Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize has a certain elegiac quality. It feels like a lifetime achievement award. We in the West have too much enthusiasm for canonizing our secular saints before they have passed.

The Nobel Prize is nothing more than signaling approval of those in the in-group. If it were sincere, they would have revoked the Peace prize awarded to the man who dropped ordnance on seven different countries recently.

What "outstanding contributions for humanity" in the field of literature has earned Bobby Zimmerman such distinction?

Being the voice of the most ill-begotten generation in human history: the baby boomers. They were the first generation in history to grow up without any material wants. As a result, they are the most morally bankrupt cohort in our history.

The baby boomers are in favor of preserving the environment. This means favoring regulations that limit new construction and keeps their home valuations high.

The baby boomers are mostly anti-war. They only favor war being waged against women and children so long as their guy is the one prosecuting it.

The baby boomers expect a continually expanding economy to the extent that they will saddle their children and grandchildren with debt.

And Dylan's award validates all their self-indulgent aspirations.

It's not really the fault of the boomers. They grew up without a dad.

They used to have a dad. He was young and handsome. But he was ripped away during their formative years. His pretty young wife also resembled the residual self image of their aspirations. Jackie wore a pillbox hat and scrambled around the rear deck of the Lincoln Continental trying to scoop up his brains and pieces of skull.

She was captured in her blood-and-tissue spattered pink skirt and jacket on the flight bearing him away from Dallas. Her right glove, white that morning, was caked in blood. Her left glove was missing.

Jackie Bouvier passed away more than twenty years ago. But her name lives on, in the fictional maiden name of a cartoon character whose husband is universally mocked.

America's step -dad was vulgar and rough, and started sending their brothers far away to kill and die. America went from smiling and waving from the open convertible to pulling the hard shell down around us.

If some maniac drops a nuclear bomb on me, I will comfort myself knowing they also got some sanctimonious asshole who loved Bob Dylan.