legacy

Masters of War is early Dylan -- very early if you consider "Subterranean Homesick Blues" the turning point of his career. It's pre-1965, back when he was still an earnest, big-haired young kid making the transition from trying to sound like Woody Guthrie all the time to sounding more like himself.

Here's a picture of him with Joanie from about that time.

The song proves that Uncle Sam's perpetual war we're dealing with today has been around a long time. As a bumper sticker on my sister's car says, "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam."

Actually, it goes back a lot farther than that, to the great cataclysm in which the parents of people now in their sixties fought. On the back cover of the issue of Life Magazine published the week I was born, a handsome soldier relaxes in a bed of tropical foliage and leans against a palm tree, his right hand grasping the pack of Camels as he contentedly puffs away on the lit cigarette he holds in his left.

"When you're thousands of miles from home," the ad copy reads, "on a shell-racked tropic isle...or high on a rocky ridge...

"How precious, then, is that "taste of home"...how comforting the rich aroma and full flavor of a slow-burning, cool-smoking Camel...the cigarette that is the first choice of men in all the services."

I don't know what's up with all the ellipses, but I see the double legacy conveyed by the ad, which put us on notice that a lifetime of wars in faraway places and addiction to a sharp-toothed drug was to be our lot in life.

As a people we're doing a pretty good job of dealing with one of these legacies. How long before we deal as decisively with the other?

Let's wake up. As another pop singer said, "Give peace a chance."