Selling a Vision Ofthe Goldenwest

THE UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND PEOPLE AND IDEAS FOR WINTER 201 6 A m m Selling a vision of the golden West PLUS: Knowledge and its limits • From the archives: Lyle Ford Drushel ' 12 ! . Ill Changing times, Sfe 01 tjr and things unchanged v • o «9 K > For a lot of reasons, 1 have been thinking powerful song that seems to me a companion a good deal about time lately. About what piece to “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” O 1L p ft* changes, and what remains. About begin and one that has special resonance for me i.B nings and endings, and what comes next. these days: “Tilings Have Changed.” The a During the last week of fall-semester classes, song appeared on a movie track (Wonder I made a guest appearance in Professor Nancy Boys) and earned Bob an Academy Award and A Bristows class on the 1960s (I was exhibit A) a Golden Globe for Best Original Song, * and was interviewed on KUPS about Wood- Like its predecessor, “Tilings Have stock (yup, I was there); a few days later, over Changed” is a meditation on time and its the holiday break, I took a nostalgic stroll changes. The first song looked forward, this on the boardwalk back home—a place that one looks back. Here again, Dylan affirms was once the glittering pleasure paradise of the transformative effects of times rushing the Jersey shore and is now a shabby, hollow torrent. But now he offers us no call to skeleton of what once was. Ravages of time. action, no advice about swimming through, It’s the end of the year, too, the beginning of no warning about getting out of the way if another, and the start of my final semester at we can’t lend a hand: “Lot of water under Puget Sound, completing nearly a half cen the bridge,” he says in a tone of resignation tury of being in college. to the forces of time, “lot of other stuff, too. Inevitably, Bob Dylan has been on my The eager embrace of the changes coming is mind, too. replaced with a cynical acceptance of the way “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” He things are. No more talk about the loser’s let us in on this in 1963, making clear in luck turning to winning. Now it seems that his own inimitable way what was happening “some things are too hot to touch” and “the all around us. He was reminding us, at that human mind can only stand so much,” so the particularly pivotal moment in our history, singer can only conclude, “you can’t win with of an essential truth about time that was a losing hand.” first articulated by Heraclitus in the sixth What happened? The anthem of the first century BCE: Time changes things, and it song became an anathema in the second. You changes you. You have to keep up with it or might just say that things have changed— it will wash you away. Once you “admit that with a vengeance. the waters around you have grown” (and it’s To me, the songs together suggest some- always so evident that they have), “you better thing else, too—something that connects start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.” them and their times (and the songwriter) We are immersed in time. in a complementary way. It’s in how time is That’s the warning Bob offered, plain treated differently in the choruses. The first even to a 14-year-old like me at the time. affirms that time is about change. In the Looking to the changes that would surely second, however, “things” change rather than come in the days ahead—particularly at the “the times.” Now “People are crazy,” the latter end of the 1960s, an era that he sang so elo chorus notes, “and times are strange.” Time is quently about while “the wheel” was "still in unfamiliar, inexplicable, seemingly unknow spin”—Dylan predicted that a fundamental able. Things may have changed, but the times reversal of fortunes was sweeping in like a really haven’t changed all that much. flood with that decade’s rising tide of social Between the beginning of the 1960s and currents: “The loser now will be later to win,” the end of the millennium, between the first he declared, just as sure as “the present now song and the second, almost 40 years of time will later be past” and “the first one now will passed. A lot of water (and other stuff) under later be last.” the bridge, for sure. But with respect to the At the turn of the millennium, almost 40 things that matter, the things the latter song years later, Dylan wrote and recorded another considers “too hot to touch”—war and peace, On the cover: reproduction of orange crate label courtesy Orange County Archives. I” I from the president social justice and civil rights, human com and Baltimore and St. Louis to South appearance and history deprive people of ; passion and religious tolerance—not much Carolina and New York and Chicago. color in our society of personhood, of dig progress has been made. Strange. From the Black Lives Matter: It must be said. The nity, of protection, of respect, of acceptance, commencement of the modern civil rights fact is, black lives in America have a life and even of life in the eyes of many—of movement in 1960s America, with its dreams expectancy five years shorter than white being worth something. of peace, love, and understanding, through lives, a higher unemployment rate, a higher For many in places of privilege, this to todays ubiquitous expressions of war, prej poverty rate, a higher incarceration rate, and deprivation can be invisible or repressed or udice, hostility, extremism, and violence, we a lower graduation rate from college—and simply denied. Even if it is too hot to touch, just haven’t come very far. the gaps have widened rather than narrowed this, too, is a truth that must be exposed and The historical displacement between since the 1960s. Far from self-evident, the asserted—insisted upon. I am. I am some these two moments in time makes me think insistence of the phrase “Black Lives Mat body. I matter. I am here. I deserve to live. My of another “song” we often hear sung with a ter” and the determination to make it true black life matters. combination of despair and determination is an absolute necessity in these strange It also strikes me that those two phrases, these days, a song that, like Dylans, evokes times. Some things have changed; and many like the two Dylan songs, are important the 1960s for me. “Black Lives Matter” is a things have strangely only gotten worse. markers in my own life experience in the chorus intoned over and over in our streets “I Am Somebody.” I first heard this academy, from my first years as a college and on our campuses (including our own), “song” as a young college student on a Sat student in Chicago in the ’60s, to my years and it has earned a particularly urgent cur urday morning in the fall of 1968. It was as a professor in Chicago in the ’80s, then rency over the last two years. The phrase spoken, actually, in a dramatic call-and- in Cambridge and Hartford, Conn., in the would seem to be, it should be, an unneces response performance in an old auditorium ’90s, and finally, as a college president here in sary statement to make in the wake of the in a run-down section on the West Side of Tacoma for the last 12 years. A lot of water changes brought about in our society by the Chicago, where I stood with classmates who under the bridge for me over that time, a lot civil rights legislation of the last half century. had brought me there. A gospel choir sang of other stuff, too. The words would seem to be a redundancy. A and swayed before us as a young minister And as I look back I think Bob had it self-evident truth. Of course black lives mat and activist named Jesse Jackson stepped to right—both times. Times are strange. Always ter. Right? the podium, and led us—in the dramatic have been. But they are also changing. But times are strange. What is all too and charismatic way only he could—in a Always will. Many things have changed, to evident about the times in which we now complete, almost hymn-like, recitation of be sure, and not all of them for the better. live is that the phrase has become an essential the powerfully simple poem from the 1950s But I believe firmly that the wheel is still in declaration to make in the face of evidence written by the Rev. William H. Borders, spin. That we’d better keep swimming, and opposing the truth it affirms. That black lives senior pastor of Atlanta’s Wheat Street we can. That we’d better continue to learn to do not matter—to our institutions of law and Baptist Church. The poem’s last stanzas understand why times are strange, and we’d order, to our justice system, to the funda go like this: better do something—do more—about it; mental structures that compose our society— and we will. would in fact seem to be the more evident I Am Somebody You cannot be in higher education and truth when we look around us.

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