I once interviewed an aging economist for the English Department newspaper at the university where I was teaching English. I was asked to interview him by the editor, who just didn’t have the time to do it herself. He had recently had an article published in Vital Speeches of the Day, and was at the university to present the paper in a Q and A session. When I walked into the room to interview him at the scheduled time, he greeted me coolly and made some pleasant conversation, just long enough not to appear rude, and then he invited me to begin the task of asking the questions so that he could get down to the business of answering them which, after all, is the sole purpose of an interview.

We talked for a while, and I tried to ask the most thoughtful questions I could about his paper, which was entitled, “Quality of Life? The Emergent Critique of America’s Work-centered Culture.” I knew from reading his paper that I agreed with almost everything in it, but having thought a lot about the subject myself, I had some ideas about the causes of the situation that differed from his presentation in the paper. It was clear, however, that he had very definite opinions about everything he was telling me. As the interview progressed, he would occasionally glance up over his reading glasses at me, trying to gauge my understanding of his responses, and he began to grow testy when I continued to ask if perhaps there might be another way of getting to the root of the problem. After twenty minutes or so of questions and answers, though, we began to realize that we saw eye-to-eye on many issues, and after I acknowledged that I also thought Adbusters was a very insightful magazine (which seemed to serve to him as some sort of litmus test of my political stance), he began speaking to me much more frankly. Soon this very conservative and mild-looking economics professor was espousing radical theories of a neo-feudal world order with multinational corporations at the head of the power structure, and he could cite references and research to back up every outlandish claim he made. It was a very interesting interview. (The Adbusters website, should you choose to click the link, looks rabid and amateurish compared to the magazine, which is actually beautifully and thoughtfully designed.)

At one point, while musing about the amount of political sway enjoyed by the tobacco lobby, he uttered a sentence that caught me completely off-guard. “Bob Dylan, you realize, was one of the most powerful forces for political change in the twentieth century.” Suddenly it came to me: an image of this balding man in his tweed coat, looking at me over his reading glasses, with long hair and bare feet, wearing bell bottoms and perhaps some garment with a leather fringe. I didn’t ask, but in that comment I heard a syllable of unadulterated nostalgia for the time long ago when he was an idealist and acted out his beliefs with no regard for adult responsibilities. We forget sometimes that the kids in the video footage of the sit-ins and the ones in the photos at Kent State and Berkeley are now passing middle age and heading for retirement. And it was precisely because I always forget that fact that his comment about Bob Dylan came out of left field. Don’t get me wrong: I like Bob Dylan a lot. In fact, I was listening to the first side of Blood on the Tracks yesterday morning on the bus to work, which is probably what got me thinking about Dylan in the first place. (The album side is, of course, a theoretical concept on an iPod, but it still persists as a fundamental unit of musical dissemination). As I type this very sentence, in fact, I’m listening for the fourth time in a row to the several layers of Daniel Lanois’ other-worldly pedal-steel guitar on “Not Dark Yet” from Time Out of Mind. I like the drawn-out drawl of Dylan’s voice, and his clever rhymes and obfuscated lyrics. His backup bands, also, are usually exquisite. Nonetheless, I never really think of him as a political force, at least not of such magnitude that he would rank among the most powerful of any century.

So do I underestimate Dylan, or perhaps the effects of the sixties in general? I do know that we all tend to become a bit myopic about our own lives, and we tend to overestimate the importance of the movements with which we associate and identify ourselves. When I was playing in a band and running a tiny recording studio in Chicago in the mid-90s, I was convinced that we in particular and the whole indie scene in general were going to shake the musical foundations of the world. Classic rock guys who grew up in the seventies talk about Steve Miller or the Eagles as if they’re prophets (“Fly like an Eagle, man! To the frickin’ sea! If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is, man. Hey, pass me another Bud Light, will ya?”) But it’s not just the music scene of the day—it’s everything to do with pop culture: social movements, philosophical trends, fashion, advertising, you name it—all these things that change over time, whose changes themselves come to describe the character of a particular generation. I’ve heard my own contemporaries talking about Friends and South Park in such terms, and that honestly frightens me. In a similar way, this aging economist had become convinced over the years that Dylan, that clever songsmith of subversive ideologies, had led a revolution. In some ways he had, it’s true, and obviously to a far greater degree than any of the soy-and-ramen-eating slackers in my band, but to unthinkingly call him a political force seems almost an insult to the many people who have offered up their lives and/or livelihoods in the name of social change since, say, the beginning of the industrial revolution, folks who did far more than draw stoners to stadiums by the thousands.

Sometimes I get to thinking about a particular time and place, mine perhaps, or the particular time and place that constitutes the life of any one of us. All these ephemeral things that identify us, those that will seem so ridiculous to subsequent generations, and will be completely forgotten sooner or later, have such weight, don’t they? Whether it’s Chandler or Homer, Dylan or Brandon. I remember my father asking incredulously if I’d really never heard of Tommy Dorsey. I could barely identify Clarke Gable in a line-up. What will they say about Eminem? Or Matt Damon?