Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/5/2010

Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/5/2010Bob Dylan’s boot heels won’t be wanderin’ to China during this year’s world tour. It seems that the Chinese government took a look at Mr. Dylan’s curriculum vitae, noticed his status as a “countercultural icon”, and decided to declare the Bard of Brooklyn persona non grata in the People’s Republic.

This is richly ironic, considering the esteem in which Mr. Dylan and his idol Woody Guthrie always held Red China, Red Russia, Red Cuba, Red Vietnam, and all the other Red Paradises that littered the 20th century with corpses and human misery.

Do you think he needs a weatherman to know the direction of the heavenly wind?

Thanks to C. Cantoni, CSP, Gaia, Insubria, JD, KGS, Sean O’Brian, TB, Zenster, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

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5 thoughts on “Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/5/2010

  1. Baron, Bob Dylan may have penned quite a few overtly naive pacifist songs in his youth and had a fixation with outlaw imagery, but to my knowledge he has never been easily categorized as a leftist, much less held any romantic notions about communist dictatorships.

    During his conservative Christian phase around 1980 he even wrote “Karl Marx has got ya by the throat, Henry Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots. When you gonna wake up ….?”

    Being that easy to categorize as a symphatizer of Communist regimes would, as far as my knowledge goes, run counter to everything he tries to project himself as – which is outside of any category. That is, apart from his few years as an evangelical Christian.

  2. Hi.
    About the story “European countries want to ban the Burqa”.
    I would like to point out that the Belgium law had a previous older law that forbids people to wear masks in public.
    So they based their Burqa ban on the already excisting law.
    the new law states also that masks can be worn on Carnaval.
    Boerkaverbod goedgekeurd
    There’s a google translate button on the bottom of the page.
    Will.

  3. anti-uffe —

    You must be talking about a different Bob Dylan from the one I remember. The Bob I refer to performed between about 1962 and 1969, after which I stopped listening to him, with the exception of the the excellent Blood on the Tracks album in 1974.

    That Bob Dylan was an icon of the Revolution. The lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” provided the name and inspiration for the Weathermen. “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” was about revolution. He was a close associate of Joan Baez, the Queen Bee of the the New Left bards and songstresses. He covered Red Anthems like Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer”. His lyrics during the period are shot through with anti-government and revolutionary rhetoric. He was a standard-issue Port Huron lefty.

    Yes, later on he got so stoned that he seemed to forget all that, and took up religion, and made so much money that it must have been embarrassing for him.

    But during those heady days of the 1960s he was without a doubt a delight to the KGB operatives who funneled money and revolutionary training to all those “power to the people” groups that gave us 1968 and the cultural wreckage that made the mission of this blog necessary.

  4. A teenage girl who converted to Christianity and ran away from home is being blocked by her Muslim parents from fighting the possibility of deportation, her attorney told a judge Monday in an ongoing custody dispute.

    This judge and all those abetting the Muslims know damn well this girl will be murdered; they know damn well how these 7th century bastards will treat an “infidel.” This judge and his comrades are collaborators in murder.

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