feels like to me.

But the you turns to we “Blowing through the buttons of our coats/Blowing through the letters that we wrote/Yediot wind …….”

Like so much that is great in America, the song is a howling tribute to America’s endless capacity to critique and then correct herself ……..

You have to get bile like this out to build something better.

You have to let this gale blow away stupidity.

Listen.

Listen.

Think.

Learn?

Geoff Fox, in awe, 27th December, 2024, Melbourne, Australia

2 postscripts

“Dylan was later to say that “Idiot Wind” was “a song I wanted to make as a painting”. – Wikipedia

Dylan said about it in 1985: “I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with “Idiot Wind” … I didn’t really think I was giving away too much; I thought that it seemed so personal that people would think it was about so-and-so who was close to me. It wasn’t … I didn’t feel that one was too personal, but I felt it seemed too personal. Which might be the same thing, I don’t know.” – Wikipedia

 

Weldon Kees in his poem “June 1940″ : ” ……. the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform./An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.”