In case you haven’t had a TV or radio on or been to any site on the internet in the past week, then you probably did not hear about a pair of North Jersey police officers who failed to recognize the singer and song writing legend Bob Dylan. Nearly everyone who has a website or blog has reported this incident ad nausea since the story first broke and, naturally, added their own remarks. Most of the accounts I read online couldn’t seem to resist pointing out the painfully apparent parallel to Dylan’s classic ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ which becomes especially obvious when you read the narrative that took place between the police and Dylan.
Also too many of the articles insisted on having to insert various lines from Dylan songs in each paragraph, some of which were embarrassing and others just awful in their attempts at humor. Many of the reports suggest a consensus agreement to point out that Dylan now knows what it feels like ‘to be a complete unknown.’ If you need that explained to you then you can stop reading this right now…
Actually, I’d say the more appropriate line from that same classic song would actually be the last line from the final verse where he sings, ‘You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal’.
While I doubt that identifying past & present cultural icons that transcend generations isn’t part of the course schedule at police academy, the one item that I could not find a definite answer for was if the two officers recognized the names of Willie Nelson & John Mellencamp who Dylan explained he was there in town to perform in concert with. But I assume that they did and this is the reason why they went directly to the hotel and got the staff there to vouch for him. But the tragedy here isn’t that Dylan wasn’t recognized – as unbelievable as that seems to many. No, the tragedy here is that the two police officers, both in their mid-20’s, could very, very likely tell you the names of all the current (and maybe many of the past) contestants on ‘American Idol’ and what they performed as well. Now, that is a tragedy!
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