Are the Times Still A'Changin'?

 

I recently inadvertently uncovered the essential difference between right wing and left wing perceptions. 

In a poetry group, I was given Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A’Changin’” as a prompt.

My immediate thought was that, if that song is still relevant today, times have been a-changin’ since at least 1964. Over sixty years. And yet, all the things we wanted changed then seem still to be with us, or back with us, or many claim are still with us—notably those on the left, so I thought this point was uncontroversial. We have endless foreign wars; we have rogue government; we have continuing racism and discrimination. 

The only difference, I thought, is that we now lack the same enthusiasm for change that we had back in the Sixties. Nobody is singing any longer. Which stands to reason, after sixty years barking up the same tree. We are exhausted; we need transcendence.

I wrote a prose poem to this effect. I read it to another poetry group to which I belong. I thought my sense would be universally shared, among those who knew the original song. 

I was wrong. Most folks who style themselves poets these days are leftists, and from them I got, unexpectedly, immediate pushback.

First, according to the left, the arts today, including most specifically popular music, are just as vital and vibrant and popular today as they have ever been. The quality of art is a constant, regardless of time and place.

So there was nothing special going on in Greenwich Village in the early Sixties, nor in Haight-Ashbury in the later Sixties, nor in Paris in the 1920s, nor in English poetry during the Romantic era, or Italian painting and sculpture during the Renaissance, or English drama during the Elizabethan era. The perception that it is so is all just prejudice.

I id not expect this; I would have thought the assertion mad. It is as if there is no such thing as quality in art, no standards. 

Yet this actually makes sense from a left-wing perspective. It is consistent and in fact seems to follow necessarily from their contention that all cultures are equal. Moreover, that all women are equally beautiful. 

It then seems necessarily so that eras in a culture must also be equal. Indeed, one could extend this: the works of all artists are equal, so that one chooses for a gallery or a publication only for proper ethnic representation. Which is pretty much how it works these days. I would see a decline in quality as a result; to the left, apparently, this is not possible. 

But that was not the strongest objection. The leftists in the group also objected to the assertion that we are facing all the same problems, in essence, that we did in 1964. 

They must believe this, I suppose--despite also insisting often that nothing has really improved in non-white lives since the days of slavery, indeed since the days when European empires controlled the world. Despite the contradiction, the inexorability of social progress is after all the core of their belief system as “progressives.” The left-wing agenda is to them after all, as an article of faith, the “right side of history.” Even if that left-wing agenda once included such failed ideas as prohibition, eugenics, pacifism in the face of Nazism, or segregation. Progress has to be a given.

“At least,” one fellow insisted, “You have to agree that society has become more tolerant.”

This floored me. Growing intolerance is my strongest impression. Back in 1964 there was no political correctness, no deplatforming, no cancel culture, no shouting down the other side. The Fifties saw blacklisting under McCarthyism. The Sixties had thrown off that yoke. Now we have it worse than in the Fifties. 

You might cite sexual freedom. After all, nowadays men can walk around wearing women’s clothes. But this is not the whole story. Things were freer for heterosexuals then. The Sixties have been called “The Golden Age of Porn.” Now that is largely shut down by fears of disease, “me too” and the like. And the growing legal requirement to pretend that men are women is, for 99% of the population, a decrease, not an increase, in freedom and tolerance.

You might point to the civil rights movement. But that was a fight for the 1950s. It was already capstoned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the year the song came out. I recall Martin Luther King adjusting his program accordingly, to focus on poverty instead of race; that war was won. Since then, the movement seems to have been in the opposite direction: towards greater segregation, now often by black demand; in most recent years, greater hostility among the races; and even a higher poverty rate among black families. If whites are more tolerant of BIPOCS, BIPOCS are less tolerant of whites. There seems an even greater and more clearly binary us-them divide than ever.

And antisemitism is now at a level I would not have imagined possible after WWII.

It feels absurd even citing these matters—they seem obvious. 

Yet apparently they are invisible to the left.

To my mind, the left is trapped back in 1964, and cannot get out.

To be fair, when I held firm to my opinion, even without getting into detail or citing evidence, the leftists in the group seemed to back down.

They had to, I suppose. All opinions, after all, are equal. [sic]