"The Chimes of Freedom Flashing"

If you’re new here, welcome. Every Sunday, I share a poem and a brief reflection on our times.

We live the Era of Rage and Degradation. The two go hand in hand.

There are a lot of people in America who are making a lot of money by making a lot of other people angry. Business is booming.

And there are plenty of politicians hollering their heads off, spitting venom against enemies (mostly imaginary), wild-eyed and shaking with the glee we can all get by loosing the choler in our blood and letting the rage rip. Donald Trump himself is the paragon example of this stage of our civic de-evolution: Angry Man.

The right-wing, MAGA media ecosphere that embraced Trump early and lifted him up by feeding his rages to millions was built long before Trump ran for office. It was created and brought into the national culture by Rush Limbaugh’s radio broadcasts, and then moved into cable TV in Roger Ailes’s Fox News, all the while honing and refining a simple approach: cultivate grievances and stoke rage about them. It’s actually a very old strategy. “Yellow journalism,” they called it a century and more ago; “rage bait” is the same thing today.

First, you find stories you can reduce to a simple narrative of “good versus evil,” never mind the pesky details. Second, make sure you’ve got a guy who’s good at headlines. Boil a story down into something sharp, painful, terrifying, gory. “If you’ve got a headline, you’ve got a story,” an editor once told me at the beginning of my career (though later a great producer at ABC taught me that the best stories “live in the grays, not the black-and-whites.”) And finally—”if it bleeds, it leads.” Blood changes everything. Makes the story literally existential for readers and viewers.

Yellow journalism is harder than you might think. To do it well takes a very particular set of skills, as Bryan Mills might put it. But now, the merchants of mad rage don’t need to go hunting for people who have those skills, that knack for twisting the viscera of your audience. And they don’t need to be confined to the right-wing ecosphere. The algorithms of social media and the AI bots will do it all for you, and their reach is boundless, global.

The consequence of all this:

And that’s where the degradation happens.

Democracy is hard, as President Barack Obama used to remind us.

“Our youth, our drive, our diversity and openness, our boundless capacity for risk and reinvention means that the future should be ours,” Obama said in his farewell address in January, 2017, days before Trump took office. “But that potential will only be realized if our democracy works. Only if our politics better reflects the decency of our people. Only if all of us, regardless of party affiliation or particular interests help restore the sense of common purpose that we so badly need right now.”

That seems like a voice from a dead and distant past. And Obama has been rejected by many on the left as well as those on the MAGA right. But he remains the most popular living president:

There’s a reason Obama remains so popular, and it’s the best-kept secret in American politics: Most people are still normal.

They don’t want the relentless rage. They don’t want a fight to the death online every day. They don’t want a politics of hatred and viciousness. They don’t want a civil war, or “national divorce,” or any other crackpottery on offer from the extremists who dominate our discourse. They want what they’ve always wanted: A country that works. A politics that’s decent.

You know all this.

You also know that there are times when anger is a necessary and proper response to the times. Righteous anger has always been part of the struggle for justice. “And he looked around at them with anger, and grieved at their hardness of heart,” the Gospel of Mark tells us. Jesus understood. So did Malcom X.

You don’t hear much about love in American politics these days. Not the slogan; the real thing. Trump uses the word “love” quite a bit, and he may mean it sometimes, but Trump is more than anything else a world-class hater (as someone once said).

There was a time, though, when “peace and love,” and “make love not war,” were actual political slogans. The hippies may not have bathed sufficiently, but they got that right.

Our poem this week comes from that era. A time when there when political leaders and ordinary citizens called for more love, greater love in our democratic life together. We need that again. In fact, it’s the only way out, the only way forward.

Bob Dylan understood that.

You probably know this song, our poem this week. I heard it the other day as I was driving, and as I listened to the words of the song, tears welled up in my eyes. I realized—this is not a protest song. It’s a love song.

The scene: The singer and friends duck in a doorway during a thunderstorm. The power of the storm, the glory of it, stirs something overwhelming in the heart of the singer, an ecstatic sense of empathy and love with all humanity. A revolutionary love.

Bob Dylan was 23 years old when he wrote this. And I think that’s part of it, too. Anger often comes too quickly to us as we grow older. The young are keen to love.

—Terry

by Bob Dylan

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll

We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing

As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds

Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing

Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight

Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight

An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing



In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched

With faces hidden while the walls were tightening

As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain

Dissolved into the bells of the lightning

Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake

Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked

Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing



Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail

The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder

That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze

Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder

Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind

Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind

An’ the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing



Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales

For the disrobed faceless forms of no position

Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts

All down in taken-for-granted situations

Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute

Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute

For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing



Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed

An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting

Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones

Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting

Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail

For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale

An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing



Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught

Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended

As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look

Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed

For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse

An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing