http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4WmBiSA5XU&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Dylan hit a nerve for me, opened a door into a trove of barely distant memories when I was a grade-schooler and would be told to huddle under my desk in case of attack. I had grown up with Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove and had lived through the endless grade-B Japanese horror films where everything was mutated from some form of radiation. I had seen the photo spreads in Life showing people who built bomb shelters in their back yard. The fact is, I was frightened by it all. Now it was being put to me that there were people out there who were responsible for this. 1 started to get angry.
Dylan sings on, his voice raspy and aggressive,
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
The fear to bring children into the world.
Dylan’s emotion resonated. His point seemed unanswerable, and I got angrier. (There’s more power in these lines sung than read. Someone out there was lining his pockets creating weapons that could incinerate continents. And this had been going on all my life.
Inexorably, it was getting to be our turn. I was born in 1945, right after Hiroshima. When I was almost seventeen I got to live through the Cuban missile crisis just one teenage American, terrified that I, my whole family, and my country would soon be a pile of dust. 1 was nineteen when I first listened to “Masters of War.” It seemed a reasonable age to start to protest having one’s entire life pre-empted. FROM AN AMERICAN STORY
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