I blame President Bush and his administration of fear-mongers, willing to strike fear of terror in the heart of every American to fulfill his bid for unbridled exectuive power, for the demise of our civil liberties.

Poets, philosophers, and priests have historically presented different ideals of personal freedom. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the relation of freedom to culture preoccupied moral and political philosophers, one school insisting that personal freedom (or autonomy, in one sense of the word) required a certain independence from one's surrounding culture, the other that such freedom required the internalisation of cultural norms. In this paper, I examine Bob Dylan's take on the question of how freedom relates to cultural membership - in particular, whether adhering to the norms of a culture - of twentieth century American culture, to be precise - threatens freedom.
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Bob Dylan stands for an ideal of personal freedom, in some sense.
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"To live outside the law, you must be honest." Why? Outside what law? Is there another law, mandating honesty, outside the law? In this essay, I will trace a philosophical dialectic of freedom in lyrics from four albums of this period - Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde - bringing us finally to this extra-legal imperative of honesty.

""America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. --Abraham Lincoln

"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."