Josh Marshall on Bob Dylan


I’m not a particular fan of Bob Dylan and I don’t own any of his albums. He does have a clever way with words sometimes and has made a remarkable career out of a limited musical vocabulary.
I’m listening to a podcast that’s part of a series on the favorite Dylan songs of various people. In this case, the person is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. I’ve been a big fan of Josh Marshall’s writing over the past couple of decades. Here’s a thoughtful graf from Josh’s commentary that I thought worth transcribing as a personal reflection on optimism:
“This song resonates with something that has been a basic—one of the kind of the core preoccupations of my life, and that is—which has shown up in various ways in my writing over the years, which is how we live with dignity in an adverse world. And I’ve written at various points in a political context that optimism is not a matter of predicting the future. Optimism is sort of an ethical posture towards life. When things are going great, you don’t have to be optimistic, you know things are going great. So it’s not about thinking things are or will be great. Again, it’s sort of an ethical posture that I think we should try to bring to life. Even though, as we know, life is very difficult and can be filled with reverses and heartbreak and all sorts of things.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrs4bk0xq74&t=1193s

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