Viral Spring #20: Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie 

                           your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

In this apocalyptic time, as America is revealed in all her shame and beauty, an old man dreamed a dream: 

I was walking the wrong way on Grand Central Parkway --- a road without a sidewalk -- making my way against a tide of traffic speeding into New York.  My clothes were filthy, my shoes battered.  

A voice said stop, wake up, before you get hit by a car and killed.  But another voice No, keep going, walk the walk.  I kept going.   

The first voice said watch out, here comes a truck.  I walked through the truck and it vanished. Then I knew the dreamer was not a bum going the wrong way, but a spirit bound for glory.   

Friend of the Poor

-- By Tom Phillips

Bob Dylan is a serial disappointer, and that is part of what's kept him thriving as an artist for six decades.  A Swedish friend tells me his nation is deeply hurt that Dylan declined to come to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature.  But this is just one of a long series of disappointments and shocks to his fans -- going back to the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, when the left's favorite folk-singer came out with a snarl and an electric guitar.  

In 1967, after a year's hiatus attributed to a mysterious accident, he again came out with a new style that distressed his followers.  Suddenly Dylan's words and music seemed thin and spare -- compared to the hard rock and smoldering satire that began in Newport and culminated with "Blonde on Blonde."