The First and the Last in Phillipsburg, New Jersey

The Cinch Review

The last will be first and first will be lastA substitute teacher was terminated by a vote of the Board of Education in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, this past Monday, apparently for violating the district’s “religion and distribution” policies.

The Phillipsburg Board of Education has refused to release full details on the case, but multiple reports in the media tell the story this way: The teacher, Walter Tutka, had remarked to a student who was last in line when leaving a classroom, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” The student asked him where that saying was from, and Tutka told him that it was from the Bible, but he couldn’t recall the exact passage. The student asked him several more times, and finally, during a lunch-break, Tutka pulled out his own copy of the New Testament and found the quote for the student. The student said he didn’t have any Bible of his own, and so Tutka gave him his own copy. It’s not clear how the interaction came to the attention of the powers-that-be, but the student did apparently return that copy of the New Testament to the teacher at a later time.

Based on the outline above, it looks like a pretty good case of zero tolerance for Christianity. The initial remark about the first being last and the last being first seems far more jocular in nature than proselytory, given the context. It happened to stimulate this student’s curiosity. If Walter Tutka had attributed the quote to Bob Dylan, and brought in a copy of “The Times They Are A-Changin'” (a song which does include that line) then there no doubt would have been no problem. The Bible is indeed a book of Jewish and Christian Scripture, but it is also literature, and quotes of that kind are at least as important to be familiar with as great quotes from Shakespeare. They are infused in our culture and themselves inspire more literature, poetry and music. Is the original source to be banned from being viewed or mentioned in schools? Well, I ask the question, but I know that it’s rather like asking whether we should consider maybe pushing the barn door closed after the horse has already run down the road and gotten hit by a truck. Continue reading “The First and the Last in Phillipsburg, New Jersey”

Bob Dylan and Professor Gates: One More Time

What with going off on a sentimental tangent about Mr. Limbaugh in that last post, I forgot to make one more point that I had intended to make about Bob Dylan’s encounter with the police and that of Professor Gates. I did already touch on it in previous posts but just wanted to emphasize it one last time before dropping the subject.

It is regarding the time-line of the events. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. had his encounter on July 16th, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bob Dylan was picked up on July 23rd in Long Branch, New Jersey. That is, exactly one week after Gates’ blow-out and arrest. It should be recalled that Gates’ arrest was not huge national news overnight. It took a few days to build. But one week later, on that Thursday, July 23rd, when Dylan was walking in the rain and admiring the architecture in Long Branch, the Gates story was certainly big news, and all over the media. In fact, the press conference in which President Obama famously declared that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” ( something from which he later back-pedaled) was held the day before, on July 22nd.

Therefore, as I said in an earlier post, the Gates story was peaking in the news just as the incident with Dylan was taking place. Dylan, as we know from interviews, pays pretty good attention to the news, even if he casts a jaundiced eye on a lot of it. But there is no way that Dylan wasn’t aware of this story.

So, this is simply something to add to the mix when thinking about Dylan’s mindset that day, and how he chose to deal with his own situation. Like Gates, Dylan had done nothing wrong, and yet was being questioned and asked to verify his identity by police, who had arrived on the scene in response to another citizen’s concerned telephone call. Knowing what had gone down with Professor Gates, and the furor still going on over it, Dylan might have used it as an outrage-multiplier. It’s easy enough to see how someone would do that — and no doubt some people across the country did do it around that time. He could have said, “What the hell is this? What do I have to prove? What are you gonna do — arrest me for nothing, like you did that professor?” A lot of people would’ve said that, and much worse.

As we know, Dylan took a different approach, one based on empathy for the cop’s situation. As a result, we didn’t even hear about the incident till Friday, August 14th — three weeks later. (I don’t know what in particular made it public at that time—of-course the police records are public information—but I suspect it may have come from Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley, who was heavily quoted in the first story from the Associated Press.)

For the sake of it, and before leaving the topic behind, let’s throw into the mix Christopher Hitchens’ recent column inspired by the Gates’ affair, and his own story of taking a nighttime walk in a California suburb this summer:

Suddenly, a police cruiser was growling quietly next to me and shining a light. “What are you doing?” I don’t know quite what it was—I’d been bored and delayed that week at airport security—but I abruptly decided that I was in no mood, so I responded, “Who wants to know?” and continued walking. “Where do you live?” said the voice. “None of your business,” said I. “What’s under your jacket?” “What’s your probable cause for asking?” I was now almost intoxicated by my mere possession of constitutional rights. There was a pause, and then the cop asked almost pleadingly how he was to know if I was an intruder or burglar, or not. “You can’t know that,” I said. “It’s for me to know and for you to find out. I hope you can come up with probable cause.” The car gurgled alongside me for a bit and then pulled away. No doubt the driver then ran some sort of check, but he didn’t come back.

This is almost identical to Bob’s situation — even in the respect of Hitchens being an old white guy too — except that in this case we don’t know that any call had been made to the police. We can probably assume that there wasn’t—that the mere fact of someone moving about with their legs in some California suburbs is sufficient to arouse suspicion in a passing police officer. Hitchens chose to stubbornly (but apparently not obscenely) assert his rights. The police officer let it go on meeting that resistance, probably satisfied at that point anyway that this guy made an unlikely robber or burglar. Hitchens goes on to doubt that he could have gotten away with this, or that he would have tried it, had he been a black man.

On the other hand, if Hitchens had reacted by saying, “Don’t you know who I am?!” (and his mug is a little better known, from TV, than that of Professor Gates) and loudly accusing the cop of violating his rights, then things also might have ended rather more unpleasantly.

And if he had claimed to be Paul McCartney, out on tour, perhaps the police officer would have wanted to give him a ride back to his hotel…

Also see Ron Radosh’s blog on the subject of Dylan’s encounter with the police, in which he picks up on some of what’s been said hereabouts.

A Rush Judgment

U.S. radio talk-show host and living institution Rush Limbaugh mentioned the July 23rd Bob Dylan encounter with the Long Branch, NJ police department on his show today. He highlighted the difference between how Dylan responded to the cops versus how Professor Gates did (which I did in my own way here a couple of days ago).

Now, the situation was resolved uneventfully, the peace officers and Bob Dylan going their own way. There were no problems, not like Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant Crowley. You contrast that with what I call the Boston massacre, the insult that rocked the nation, the Professor Gates affair. The police didn’t recognize a professorial professor, and they reacted when yo mama got confrontational. They said, “Wait a minute, we’re going to arrest you, dude. You’re being contentious here with no reason.” Now, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that Bob Dylan, the name, is a zillion times more known that Henry Louis Gates, and so is Dylan’s face, and so is his voice. Now, the learning experience here is that a rock composer and singer 40 years back can teach civil behavior better than a tenured college professor.

Nevertheless Rush made some factual errors in telling the story. That’s not surprising, since he seemed to be referencing (and indeed on his site he linked to) the original “drive-by-media” Associated Press article on it. In that article, it was said that neither of the police officers involved had ever even heard of Bob Dylan. Later reporting by Chris Francescani of ABC, including a direct interview with Officer Kristie Buble, asserted that this was not true. The officers knew in general terms who Bob Dylan was, but they did not, however, recognize the rain-soaked man who’d been picked up as being Bob Dylan.

Mr. Limbaugh also made some swipes at the “Woodstock generation,” particularly in the light of all the remembrances of the Woodstock concert which have been flooding the media lately, with the 40th anniversary of the event. I certainly don’t mind hearing knocks at all that stuff, but it’s not accurate to include Bob Dylan with the same broad brush strokes. I guess it proves there’s still work to do around here. Oddly, Rush noted that Bob Dylan wasn’t actually at the Woodstock gig, but added, “He couldn’t get there because his son was sick.” Where the heck did he get that story? Mr. Snerdly doing some too-fast fact-checking?

Rush also took a swipe at Bob’s singing ability, which is too bad, but there you go. I think there are few if any better (and funnier) commentators on and observers of the political scene in America than Rush Limbaugh — and if you don’t agree you probably haven’t listened to him for any length of time — but when it comes to his taste in music, well … let’s just say that when he invokes something I genuinely dig it’s generally just a coincidence.

It’s doubtless not relevant to why Rush doesn’t dig Dylan’s singing voice, but for those who don’t know, including overseas readers: radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh went completely deaf in 2001. He lost all hearing in both ears. While this loss of hearing was occurring, over a period of months, he continued doing his daily three-hour radio talk-show without informing his listeners that he was becoming and indeed had become deaf. I recall that I was listening to him a lot back then, and noticing some strange changes in his voice. Others noticed too, and sent him e-mails wondering what was wrong with the broadcast, or with the microphone, or with him. I remember him point-blank telling his listeners one day that there was nothing whatever wrong at his end, and that they should just adjust their own sets! Of-course he knew very well what was wrong, and thinking back about this later it struck me how that statement was as poignant as it was also typically humorous on his part. Being unable to hear his own voice anymore, he was losing the ability to control how it sounded. And this was for someone who was not merely a radio talker but also a pretty talented mimic when he felt like it (his imitation of Bill Clinton remains the most hilarious and spot-on I’ve ever heard). When he finally told his listeners that he was deaf, I was flabbergasted and not a little devastated also. People who don’t listen to him, or who hate his politics — or both — will sneer, but to me, it was equivalent in its cruel irony to Ludwig Van Beethoven losing his hearing. Limbaugh is a master of the medium of radio like no other. He was clearly born to do what he does, and makes just about every other talk radio host sound like an amateur, a bore, or a screeching maniac. Rush Limbaugh takes his conservative political views, his sense of humor, his timing and just his ability to articulate and day after day pumps out three golden hours of radio, while lesser mortals trying to the same thing just repeat themselves, harangue the air and use callers and interviewees as crutches. Naturally, some are better than others, but I’m sure all of them would acknowledge that there is only one Rush, and that no one else even comes near him.

Rush continued doing his show while totally deaf and even continued taking callers (having their words typed on a screen in real time so that he could have conversations with them). He pulled it off astoundingly well, in fact. I’m convinced that had he not been a conservative talk-radio host, his story — one of great personal courage and triumph over adversity — would have been celebrated with in-depth sympathetic stories on all the major TV networks. But he was a conservative talk-show host, so it didn’t really matter to anyone. Except, of-course, his twenty million or so listeners across the United States of America.

Ultimately he had a cochlear implant surgically placed into one of his ears, and he regained a form of hearing. He has said that it allows him to recognize and enjoy music that he knew previously to going deaf, but that he can’t really hear and enjoy new music with which his brain is unfamiliar.

As far as doing his radio show is concerned I believe that no one today, just turning it on, would think for a minute that he has any hearing problem whatsoever. And he almost never mentions it. But in reality he is still a deaf man doing a radio show — the biggest radio show in the country; I suppose the biggest radio show in history. He can control his voice again. He can do his mimicry. And he is a huge force to be reckoned with in U.S. politics.

Before the blogs, before Fox News, before the “new media,” there was Rush Limbaugh, saying what so many people thought but what was almost never heard in the mainstream media. Contrary to caricatures of him, Rush Limbaugh doesn’t radicalize or rile up anyone; rather, by articulating what so many ordinary Americans perceive anyway, Rush is more like a safety valve and a source of comfort and levity in the face of political conflict. The really bad thing is to feel isolated in one’s political outlook, and to see only decay and doom ahead. Rush Limbaugh daily lets his listeners know that they are not alone, that liberals are rightfully a source of hilarity, and that the liberal agenda, being ridiculous, can be defeated.

When it emerged a few years ago that he had an addiction to pain killers, many of those who hate him rejoiced and figured that a lot of his listeners would abandon him. Conservatives are so intolerant of weakness, right? Instead, his listeners rallied around him. Even President Bush, instead of trying to distance himself from someone who was at risk of being convicted of a crime, publicly expressed concern for Limbaugh and pronounced him “a great American.” There wasn’t any need for him to do that. Limbaugh hadn’t always agreed with Bush on particular policies then and certainly didn’t always agree with him afterward. But Dubya well understood the kind of contribution that Limbaugh had made to political discourse in America.

Rush Limbaugh gets paid very well for what he does. But it’s still worth remembering how rare a gift he possesses and how well he utilizes it.

His comments on Bob Dylan, off-key as they may have been in some respects, at least provided this opportunity to salute him.

Bob Dylan Picked Up By Cops In New Jersey!

DYLAN TO POLICE: “I’M JUST WALKING AROUND LOOKING AT HOUSES”

Cops say: HE HAD NO I.D.!

Asked to accompany law enforcement officers back to his hotel to confirm identity.

“He couldn’t have been nicer.”

The blurbs above just about summarize the story that has hit the wires in the last few hours, about an incident that took place back on July 23rd (oddly, exactly one week after Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested in Cambridge, MA for disorderly conduct, when police came to his house to check on a reported break-in — and very much at the time that the Gates story was peaking in the media). From the AP:

The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront looking at houses.

[…]

Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday.

“I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work,” Woolley said.

[…]

The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name. According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:

“What is your name, sir?” the officer asked.

“Bob Dylan,” Dylan said.

“OK, what are you doing here?” the officer asked.

“I’m on tour,” the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” said that he didn’t have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night’s show.

The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation.

“He couldn’t have been any nicer to them,” Woolley added.

We’re just hearing about this now because Dylan didn’t rush to any microphone or newspaper to voice his outrage at being stopped, and essentially picked up, for doing nothing more offensive than looking at houses.

What could have been running through Bob’s head? Of-course, in his film Masked and Anonymous his character Jack Fate says to an armed guard, “I’ve got a lot of respect for a gun.” It’s a prudent attitude for anyone to have. Cooperating with the police works out better than confronting them, just about every time. It’s not solely about avoiding being shot; it’s about avoiding any kind of escalation of trouble, whether a summons, an arrest, or anything. Nevertheless, one could easily get huffy about being asked what one is doing, on a public street, causing no harm to anyone. Carrying I.D. is not required when out in public in the United States of America ( “I don’t need no stinkin’ passport”: more Masked and Anonymous), and long may that be so. You could get on your high horse and force the police to decide whether to arrest you (for what?) or whether to let it go.

Or you can take another tack. You can be empathetic to the young police officer who is doing a job and is responding to some kind of report that has to be investigated. You can choose to make things easy for that officer instead of hard. That is apparently what Dylan did.

We’re not all Bob Dylan, of-course. And we’re not all Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. All such situations are somewhat different. But the larger lesson, as always, remains this, I do believe:

Keep a good head, and always carry a light bulb.

And then there’s this:

In Long Branch that’s just the way things go.
If you’re white you might as well not show up on the street
‘Less you wanna draw the heat.

Addendum: A lot more details on this in a story by Chris Francescani at ABC, in which the police officer concerned speaks for herself. She maintains she knew who Bob Dylan was, in general terms, but didn’t believe that this guy was Bob Dylan. It’s quite hilarious.

Following her police training, [Officer Kristie] Buble said she indulged him.

“OK Bob, why don’t you get in the car and we’ll drive to the hotel and go verify this?’ ” she said she told him. “I put him in the back of the car. To be honest with you, I didn’t really believe this was Bob Dylan. It never crossed my mind that this could really be him.”

Buble made small talk on the ride to the hotel, asking her detainee where he was playing, she said, but never really believing a word he said.

“He was really nice, though, and he said he understood why I had to verify his identity and why I couldn’t let him go,” Buble said. “He asked me if I could drive him back to the neighborhood when I verified who he was, which made me even more suspicious.

“I pulled into the parking lot,” she said, “and sure enough there were these enormous tour buses, and I thought, ‘Whoa.'”

More On Bob Dylan and His Hot New Jersey Night

Well, one post was never going to be sufficient on this story of Bob Dylan’s encounter with the Long Branch police department on July 23rd, 2009. If you think that it caused controversy when Bob Dylan went electric, it’s seems to be nothing compared to the roiling set in motion by his getting picked up while out taking a gander at some houses in New Jersey. Chris Francescani’s story at ABC remains the best I’ve seen on the whole incident, and taking a look at the readers’ comments which are attached to it is guaranteed to make your head spin right off.

What was he doing, anyway? I’m still far more fascinated by the events themselves, rather than what Dylan’s purpose was in being there, but there is speculation including by Mary at BabyBlueOnline that he may have been searching out the roots of another musical friend (as in his recent visits to Neil Young’s and John Lennon’s childhood homes). Could be.

On the other hand, the whole point is that he doesn’t need an excuse or justification to just take a walk, in the United States of America. He doesn’t need to carry identification while out perambulating either. Dylan knows these things very well (in the last post I quoted lines from his film Masked and Anonymous that highlight questions of freedom such as these, and it’s quite ironic that in the end here Dylan’s identity was demonstrated by his actual “stinkin’ passport”!). Yet, instead of making some kind of angry stand, he simply cooperated to the fullest extent possible with the police, and allowed himself to be detained in a de facto way (of-course he was never arrested as such and there was no crime in question).

Just say it wasn’t a trip intended to search out anyone’s childhood home. Say he just wanted to walk away from the concert tour hubbub and clear his head (even if it was in the rain). He walked around and looked at houses, in what happened to be a “low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood,” as the AP described it. Such a thing might have appeared bizarre in a place where people likely drive everywhere they need to go, and where the appearance of houses does not seem worthy of any focused attention. But take a look at Dylan’s “Drawn Blank” series of sketches and paintings, and it’s easy enough to see that he can take an artist’s interest in things that appear quite ordinary to the average person’s eye. Indeed, that’s a lot of what being an artist is all about, isn’t it? So, maybe what happened on July 23rd amounts to a guy being “picked up for walking while being an artist.”

Lest this sound like I’m joining those who are condemning Officer Kristie Buble for being some kind of constitution-shredding storm-trooper: I am not. The comparisons to the Gates/Crowley case (which I wrote about at this link) are many and are valid. In this case too, a police officer was responding to a complaint telephoned in by someone in the neighborhood, who saw a strange old man walking around in the rain peering at houses and for whatever reason felt concerned or threatened. Should the police ignore such a call? Buble was nearby, drove up, and asked the guy who he was and what he was doing. She asked. No law against asking a question, even if you are a cop. The man was entitled to refuse to answer and to challenge her to make a case out of it. Or, he could have answered but done so with loud anger and recrimination, yelling about his rights etc. He chose a different approach.

One thing that surprised me (and perhaps some others out there) most of all when I first read the story was the mere fact that Dylan admitted to being Bob Dylan right off the bat. That sounds funny, but I would have thought that he might be tempted to say, “Uh, I’m Frank Smith, and I’m just out taking a walk.” Try to avoid a lot of razzmatazz. But obviously Bob is smarter than me. He didn’t hesitate to just tell the plain truth of who he was. And when the truth wasn’t accepted, he just agreed to the request to get into the back of the police car and (as reported in Francescani’s story) told the cop that he understood why she had to take him to the hotel and verify his identity. He merely asked, amiably, if she might afterwards drive him back to where he had been picked up! (This, apparently, did not happen. Too bad, but it was probably too late for more house-gandering by then anyway.)

Some people commenting on the story seem to be assuming that Dylan was on his way to some kind of terrible unjustified punishment, had he not been proven to be Dylan (or if the man picked up in this way wasn’t Dylan to begin with). (If you get my drift.) That displays a failure to understand how police do their work on a daily basis, and the kinds of things they have to handle. This was not a case of someone being arrested for committing a crime, but rather it was a case of police responding to a citizen’s complaint, finding what appeared to be an oddly behaving character on the scene, and having the character then claim to be a world-famous individual. What do police do in such a situation? Wave bye-bye and good luck, and wait for the next call to come when said individual is perhaps found lying face down in a ditch? No. A responsible police officer does what a police officer is trained to do: ascertain the facts of the situation, provide assistance to someone who is in need and protect the public safety. If the rain-soaked old guy had turned out in fact not to have tour buses at the hotel, and not to have a harmonica to his name, then the police officer would have wanted to find out who he might actually be, if he had a place to stay, or if he in fact required shelter or indeed psychiatric attention. These kinds of things happen every day; indeed, many times a day in urban environments. There’s no reason to think he would have been tossed in jail on trumped-up charges with the key tossed in the garbage. But some people prefer to conjure false outrage rather than to take a moment to empathize with the police.

Bob Dylan, on July 23rd last, was not one of those people.

By the way, you’ve got to wonder if that drive to the hotel in the back of the police cruiser looked and sounded anything like this: