Ode to Billie Joe, With Dylan and Lucinda

Plus Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert return--and music from Dylan, Lucinda and Sheryl Crow.

Friends and neighbors, asking for a bit of help here. While I appreciate the continuing strong interest from all of you (free) subscribers, it’s harder and harder to reach new readers, thanks to politically-inspired partial suppression of my feeds at Twitter and Facebook—the new reality for many. But you might help attract more readers here if you’d take the trouble to “share” below, or post a link on your other outlets, or recommend to a friend in a good old fashioned email. Thanks again for your support!

Jon Stewart last night:

Stephen Colbert returned with this monologue:

We happen to be planning a visit today with the great Robert Jay Lifton, who recently turned ninety-nine years of age, out on Cape Cod and, lo and behold, what do our wandering eyes spy but a letter to the editor written by him (see below), on the home page of The New York Times.

I met Robert more than forty years ago when I got him to write a piece for Nuclear Times magazine when I was the editor at the height of the anti-nuclear movement. Of course, he was known for classic books such as “The Nazi Doctors” and “Death in Life.” We then became good friends, bonding over various issues, and attending almost every year for more than a decade games in New York between his beloved Dodgers and my Mets. Unlike many ex-Brooklyners, he did not divorce them after their move to L.A. As recently as a year ago on the Cape, I turned him on to the fantastic Ry Cooder album “Chavez Ravine.”

Oh, we also wrote a couple of notable books together, “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial” and “Who Owns Death?” on capital punishment in the USA, and many articles.

Anyway: Here’s his letter to The Times in response to another one of our favorites, columnist M. Gessen. Oh, by the way, he is the person who long ago coined the now widely-used term “psychic numbing.”

Countering ‘Psychic Numbing’ in the Trump Era

Re “The Most Dangerous Phase of the Trump Era Is Now,” by M. Gessen (column, June 1):

M. Gessen does us a powerful service. It comes under the category of alerting us to what I have called “malignant normality.” Falsehoods are put forward as facts of nature, both all-consuming and inevitable. Terrible events become commonplace and fuel our tendency toward psychic numbing.

Combating this numbing requires witnesses, and M. Gessen has called it out in both Russia and America.

Witnessing is a necessity for recovering truth and stirring active resistance….

Robert Jay Lifton
Truro, Mass.

I will also recommend Gessen’s profile of Robert in The New Yorker a couple of years back.

My wife pointed me to this new Sarah Kendzior substack post and reminded me that it’s the 3rd of June so….eternally it is “Ode to Billie Joe” day….so a bluesy cover by the very apt Lucinda Williams:

…and Sheryl Crow here:

You may not be aware that Dylan parodied the song in one of the once little-known remnants of his Basement Tapes, with the boys in The Band, “Clothes Line Saga,” with the listing of common small town daily life activities but with the revelation in this case being “The Vice President has gone mad!”

From Tunes to Toons

Steve Brodner: