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Dylan’s phony Achilles and the neocons
In a recent thread I wrote:
[The neocons] don’t actually want the West to defend itself. They just want to beat their chests and throw darts at the left and let the neocon audience imagine that beating one’s chest and throwing darts at the left is enough to stave off the external threats to the West.Now compare that portrait of the neocons—with their arrogance and empty braggadocio—to the Bob Dylan verse which I quoted in part a couple of weeks ago to describe Rudy Giuliani, but which I now realize fits the neocons to a “T”:
Achilles is in your alleyway,Look at it this way. The singer is us, the traditionalists and real Americans, who love our country, not a universalist idea. The girl the singer is trying to win over is America. But she won’t have anything to do with him, with us. Achilles has taken charge of the situation. He’s very full of himself, in his assumed role as America’s guard and guardian, and keeps the singer away from her. He boasts of his own grandeur, he points to the sky, he struts around like Achilles, the greatest warrior in the world. But in fact he’s not a great warrior, he’s “like a man in drag,” a man dressed as a woman, not a real man at all, but a grotesque caricature of one. He struts and brags and beats his chest, but there’s nothing there. “Hungry like a man in drag” symbolizes the unnatural spiritual greed to be something other than what one really is. In the same way, the neocons pretend to stand for America and to guard America, but what they really believe in is an empty democratist ideology which is their ticket to power and glory and a fake transcendent. (See my article, “The Political Religion of Modernity,” where I discuss Jack Kemp’s hyped-up vision of America.) Instead of loving and protecting a real country and a real people, the neocons boastfully “point to the sky,” their universalist idea of America with which they are so puffed up. This phony warrior can’t defend America, he’s a fraud, but he manages to keep us, the true lovers and protectors of America, away from her. And the singer plaintively and cuttingly asks, “How come you get someone like him to be your guard?” Meaning, how did you pick this freak, this fraud, this nothing, to be your man, instead of me, your real man, your real lover?
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