Liberty Maven

They have their reasons for invading Iraq, drone bombing Pakistan, and bailing out the financial industry and perhaps the auto industry, but who are “they”?

We spent our Thanksgiving weekend in Minnesota, which was mercifully warm (up to 20 degrees on my early morning walks).  One of our destinations was the bar mitzvah of my mother-in-law’s cousin’s grandson (the shtetl lives on in the frozen mid-west) in the comfortable Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka.  The rabbi of the reformed congregation was proud of their new synagogue, not least because, as he explained to us, their Torah scroll, the handwritten copy of the five books of Moses, has a unique significance, as it was obtained from a defunct temple in Hibbing, Minnesota, where it was in all likelihood the Torah used by Bob Dylan (aka Robert Zimmerman) at his bar mitzvah.

When the time came for the bar mitzvah boy to parade the Torah through the aisles, where, as is the custom, people touched their prayer books to it, then kissed the prayer book, I couldn’t help wondering, as I performed the ritual and kissed the book, whether this progression, from Moses to Dylan to us, was kosher.  Without a canonization process, how would one know if Dylan should have the stature of a prophet, such that he could produce holy relics by his touch?

To help myself answer the question, I pondered various Dylan lines until I came up with the one I always thought carried the greatest import:

“Look out kid,
They keep it all hid….”

It seems a bit on the simple side for a prophet, but isn’t it the truth?  And you sure don’t have to be a kid to feel that way.  To take a well-worn example, ask an adult, or ask yourself, why we invaded Iraq.  It wasn’t apparently for the stated reason: to find WMD’s.  So why, then?  Oil? Something about Iran?  You don’t know, do you?  The answer, so says the Prophet Dylan, is kept “hid.”

Let’s try another question: What caused the current world-wide financial crises.  You and everyone else will answer, “Unsound sub-prime mortgages caused it.”  Now ask, “But sub-primes only account for $2 trillion of the $14 trillion in U.S. mortgage debt.  How did they acquire what seems a disproportionate impact, enough to disrupt the economies of every country on earth?”  What is your answer?  Unless you’ve got an information pipeline very few others have, you don’t know.

The list of answerless questions is endless.  Why are we firing rockets from unmanned drones at villages in Northwestern Pakistan?  Ah, you say, you know the answer to that one.  It’s because there are many terrorists in that area, and we have to stop them before they blow up something in America.  But let’s focus in a bit.  No one claims that all the civilians in all the villages are terrorists, or even sympathizers.  How do we know in which villages and in which houses the terrorists are hiding?  We have been unable to find our most wanted terrorist, Bin Laden, who is believed to be in this area, so our intelligence is limited.  After we blow up a house we issue statements like, “A certain terrorist was believed to be in the house.”  How do we know?  Do we just “believe” it might be true?  Is it ever confirmed?  By whom?  When we blew up a wedding party in Pakistan just before the U.S. presidential election, killing 38 people, there wasn’t even a statement about “believing” anything.  Who is in charge of these operations?  How are their successes or failures evaluated?  Who is thinking about the immense store of hatred against the U.S. that is created every time we kill civilians in Pakistan?  What is the ultimate game-plan?  You don’t know, do you.   You might give an educated guess, but you don’t know.

Of course, someone will make fun of my assumption that there is a “they.”  As an English teacher, I’ll have to plead guilty to demanding that my students present clear antecedents for pronouns.  Fair enough; we should ask if there is a “they.”  Is there a “they” who know why we invaded Iraq, or what started the global economic meltdown, or how our interests are balanced when we bomb civilians in Pakistan?  Are you ready to answer “No” to all of the above?  If not, then logic insists you’ll have to agree that “they” do in fact keep it all hid.

I think the Minnetonka congregation should hold on to its holy relic.  What more could you want from a prophet than that he pack this much truth into so few words?

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Doug Lasken teaches English and Debate in Los Angeles Unified.  Reach him at Dlasken514@aol.com