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“The Left was too dumb to know he never was into their garbage, and of course the media just went along with what the dumb lefties said, being for the most part dumb lefties themselves. Of course, being so enigmatic compaired to most famous folks didn’t help matters, but that’s Dylan.”

Here is a little more on Dylan.

“While most left-wing Dylan fans have always quickly moved to forgive or forget Dylan’s sins, there are always those who continue to upbraid him. Mike Marqusee, in The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (2003), says, “If public life is an ongoing test for the artist, then when it came to Vietnam, Dylan failed.” He also bemoans the “fatalism of the later Dylan”—as if songs that place their hope primarily in the next world’s justice are somehow more “fatalistic” than 1963’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown.” Earlier this year, in The Nation, Richard Goldstein took Dylan to task for his “sexism” and told us that “the rod of ages he clings to . . . is a phallus.”

On the other hand, there is also a largely unheralded brand of listener who is perceiving a funny thing in Dylan’s latter-day work: Many of his apparently secular songs of romantic love seem to resonate most strongly, and are arguably best understood, as songs of devotion to God. Is Dylan in some sense masking his (always controversial) faith in this (almost blasphemously) sly manner, where “you” often really means “You”?

It does appear clear that our view of Bob Dylan has been constricted by the “a-changin’” times during which he’s worked. And while the music of peers like Young and Springsteen is probably destined for artifact status as the decades pass by, Dylan’s seems likely to continue provoking consideration well into the future. It is also likely that that future belongs to those Dylan listeners who are not so much flummoxed by the enigma of an ever-shifting man of many faces—who supposedly swings back and forth between leftism, conservatism, faith, and nihilism—but instead to those who see a continuum in the precocious 22-year-old who wrote, “How many years can a mountain exist / before it is washed to the sea?” and the at-peace-in-his-own-skin 65-year-old who now sings:

In this earthly domain
Full of disappointment and pain
You’ll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you
And that’s sayin’ it true
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.

Posterity is likely to understand that the politics of Dylan’s art has always been on another level entirely.”