Bob protests about hell in Ukraine
The European leg of Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways tour is ready to roll. And will this stint again contain a major protest about Putin’s insane war on the land of his fathers?
On the first night at the Arizona Federal Theatre, Phoenix, Arizona he dropped Early Roman Kings and replaced it with Crossing the Rubicon.
The song is normally accepted as being about Julius Caesar taking his troops across the Rubicon River in 49 BC. The journey began a bloody war.
The new message of protest was clear as it wound round the auditorium in its slow blues guise.
Bob, like so many of us, was a victim of Cold War propaganda.
In Chronicles, he wrote about how children in small-town America were taught to see Russians as a threat.
He wrote: “One of the things we were trained to do was to hide and take cover under our desks when the air-raid sirens blew, because the Russians could attack us with bombs,” he wrote. “We were told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us.”
And in so many ways this is the scenario coming out of the Ukraine now as so many old men – and women too – take to the streets armed often only with anger, pride, fear and ancient guns.
Dylan stood up with them to be counted.
Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. Following a series of vicious violence against Jewish people, in 1907 his paternal grandparents emigrated there from Odessa, then part of the Russian empire, now in Ukraine.
Bob Dylan! One more pride of Odessa,” read a large billboard standing in front of City Hall in the Black Sea port
Good on him…
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