November 4th is the U.S. release of Hacksaw Ridge, a film portraying part of the life of Desmond Doss, a U.S. Army Medic who would become the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honor.  Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist.  His church uses the term “conscientious participant.”

Just over a month later, on December 11th, Bob Dylan will accept the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.  He’s the first songwriter to have ever received it.  Considerable debate continues on if he deserves it.  I suppose it depends on one’s view of Dylan.

How to view Dylan is the subject of another a movie, a documentary directed by Martin Scorsese called No Direction Home.  It covers the period in the mid 1960s when Dylan left the folk scene which propelled him to prominence.  In one scene fellow songwriter, Joan Baez, delivers the following quote about Dylan and their one time relationship:

“I was feeling this political pull very strongly, and I was thinking what the two of us could do together as far as any kind of movement….Dylan wanted to do his music, and I wanted to do all this other stuff….He had given us by that point the greatest songs in our anti-war/civil rights arsenals.

 Thirty some years whenever I go to a march, sit-in, or lie-in, or jail-in, people always say ‘Is Bob coming?’ I say he never comes you moron. When are you going to get it? Never did, probably never will…I think he didn’t want to have to be the guy people were going to have to go to. The times then were cut and dried you were either for the war or against it…You were forced to take a side.”

The quote comes at a time when the camera has already caught several, including Baez, patting themselves on the back for bringing Dylan out of obscurity.  It’s also catching a sense of the bitterness his leaving left them with.  While Baez seems to suggest Dylan took the self-serving, easy way out, Scorsese’s camera as well as his title seem to point in a different direction.

It is as though Dylan chose to protest even the protestors, and traded in their self-congratulatory acknowledgement to continue to grow.  We see the hostility, isolation, and mental strain that result.  Perhaps Dylan’s songs have no “them” to direct our ire against.  Perhaps there is only an us, and that’s the side Dylan took.

The movie has a scene where Dylan is about to be honored by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in late 1963.  Dylan says about the dinner, “They were trying to build me up as a topical song writer. I was never a topical song writer to begin with. For whatever reason they were doing it was reasons that didn’t really apply to me.”

Scorsese delivers this quote from Dylan that evening, the only quote in Scorsese’s own voice:

“There is no black, white, left and right to me anymore. There is only up and down. And down is very close to the ground, and I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

Dylan could have dropped off the face of the earth to do that, but he didn’t.

In between Hacksaw Ridge and the Nobel Ceremony, lies the event currently dominating the news cycle.  One prominent American Evangelist has encouraged his followers to “hold their noses and vote.”  The trouble is that he isn’t really asking them to hold their nose; he is asking them to hold their conscience.

In conscience I was going to object to that particular race altogether.  Upon reflection I suppose I should try to find a way to participate.  Dylan’s lead would suggest we can do so by engaging the group we’re associated with instead of posturing towards the other one for a change.  Doss’ seems to suggest the same thing.  Perhaps in doing so, we grow.

Growth knows no party, and either seems to offer plenty of opportunity for it.

Does Bob Dylan deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for Literature?  Damn straight.  It isn’t his fault if we can’t read.

1965, working for himself:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8yU8wk67gY