At the end of February this year, I stopped posting on this blog for a month, during a switch to a new blogging host and platform. At the end of that period, the blog was down for four days. It went back up on 3 April.

The suspension and interruption cut traffic to the blog in half, from about 1,500 hits a day to about 700. Most people who visit my site are directed there by search engines — they’re usually looking for images, and since I post a lot of them in high resolution, all these visits tend to keep me moving higher and higher on the search pages, resulting in more and more hits.

The month-long hiatus dropped me back down a few notches, but I’m climbing up again. Today, I hit 100,000 hits since the blog went back up. That’s a lot of hits, and my thanks go out to everybody who has visited, for whatever reason.

I spend about an hour a day posting to the blog — it’s a pleasant routine and a kind of discipline which helps me structure my work day, spent mostly at the computer.  The blog will be six years old this December, and I’ve enjoyed every minute I’ve devoted to it.

[Photo by Jae Song]

The early kings of Rome were absolute dictators who ruled Rome before the days of the Roman republic. The kingship was not an hereditary position — the dictator was elected by the Roman Senate from among its own members, but once elected the king had power over the Senate, which basically carried out his wishes.

Dylan’s song “Early Roman Kings”, from his forthcoming album Tempest, evokes these despots, I think, as emblems of the corporate powers that have taken over the American republic. (“They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers, they buy and they sell — they destroyed your city, they’ll destroy you as well.”)  We are now ruled by “elected” officials, but are only offered choices provided by the monied interests, who function as the early Roman Senate once functioned.

Once elected, our leaders can basically do anything they want, with the permission of their corporate masters — including suspending the most basic provisions of democratic government, like habeas corpus, as Barack Obama has done, by fiat.  Obama’s relentless war against the U. S. Constitution places him squarely in the tradition of the early Roman kings, who recognized no power higher than their own.

In any case, Dylan’s early Roman kings symbolize political apocalypse — lunatic and merciless tyranny.  Amidst this horrifying vision, Dylan’s own persona emerges as a kind of opposition to this tyranny, promising to fight the tyrants as viciously as the tyrants oppress us all.

The result is a song that is more prophetic than political — a snapshot of the horrific mess we’re in and a suggestion of the rage and violence that will be required to extricate ourselves from the mess.

When posterity contemplates the ruin (or perhaps even the miraculous recovery) of the American republic, Dylan’s song will certainly be among the few works of art recognized as responsive to the actual temper of the times we’re living in now.