Before Dr. Feelgood rubs BeatleBalm over the pores of pre-teen America, to soothe and ready them for bed as they wail the Dallas assassination, he recinds, a year earlier, Bob Dylan’s invitation to serenade the Sunday night nation, because the folksinger’s aim is not lullaby, but to join the adults as they hunt them low-down, godless commie reds.
But mindless fear of low-down, godless, commie reds is the balm Dr. Feelgood rubs over the pores of the post-teen American cohort, so they’ll smarten up in time to keep heathen hordes of Vietnamese rice farmers and fishermen from rowing to America, where they’ll launch their scheme of commie domination.
As James Thurber told us, You Could Look it Up: Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues is the name of the song that made Dr. Feelgood keep Bob Dylan from messing with minds in an America whose future will depend on whether John Birch is allowed to team up with Jim Crow to deepen the chasm that has grown day by day from the stinking crevice left open at Appomattox.
Neither Jim Crown nor John Birch Society stands a chance in the sunlight of an educated citizenry. Each depends on public indoctrination of ignorant fear, from pulpit, classroom, radio, and TV. Dr. Feelgood gave fear a chance, when he saved the Birchers from public ridicule that would’ve been hurled by a pretend hobo from the the vast, boundless middle of America.
Young Bob was home alone and started to sweat, afraid them commies was in his TV set, so he looked behind the screen, got a shock from his feet up to his brain, but undeterred and with the courage and innocence of youth, he quit his job so he could work alone, changed his name to Sherlock Holmes, followed clues found in his detective’s bag, and discovered red stripes in the American flag. That gol-darn Betsey Ross, who’d a thunk it?
Who flunked America, who failed to protect its young from the incessant drumbeat of ignorant fear? Who lured the champion of segregation from the Democratic party to design a southern strategy that concentrates power where insurrection meets a childish insistence that the Constitution grants a right to own people and reap profit from slave- and non-union labor?
Nixon’s only one of the ones who dunnit, while “Nixon’s The One” beat to death the slogan of Herbert Horatio Humphrey, “Some People Talk Change, Others Cause It” The American electorate reps a slogan of its own: “Don’t Make Me Read.”
“Don’t Make Me Read,” printed with invisible ink, wails from the red-capped domes of people who pledge allegiance to the spawn of John Birch and Jim Crow, who took his chance with monopoly money, bought the Republican party, and ordered his minions to print him a Get Out of Jail Free card.
Who hails the fake king, who intones requiescat in pace for the American republic, slaughtered with the two-sided blade of democracy. Damn those who profit from the ignorance they sow with every instance of attention that allows the assembly of an audience to cheer the daylight rape of Lady Liberty.
Dave Read