The genius of Van Ronk...

I have been reading Dave Van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, while staying in the East Village. If the Beatles were the catalyst for my learning the guitar - and they were - then Van Ronk's finger picking, blues guitar work was my inspiration in the folkie realm. At the tender age of 15 I practiced his "Cocaine Blues" over and over until I could play that riff in my sleep. He was tougher than all the rest of the pretty players and had a smart-ass mouth and wicked sense of humor to boot.  Forty years later I even named my local TV show after his song, "Sunday Street."

One of the early memories Van Ronk brings up has to do with the internecine battles over ideology and art that dominated the political and cultural Left in Greenwich Village back in the 50s and 60s. His recollection bears none of the romance or idealism perpetuated by other accounts of this era. Rather the way he tells it, there were the dominate commissars of culture - the Communist Party Stalinists - and everyone else from anarchists to social democrats. This fits with the reflections Michael Harrington made thirty years ago in his recollection of his days in Greenwich Village. Given the cultural hegemony of these commissars, the emphasis was rarely on the beauty of the music or the artistry of the performer. No, the goal was to foment dissent and energize participation in the emerging civil rights and union movements. Politics and ideology were more important than creativity.

In various accounts, Bob Dylan notes that this obsession with ideology nearly drove him out of music-making. If he hadn't heard the Beatles on a car radio while en route to New Orleans, he might have chucked the whole thing. You can hear this shift on his third album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, and then full blown on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. You can hear the tension of the times in the way Dylan is introduced at Newport - earnest and dedicated young troubadour for justice - and the ultra-personal, goofy song he opens with:  All I Really Want To Do.

A decade earlier, ideological purity was even more oppressive in the Village folk scene.  So Van Ronk cites commentaries from men and women who once worked with the CP during the civil war in Spain or the rise of Hitler in Germany to emphasize his point. To a person these former CP warriors spoke of the viciousness of their Party bosses. They recounted how many of their free thinking buddies had been slaughtered or sacrificed by comrades in pursuit of a higher good. The now deceased folk singer concludes that their testimony - plus his own rebellious spirit - made him a bold anti-Communist from a young age.

No wonder I was attracted to Van Ronk - and the "other side" of Bob Dylan - and let's not forget Frank Zappa. Each of these artists celebrated creativity rather that ideology and honored real human beings over abstract political goals. They were poets and artists who. like T.S. Elliot before them, asked: "Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge> Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? What life have you in you have not life together?"

Van Ronk was an early champion and interpreter of Joni Mitchell, another artist who valued both art and the creative spirit within real people. Even before I understood ideology, I was drawn to the art not the politics. I still am. Perhaps that is why I find such satisfaction in the current writing that David Brooks is exploring. I know that this quest shapes much of this sabbatical.  This morning's column found Brooks asking, "What is your purpose?"

Every reflective person sooner or later faces certain questions: What is the purpose of

my life? How do I find a moral compass so I can tell right from wrong? What should I do day by day to feel fulfillment and deep joy? As late as 50 years ago, Americans could consult lofty authority figures to help them answer these questions. Some of these authority figures were public theologians. Reinhold Niebuhr was on the cover of Time magazine. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about everything from wonder to sin to civil rights. Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote a book called “On Being a Real Person” on how to live with integrity…

All of that went away over the past generation or two. It is hard to think of any theologian with the same public influence that Niebuhr and Heschel had. Intellectuals are given less authority and are more specialized. They write more for each other and are less likely to volley moral systems onto the public stage. These days we live in a culture that is more diverse, decentralized, interactive and democratized. The old days when gray-haired sages had all the answers about the ultimate issues of life are over. But new ways of having conversations about the core questions haven’t yet come into being. Public debate is now undermoralized and overpoliticized. We have many shows where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life. In fact, we now hash out our moral disagreement indirectly, under the pretense that we’re talking about politics, which is why arguments about things like tax policy come to resemble holy wars.

As I pray this morning about Palestine and Israel, the truthful and dishonest expressions in the media of Islamaphobia, the recent shootings in Texas, the President's words of love about forgotten children of color I am convinced of two things:  the spirit of Van Ronk continues to make sense to me. Ideology restricts and wounds while art expands and heals.  

Today is our 20th anniversary: we'll spend the better part of it at The Strand - a massive bookstore at E 12th and Broadway - and then share dinner at a French bistro. Tomorrow we head for Roanoke, VA en route to Nashville. Not long ago some one asked me why we decided to get married on May 5th? "Did it have something to do with Cinco de Mayo?" No, I smiled, it was because of a Bob Dylan song...