Driving Across the Country with Dylan and Sinatra
We need leadership from Washington and music in our souls
Pete Hamill once wrote that Frank Sinatra helped men, perhaps particularly men of his generation, to get through the evening.
When Hamill wrote Why Sinatra Matters, I was too young to understand what the great New York City writer meant. But I know now.
Sinatra, to whom I began to listen in earnest when I was in college, can soothe and comfort all of us late at night, in the wee small hours, with his romantic ballads, with his deep baritone, with his songs of love and loss.
I used to sing Sinatra songs in the car and the shower when I was younger, and I even sang “Something Stupid,” a duet sung by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, to Carol, my wife, at our wedding dinner at Musso & Frank in July.
If Sinatra can help us get through the night, Bobby Dylan can help me get through the day.
I will write more of Dylan later in this essay, as I have in the past, for he figured prominently in a recent cross-country drive undertaken by Carol and me, in which we visited relatives on the East Coast before heading from joint to joint back to Los Angeles.
Along the way, we were treated well just about everywhere we drove, including upstate New York, with the awe-inspiring wonder of Niagara Falls, where Carol and I donned blue ponchos, as we voyaged on the “Maid of the Mist,” a ship that bears a resemblance to an old steamboat, past a pair of rainbows that turned the falls into a mixture of colors.
I believe deeply in God, as does Carol, and so for us there was no doubt that only God could have created the majesty of the falls connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, with a series of precipitous ripples splashing down from the palisades to the lower waters.
Were we in the heavens, at the dawn of creation, as the falls sprayed mist upon us?
Perhaps, we were.
We had a similar feeling of wonder, when we drove through many so-called red states, as we have on our past treks across the country.
We spent time in South Bend, Indiana, visiting the Notre Dame campus, with its basilica and football stadium and mural of “Touchdown Jesus,” a depiction of the Savior raising His hands above His disciples, as if rejoicing with His teammates after scoring a touchdown.
And we stopped at Zion National Park in Utah, with its red rock formations that seemed to call forth Zion, or the Judean mountains by Jerusalem.
Being in Zion, at a beautiful national park, whose rocks date back to a much earlier time in the history of the planet, back to a primordial past, long before there were humans, reminded me that Adam, our progenitor, was formed by God from the earth, the Adom, which means red in Hebrew.
It was thus quite fitting that the red rocks would bear names such as Zion and Mt. Carmel in Utah.
I have written before of how fortunate we are, wherever we live in the U.S. and the world, that we can still enjoy green space, parks and natural wonders, as well as the arts.
Tragically, the solipsist in chief, a man with no poetry, no music in his soul, as I have noted in previous posts, is, one might say, hijacking the Kennedy Center, slashing the budgets of our national arts organizations like PBS, and gutting the funding for our parks, cuts that harm all of us, since in the case of our national parks, emergency officials and others will lose their jobs maintaining and overseeing treasures like Zion, the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls.
There are times that I can revert to depression, even on drives across the country, but then Carol and I encounter lovely people, who have steered us to sites and shown us hospitality.
As Bobby Dylan sings on Trouble No More, a compilation of live music from his so-called Christian phase, “Wherever I am welcome, that’s where I’ll be.”
Yes, Carol and I listened to Trouble No More among other Dylan albums on our recent trip, and we were welcomed everywhere we stayed and stopped.
Americans truly are a decent people, as Carol and I have found time and again on our cross-country treks.
We recall a meeting a fellow, who wore a MAGA cap, at a McDonalds in Wyoming. He cracked us up with his sense of humor, while he meandered in the burger joint looking for his wife, whom he could not find at that moment.
No doubt, he found her soon, just as Carol and I found kindness and decency across America at many Subways, where we ate our tuna subs on flat bread, nicely prepared by its staffers; and at Love’s gas stops throughout our nation, a place that offers clean rest rooms, as well as food, beverages and gasoline; and at numerous motels and inns, where the employees are overwhelmingly courteous, hard-working and cheerful, in spite of the evil that we are all facing now.
Our country is being failed by many Republican leaders in Congress, who are not holding accountable an evil man and his lackeys, who are corrupt to the core, who have blatant conflicts of interest, who are damaging the freedoms and ideals for which our democracy stands, and, needless to say, who are committing high crimes and misdemeanors that warrant impeachment.
Those Republicans who are toeing the line for Trump lack the courage and honor of John McCain, whom Trump mocked because he was shot down in Vietnam and was a prisoner of war. The Republicans who bow to Trump lack the vision of Ronald Reagan, who had the moral clarity to call out the evil of the leadership of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union, an evil that has only worsened and metastasized under Putin. And those Republicans in Congress who are enabling Trump lack the patriotism of Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker, Lowell Weicker and many other members of the GOP, who served our nation by conducting hearings on Watergate and by telling Nixon that he had to resign or else he would be convicted of impeachment.
Where are those Republicans now?
They do exist, but they are mostly hiding.
Our nation needs them now more than ever.
The leadership of the Republican Party needs to summon the free will that is within all of us and to honor God and our country by illuminating the truth and by bringing justice to our land.
No one is above the law, and that includes Trump and his lackeys.
Trump and his lackeys may be able to fool some people. But they can’t fool most of us.
And they certainly cannot fool God.
God sees everything, and He is empowering all of us to do the right thing, to stand up to a bully, a wannabe dictator, and his sycophants, who, like the Masters of War in Bob Dylan’s song by that name, have “never done nothing but build to destroy.”
Trump can’t and doesn’t create anything.
He is all about destruction.
As I have written for years, he would rather blow up and destroy any achievement of his predecessors, rather than have them get credit for helping our country.
While we navigate these perilous days, we might all turn, as Carol and I have on our cross-country journeys, to the great artists, to the prophets of the Word, like Sinatra and Bobby Dylan.
Yes, on our drives, Carol, my disc jockey and Muse in chief, has often put on Dylan, as well as other recording artists, including the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel and Frank Sinatra.
To be sure, Sinatra, as Pete Hamill wrote, will always appeal to the romantic in all of us, particularly at night.
During the day, it does seem to me that it is Dylan, more than any other songwriter, who heals me with his wisdom and soulfulness, as well as his wit and irony.
When I hear songs from Trouble No More, which, as I noted earlier, is Dylan’s compilation of live music from what is known as his Christian period, I am moved and delighted because the Bobster, in singing and writing about God, does so with such delight, with such joy, with such depth, and, as I say, with such wit.
I have written before that the song, “Shot of Love,” with its Gospel themes and hard-rocking rhythm, is one of my favorites.
I may not be alone in that assessment.
According to the Kabbalah, there are few things that God loves more than for us to sing a song of love and joy and praise and thanksgiving to Him.
That is what Dylan and other great singers do, and we can all rejoice in that.
Of course, Dylan has such a vast discography of jewels that you can find pleasure in all of his work, going back to the early 1960s and ascending to the present day, with his Rough and Rowdy Ways album, highlights of which he plays on his never-ending tour.
Dylan’s voice is ever-changing, yet it retains its gravelly character. And he is always having fun when he sings.
This is one of the qualities that links him and other great artists to one another; they sing with a joy and happiness.
Harold Bloom once asked my class what links Hamlet to Falstaff, and the answer is something similar to what we can observe about the singing of Dylan, Sinatra and other prophets.
It is Hamlet’s sense of play that links the melancholy Dane to Falstaff and Shakespeare’s other sublime creations, all of whom are delighted to don guises, to speak the speech trippingly on the tongue, and to play.
As King David once said, “Do good, and delight in the Lord.”
Do good, and delight in the Lord.
That is worth repeating.
Yes, that is what can get us all through these days and nights.
We need to remember that whatever we are going through now -- when we are facing cuts to health care and food stamps and arts and parks budgets, when we are dealing with fires and haboobs and other adverse effects of climate change, when we have forces of evil that are trying to ruin our lives and destroy our world -- we still have the love within our souls, the love that is nurtured by the great artists of song, prophets of the Word, like Sinatra and Dylan.
And this is true in red states, blue states and any other place we live in the world.
No one can take away our love.
No one can take away the Holy Spirit with which God has blessed all of us.