Who lost the war in Afghanistan? Certainly not the defense industry, which got the lion’s share of the trillion dollars the country wasted waging it. Big win for them.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, which seemed to awaken Americans to the fact that they could be incinerated at a moment’s notice, was still fresh when Dylan wrote this protest song in the winter of 1962-63. He first recorded it for the February 1963 issue of Broadside, the folk music magazine, before it appeared on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” that May.
The song, Dylan once said, is interpreted as “a pacifistic song against war. It’s not an anti-war song. It’s speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military-industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up.” In Broadside, the lyrics appeared alongside a drawing by his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, shwoing a man carving up the world with a knife and fork while a hungry family watches.
