It’s 1973 and Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, Walter Cronkite, George McGovern, and Gloria Steinem are rounded up in a series of raids by unelected forces funded and armed by a foreign government. They’re not alone- there are tens of thousands of others brought in with them- other activists, artists, and organizers, along with a number of people who just got mixed up in something that they didn’t want anything to do with. They’re taken to Yankee Stadium.

When people are taken to the locker rooms or the corridors, they’re not seen again. No one’s given any information. Everyone who hasn’t gone into the locker rooms is waiting on the field or in the bleachers. They’re terrified. Of course they’re terrified.

But Bob Dylan, he understands the power of a song. So he sings, in full voice, for everyone around him to hear. The guards come toward him with a guitar, but before they give it to him, they break his hands. Then they order him to play.

People learn how remarkable they are when tried; Dylan, who was forever uncomfortable being held by so many as some sort of savior, finds himself realizing for the first time how important his voice can be. So even with his hands broken, knowing that he’s being watched, he sings. At the very least, it means for everyone around him that when he’s finally taken and killed, they’ll know he was never beaten.

And so he sings, writes words about his new circumstances and lets those around him take some comfort, find some hope, in those words. In the middle of singing a new song about what’s become of his country, he’s picked out of the crowd. He slips the lyrics to a friend.

And then they machine-gun Bob Dylan to death in the visiting team’s locker room in Yankee Stadium. Drop curtain.

[huh?]
They’ve formally charged someone with the death of Victor Jara.

Jara was kind of like the Chilean Bob Dylan, back in the Sixties and early Seventies. His career never had quite the same longevity, because he was tortured and killed by the coup that took power on September 11, 1973. If he’d had another thirty-five years, maybe Bob Dylan would have been the American Victor Jara.

No one was ever charged with Jara’s murder, except today someone was. It’s kind of a farcical charge- the man was executed after being plucked out of a stadium full of people kept in place by armed guards, and yet the judge pointed a finger at a single man and said that he alone was responsible. It’s not perfect, but justice rarely is.

The final words that Jara wrote, the ones he palmed to a friend as he was being taken away (his friend hid them in his shoe, and survived to escape with them), began with this line:

How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror.

Which is an interesting sentiment. Because the point was never to dwell on the horror, to relegate art to the purpose of shedding light on the destructive forces and people in the world. But Jara never had a chance.

A lot of people felt like Bob Dylan was doing a disservice to the problems of the world when he spent the mid-seventies writing introspective songs, rather than illuminating things like the death of Victor Jara. I think he’s just lucky he had a choice.

So am I. So are you.