6 Monday Must Reads

OH, GET A GRIP, MAUREEN!

Maureen Dowd wrote an exceedingly dopey column in the Sunday NY Times about how Bob Dylan has betrayed himself and us and, I don’t know, music and, like, the movement or whatever—by playing two concerts in the People’s Republic of China.

Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.

More specifically, Dowd doesn’t think he should have played China unless he publicly denounced the government’s policy against dissidents.

But mostly it seems to be the fact that Mr. Zimmerman didn’t play his 1964-released song, “The Times They are a Changin’” that has put Dowd into a state of righteous fury.

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Aside from the laughable nature of that last sentence, Dowd has failed to fact check.

Yes, reportedly, the Chinese asked Dylan to submit songs for approval and two out of his gigantic cannon got knocked out, The Times They Are a Changin’ among them.

What Dowd does not mention, one guesses because she doesn’t know, is that Dylan did play other equally if not more subversive songs like: The Ballad of the Thin Man, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, Like a Rolling Stone and Gonna Change My Way of Thinking.

Thankfully, not everyone agreed with Dowd. For instance, here’s a column on Dylan, the China trip AND MoDo by the Atlantic’s James Fallows:

Maureen Dowd, writing from Washington DC, is wroth about Bob Dylan’s failure to stand up to The Man in his concert in Beijing this week. “Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out,” and so on. I see from the world of Twitter that this outraged/ disappointed interpretation is sweeping through the U.S. commentariat.

Many of my Chinese and Western friends, writing from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Nanjing, are wroth about Dowd and what they call her misunderstanding of Dylan, China, and the current alarming wave of crackdowns there…

Fallows goes on to quote a string of people who have written him to point out the uninformed nature of Dowd’s noisy opining. (Evidently they are people who both know China and have bothered to listen to a broader variety of Dylan’s music.)

Then Sunday night, Sean Wilentz was rather more caustic in the New Yorker about Dowd’s idiocy.

Dowd isn’t angry that Dylan performed in China. She is angry that he apparently agreed to do so under certain conditions, that he didn’t sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and that he didn’t take the opportunity to denounce Chinese human rights policies.

I don’t know exactly what Dylan did or did not agree to. (I don’t think Dowd does, either.) But whatever the facts are, Dylan knows very well—as I tried to tell Dowd when she interviewed me for her column—that his music long ago became uncensorable. Subversive thoughts aren’t limited to his blatant protest songs of long ago. Nor would his political songs from the early nineteen-sixties have made much sense in China in 2011. Dowd, like Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” is as clueless about all of this as she is smug.

Dowd fumes that Dylan should have sung verses like:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall

That would have really riled the Chinese—once they’d figured out what a senator or a congressman was.

Instead, Dylan opened his concerts in Beijing and Shanghai with a scalding song from his so-called gospel period, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking.”

I’m gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules
Gonna put my best foot forward
Stop bein’ influenced by fools

FYI: Here are the two set lists from the Beijing and the Shanghai performances.

PS: Azar Nafisi has an equally know-nothing-driven column in Monday’s New Republic.

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TIRED OF THE SHADOWS, YOUNG DREAM ACTIVISTS “COME OUT” ABOUT THEIR ILLEGAL STATUS

The LA Times Richard Fausset has this story, but it’s clearly been a trend. I’ve had both my USC students and, then this last quarter, a UCI student, profile college students who, after hiding their illegal status for most of their youth, now are coming out about it in the hope of helping to precipitate a change.

They also hope that by making their situations public it will be, in a way, prophylactic.

But it also a risk, as former UC Irvine literary journalism student, Antonia Rivera, found out last year.

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ERIC HOLDER AND TRYING KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED

Jane Mayor of the New Yorker has a story in next week’s issue about the details of the fight over where to try self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

It’s an excellent window into how we arrived at this dispiriting pass in which we now find ourselves as a county regarding these military commission trials.

On a more cheerful note, the LA Times reports that the CIA says it’s “out of the detention and interrogation business.”

Well, for the most part.

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CONSERVATIVE LAWMAKERS GO TO PRISON, GAIN COMPASSION

Justin Elliott of Salon observes that when Republican politicians wind up in prison they often become champions of the twinned realms of prison and sentencing reform.

To further explore the topic, Elliott interviews my favorite expert on such things, Ohio State U law professor Doug Berman.

Here’s how the story opens:

Last week, disgraced former congressman Duke Cunningham wrote a letter to several media outlets from the federal penitentiary where he has resided since 2006. In it, Cunningham, a conservative Republican who pleaded guilty in a public corruption case in 2005, waxed eloquent about an unlikely topic: prison reform.

“The United States has more more men & women in prison than any other nation including Russia and China,” he wrote. “The largest growing number of prisoners, women — 1-34 Americans are either on probation or in prison. The 95% conviction rate reached by threats of long sentences, intimidation, lies and prosecutorial abuse has got to be reckoned with now, not later.” Cunningham also promised he would dedicate his life to prison reform.

We’ve seen transformations like this before. Cunningham is the latest in a string of conservative political figures to see the light on prison reform following a stint behind bars.

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THE RIGHTNESS OF WRITEGIRL

The LA Times profiles the nonprofit, WriteGirl, a totally kick ass organization that which pairs professional woman writers with at-risk girls—with life-changing results. If you don’t know about WriteGirl (or even if you do), take a look.

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THE PROS AND CONS OF CONS HAVING CELL PHONES

Prison officials say that inmates are using cell phones to commit crimes. However civil libertarians say that most cell phones are just used to talk less expensively to friends and family, but the CDCR is primarily mad because the cell phones mean millions in lost income for the prison system and its pay phone concessionaires.

The LA Times’ Jack Dolan has the rest.