Apparition I
The year 1973, according to George Packer, was when the American Century arrived at the beginning of its drawn-out end. The Unwinding, Packer’s award-winning diagnosis of the nation’s current malaise (published 2013), argued that as soon as the Middle East oil embargo coincided with the US reaching peak oil, the conditions were in place for the whole thing to unravel. The “whole thing” here was the Roosevelt Republic, which for almost half a century had delivered the institutions and structures that allowed Americans to go to bed secure in the knowledge that God loved them—if they could trust in their bosses to protect their jobs, and if they could trust in their bankers to protect their savings, all was right with the world. But in 1973, with hardly anyone paying attention, the trust was broken. “The void,” wrote Packer, “was filled by the default force in American life, organised money.”
In December 1974, in a recording studio in Minneapolis, an appliance salesman's son bent into a microphone and summed up in three lines what Packer would one day take the length of a book to say. “Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped/ What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top/ You’re on the bottom...”
Wind”, the fourth track on the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, the rest of us have been playing catch up. Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman on 24 May 1941, had intuited the future in that song, which perhaps was why he’d gift-wrapped it in imagery redolent of the visionary works of William Blake and Saint John the Divine. In the second verse there’s a “lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door”, while the third verse has a priest wearing black on the seventh day, a guy sitting “stone-faced” as a building burns.
No longer, it seems, are we talking about the undoing of Roosevelt’s promise to every white male Christian citizen of America. Out in prophet country, where only one writer/poet in every three or four generations gets access, the fates of nations do not count as fit subject matter for artistic treatment. In this realm, a nation is only useful for the insight it grants to the collective human soul, and so Dylan must be writing about damage on a much grander scale. The building burning on the seventh day? Welcome to the apocalypse.
Either that, or as Bob’s son Jakob Dylan once suggested, “Idiot Wind” is a song about his parents fighting.
Apparition II
The year 1987, according to the BBC, was when the world’s Cold War superpowers vowed to reverse the damage done by the nuclear arms race. On 8 December of that year, after a three-day summit in Washington, US President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev put their signatures on the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which aimed to destroy all medium- and shorter-range nuclear weapons capable of hitting European targets.
Reagan termed the signing of the treaty the realisation of “an impossible vision”, while Gorbachev said it had “universal significance for mankind”.
Dylan, meanwhile, was about fifteen months away from laying down