I think people always think of Mr. Jones as a conservative, but I think it was further fallout from Dylan’s experience being honored by the older liberals.
Bob Dylan accepts the Tom Paine Free Speech Award:
“I haven’t got any guitar, I can talk though. I want to thank you for the Tom Paine award on behalf of everybody that went down to Cuba. First of all because they’re all young and it’s took me a long time to get young and now I consider myself young. And I’m proud of it. I’m proud that I’m young. And I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here today or tonight weren’t here and I could see all kinds of faces with hair on their head – and everything like that, everything leading to youngness, celebrating the anniversary when we overthrew the House Un-American Activities just yesterday, – Because you people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax. It is not an old peoples’ world. It is not an old peoples’ world. It has nothing to do with old people. Old people when their hair grows out, they should go out. And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules – and they haven’t got any hair on their head – I get very uptight about it.”
About 30 seconds later Bob was booed off the dais by the very people who were honoring him after sharing perhaps way “too soon” (three weeks or so after John F. Kennedy’s death) how he sort of empathized with Lee Harvey Oswald. Now this was perhaps a questionable move by Bob, but perhaps the greatest illustration of American hypocrisy of all time. He was after all being given THE FREE SPEECH award.
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But Brad,
Freedom Of Speech doesn’t mean that you say what you want and no one may criticize you. It means that the government can’t restrain or punish you for your expression. Critiquing someone else’s statements (even with a “Boo!”) is the type of open discourse that Freedom of Speech is supposed to encourage. If you say something I find offensive, or simply illogical, I can call you on it and somewhere in that interaction we can find Truth.
Chris Herzog