I, Dynamo

A Critique

Exhuming Bob 2-2

Detourning The Folks

     Greil Marcus has written of detournment extensively especially in his Lipstick Traces.  The French word means hijacking, rerouting or diversion, or in other words changing the direction of the flow or meaning.  Thus one strips an object of its familiar values and replaces them with others but leaves the object intact.  In a conflict of cultures the question becomes who will assign the values or meanings to objects and words.

     I will use as a starting point for my purposes here H.L. Mencken of the twenties.  The values into which immigrants migrated were those of the Anglo-Saxons.  From the immigrant viewpoint the Anglo-Saxons detourned their languages and cultures attempting to replace them with English and Anglo-Saxon values.  The inevitable result was that immigrants felt that they had been devalued and demeaned.  So it is no wonder that having recovered some balance by the end of WWII they fought back by attempting to detourne Anglo-Saxon culture in their favor.

     This is nowhere more apparent than between the Jews and Angl0-Saxons.  No matter whether you place the conflict between the Old Dispensation or the New Dispensation the Jews always view themselves as a separate, independant and potentially dominant culture.  Hence the drive is always first for autonomy and then detourning the host culture to reflect Jewish laws and customs, hopefully making Hebrew the official language.  To Jews, like Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan then ‘freedom’ means the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon law and culture with Jewish law and culture with the Jews as arbiters of the fate of what become essentially subject peoples.  The Jews can never be ‘free’ no matter how unrestrained they may be so long as they are subject to others legal and social systems.  This is the central problem the United States and the West refuse to face.  The same is true of the Semitic Moslems.  It is the purpose of Moslems to detourne Western culture for a Moslem Culture.  It is quite simple.

     By the time H.L. Mencken was making his rise Anglo-Saxon pride was at its maximum.  I haven’t been able to determine whether Mencken was Jewish but he allied himself with the Jews making common cause with them.  The approach naturally was to defame Anglo-Saxonism.    Mencken naturally chose the least sophisticated  Anglo-Saxons to represent the whole.  Thus he went to the mountain folk of Appalachia and the hill country all along the Line.  He began to ridicule these people as representative of all Anglo-Saxons.  I mean, he was mean; he was vicious; his Jews caused a huge fuss for much less criticism or in their terms- defamation.

     Expanding the arena, using these rural folk as their model the Communists then picked up on these people with the least possibility of education as the example of Anglo-Saxonism.  In 1932 and 1933 following Mencken’s example Erskine Caldwell, a Communist writer, published two mammoth best sellers, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.  These books were especially mean and vicious making Mencken look laudatory in comparison.  Perhaps using Mencken and Caldwell as inspirations a Jewish cartoonist by the name of Al Capp created the L’il Abner comic strip in 1934.  This strip also ridiculed Anglo-Saxons but in a less demeaning manner that not only didn’t offend the majority but actually pleased them.  There were some few of us who saw through the sham but there was nothing obvious enough that the majority could see.

     Capp would be convicted on a morals charge late in his career that effectively ended his influence.  The motif was carried forward on television in the series Archie Bunker.

     Now, the Anglo-Saxons used to represent the whole were the custodians of the Folk music that was so revered by the New York City Jews of the late fifties and early sixties.  So you actually have Jews imitating Hillbillies.

      The vilification the Mountain Folk endured actually shamed the city Anglo-Saxons causing a dichotomy in their character.  They rejected the Mountain Folk as representing all Anglo-Saxons.  This is made quite clear in Caldwell’s novel when his urban relative throws his rural cousins out of his house and tells them to never come back.  Something like a son testifying against his father.  The Liberal-Conservative split was given a difinitive form.

     The Mountain Folk formed what Greil Marcus calls the Weird Old America.  After the Roosevelt administration was elected and the New Deal was established as a continuation of the Wilsonian New Democracy Jews flooded back into Washington as under Wilson.

     During the twenties as radio became a reality and recording technology became more widespread and available a number of Mountain Folk and/or White Trash as they were alternately known, recorded their distinctive music in their own voice.  Nor was this music ill received, many of the recordings were huge sellers according to the standards of the times while some like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family became very successful recording acts.  Thus what was known as Hillbilly music until 1954 came into existence.  For whatever reason whoever controls these things thought the term Hillbilly was insulting so the various rural flavored musics were grouped under the term, Country and Western.  Hicks are hicks to me whatever you call them,  Hillbilly or Country, I’ve been called worse.  Having ancestors that came down from the Kentucky hills I have no objection to my Hillbilly ancestry.

     The Anglo-Saxon dichotomy was such that those who were shamed by Communist efforts had an extreme aversion to Hillbilly or Country music that they considered ignorant while professing to admire the Blues simply because it was performed by Blacks even though the intellectual content was well below that of Hillbilly music.

     Nevertheless the Hill Folk were the custodians of the old English folk traditions.  Folk music was then separated from Hillbilly music and approved on that basis.  Thus after the Roosevelt administration was installed in an effort to counter the Depression certain cultural programs were developed.  One involved the attempt to preserve the quaint customs and music of the Hill Folk and the rural Blacks.  These two peoples were treated as anthropological specimens on the same level as Tobriand Islanders and others.

     The New Deal of the Roosevelt administration was a direct continuation of Wilsonian New Democracy.  It was as though they’d never been gone.  With the creation of a huge new bureaucracy Jews came flooding back into Washington as they had in the two Wilson administrations.  In many if not most cases these people were the ones sent out to deal with our homegrown anthropological specimens as Superior to Inferior.  Sort of a domestic Peace Corps.  Yes, they did profess to revere the music of these simple folks.

     So Folk Music always had an honored place in Anglo-Saxon cultivated circles perhaps spurred to some extent by the ‘field’ recordings of the New Dealers.  Folk played a prominent part in popular music from the end of WWII on.  Foremost practioners of the genre were the Almanac Singers and their successors The Weavers.

     A key member of both groups was Pete Seeger.  Pete was both Jewish and Red.  This was a bad combination during the post-war anti-Communist reaction.  While making hits of a number of Leadbelly songs under Seeger’s guidance The Weavers had a major success with the Jewish melody Hava Nagila.  It was a catchy tune.  I liked it.

     Capitalizing on this success The Weaver’s under Seeger’s guidance concocted a ‘folk’ tune called Song of the Sabra celebrating Jewish ‘pioneer’ efforts in Israel.  Apparently the Sabras were some kind of hobo outfit that sat around campfires and ate stew a lot.  Thus the effort to detourne American Folk Music began.  The Song of the Sabras was so egregiously promotive of Israeli/Jewish interests that the song caused a big reaction.  If I remember correctly it was staged at least once on a TV version of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.  That’s where I got the camp fire bit as Pete roasted his weeny and sang.  Whether it was an extra or supposedly in the Top Ten I can’t remember.

     Somewhere about then Seeger and The Weavers were found to be subservice giving a bad name to Folk Music as long as the genre lasted in 1966  or ’67.  The Weavers disappeared from the air waves.  However at least one member would be instrumental in guiding the musical direction of the Kingston Trio.

     Folk music continued strong between the demise of The Weavers and the emergence of the Kingston Trio both as popular music and ‘purist’ Folk.  The greatest of them all was Lonnie Donegan who had a successful career in the US and a tremendous impact on the British scene from England to Australia as Skiffle Music.  Josh White, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders among others, one might add Mitch Miller, had many memorable folk tunes competing equally with Rock and Roll if not its superior.  If one considers the Presley Sun recordings objectively they also can be seen as Folk or highly influenced by Folk.  After all Elvis was known as the Hillbilly Cat.

     The Kingston Trio with their Tom Dooley that was an actual sensation in 1958 sort of broke the taboo against Folk music although the Kingstons were plenty subversive.  The great Chad Mitchell Trio emerged at this time also as an even more politically subversive group but also with a popular sound and enough bite to defuse Dylan’s claim to have introduced serious lyrics into popular music.  The Chad Mitchell Trio is probably running neck and neck with the Kingstons as my favorite folk groups although Terry Gilkyson along with the Pozo-Seco Singers are right behind them.  The old Seekers from Australia are hot stuff too.

     So that brings us up to Grossman’s Gate of Horn in Chicago of ’58 and the founding of the Newport Folk Festival in ’59 as well as Dylan’s entry into the New York Folk Scene in ’61.

3.

     After WWII the Jews had introduced the raw form of multi-culturalism designed to replace the Anglo-Saxon model of society with the Jewish.  With the election of the Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy it appeared that the Anglos had been defeated. 

     The next phase of the Jewish program was put in place.  The thing was to detourne or hijack American culture. 

     Detourning Folk music was part of it.  The study of Dylan concentrates on the New York City East Village group that was virtually Jewish with its specific outlook.  Actually the Folk scene was very diverse and different in its emphasis in each locale.  Bob would focus the entire Folk movement in himself.

     Boston with the Mel Lyman family and Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur was quite different from NYC.  The strictly commercial LA scene with Randy Sparks’ New Christy Minstrels had its own flavor.  In San Francisco Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and others had credentials that easily matched those of Dylan.  The whole San Francisco Sound was Folk based.

     The top bands like Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell Trio and semi-pop groups like the Brothers Four and the Christy Minstrels really carried the banner for folk.

     And then there was the Country or Hillbilly faction that was considerable.  Great old tunes like Jimmy Brown The News Boy were Country smashes.  Hank Snow recorded a passel of old Folk songs like Nobody’s Child.  New murder ballads appeared for people who like that sort of thing that were fabulous like Snow’s Miller’s Cave  and Lefty Frizzell’s dazzling The Long Black Veil.  It would be years before it was known that Veil was newly written and not an old Hillbilly song.  If you compare the Kingston’s  Tom Dooley with Frizzell’s Long Black Veil you can’t tell the difference.

     A word about Harry Smith’s  Anthology Of American Folk Music that Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan revere so much.  The collection is a very small selection of songs culled from a huge mass of material that just happened to fit Harry Smith’s personal psychosis.  Anyone going over the same mass of material could select an entirely different selection of songs that reflected their own personal outlook and would be just as ‘authentic.’  I mean, I heard The Cuckoo and I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground over the radio decades ago as a kid.  I was signally unimpressed.  I never called in to hear either again.  So as far as being some authentic voice of America I rather think the collection reflects Jewish and Communist ideals. 

     What is the message exactly of ‘I wish I were a mole in the ground, I would burrow until I brought that mountain down.’

     It that isn’t a call to detournement I don’t know what is.  So Harry Smith is Harry Smith and welcome to him but I have my own agenda.

     So Dylan left his old life behind to begin a new life in New york City but with an old agenda.  His secret agenda was to detourne American culture.  Of course the word ‘detourne’ was unknown in America at that time.  I have to thank Greil Marcus for adding that very useful word to my vocabulary.

     Bob started out detourning Woody Guthrie.  Within a couple months he had hijacked Woody’s life.  Clinton Heylin believes that even the Guthrie persona was second hand having been detourned from Jack Elliot who had of course detourned it from Guthrie.  Boy, there was another stone bore I never could listen to, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.

     Dylan more or less confirms this in his Chronicles Vol. I.  I’m copying a quote from Chronicles as noted by Jim Kunstler in his excellent review of Bob’s memoir:

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_dylan.html

     Quote:

     “You’re trying hard, but you’ll never turn into Woody Guthrie,’ (John) Pankake says to me as if he’s looking down from some high hill, like something has violated his instincts.  It was no fun being around Pankake.  He made me nervous.  He breathed fire through his nose.  ‘You’d better think of something else.  You’re doing it for nothing.  Jack Elliot’s already been where you are and gone.  Ever heard of him?’  No, I ‘d never heard of Jack Elliot.  When Pankake said his name it was the first time I’d heard it.  ‘Never heard of him, no….’ Pankake lived in an apartment over McCosh’s bookstore, a place that specialized in eclectic, ancient texts, philosophical political pamphlets from the 1800s on up.  It was a neighborhood hangout for intellectuals and Beat types, on the main floor of an old Victorian house only a few blocks away.  I went there with Pankake and saw it was true, he had all the incredible records, ones you never saw and wouldn’t know where to get.  For somone who didn’t sing and play it was amazing he had so many….Pankake was right.  Elliot was far beyond me….I sheepishly left the apartment and went back out in the cold street, aimlessly walked around, I felt like I had nowhere to go, felt like one of the deadmen walking through the catacombs.  It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy….He was overseas in Europe, anyway, in a self-imposed exile.  The US hadn’t been ready for him.  Good.  I was hoping he’d stay gone, and I kept hunting for Guthrie songs.”

     Unquote.

     Of course the US hadn’t been ready for Elliot.  One Guthrie was one too many.  Who needed a Guthrie detourned by another Jew?  Let the English have Elliot.  But that didn’t stop Bob from detourning both Guthrie and Elliot when he got to the Big Apple.  He followed Elliot around studying and copying his mannerisms.  Elliot should have painted on his guitar the slogan:  This machine kills copycats.

     Well, no matter Bob learned his error when he learned another Guthrie copycat wasn’t needed in NYC but Bob had mastered a style, a persona on which he could build.  That was more than he had had before.

     Pete Seeger and the Jewish busybodies were busy fomenting discord in the South.  Already knee deep in the Big Muddy Seeger was encourging others to write political diatribe songs.  The path was clear and Bob met a girl named Suze Rotolo.  Rotolo worked at CORE.  She then encouraged Bob to write ‘politically relevant’ songs.  Well, what are you going to do but go with the flow, swim with the current? Bob didn’t like the topical songs though.  You have to give him credit for good sense there.  He wrote literary style lyrics that talked around the political issues without dealing with them directly.

     Now there were songs that other voices could sing.

     As a lyricist Bob was not a tunesmith so he merely borrowed tunes from old ballads and other people.  In other words he detourned Anglo-Saxon folk tunes grafting on Jewish sensibilities.  Heylin gives a perfect example in an exchange Dylan had with Martin Carthy in England.  Carthy showed him the old English ballad Greensleeves.  Bob dutifully learned the song.  Then he went away for a few weeks.  When he came back he collared Carthy and played him Greensleeves.  Here’s your Greensleeves he said.  Then he played the tune set to the words of Girl From The North Country.  Thus he detourned tune after tune to his own Jewish sensibilities.

     Now things were heating up on the Jewish revolutionary front.  The so-called Free Speech Movement was being launched at UC Berkeley.

     As I mentioned Jews could never be ‘free’ so long as they were merely part of a dominant other culture.  So ‘Freedom’ meant to them detourning the dominant culture so that their own law and culture was supreme.  Freedom for the Jews meant slavery for everyone else.  Thus we have Greil Marcus in the bleachers cheering his heart out at Free Speech rallies for ‘freedom.’  There were many of us in the bleachers much less enthusiastic.  But then we weren’t Jewish and we weren’t clear as to what was going on.

     Dylan as a Jew came to Berkeley to play where he was received as a hero by his fellow Jews.  Both must have been aware of what they were doing.  Jerry Rubin was the sparkplug whether Greil Marcus slyly disagrees with him or not.

     The revolt at Berkeley soon spread to Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League and across the country where it meshed with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

     Dylan himself progressed from his political associations to Another Side of Bob Dylan in which he worked out his own personal problems in a Jewish social context in highly symbolic language.  The lyrics are complex, poetical and not easily understood.  the concept of ‘Freedom’ plays a prominent role.

4.

     Freedom as the idea of a complete lack of constraints developed in the latter half of the twentieth century.  Prior to this ‘freedom’ meant to be free so long as your own freedom didn’t conflict with the freedom of others.  Latterly it has taken the meaning that others be damned so long as one can do what one wants.  This entails the related notion:  consequences be damned.  Consequences won’t be damned so if one does the crime one must do the time.  I suppose the notion is that if you can run fast enough you can avoid the consequences.  I don’t know if one can but some have done a very presentable job of it.  Mao was one, Dylan is another.  Of course there was that one little incident at Redwing that didn’t work out too well but since then it has been fairly smooth sailing for Bob and he may leave the building without suffering too many serious consequences. 

     Now, in order to be free one has to dominate everyone else.  If one is obligated to an other then one isn’t free according to this latter day interpretation of ‘freedom.’  In that sense in the entertainment industry Frank Sinatra was as free as anyone has ever been.  The man need only place a call to anyone elses wife and she would leave her husband’s bed and run over and give Frank a blow job and there was nothing the husband could do about it.  This is no joke.  Sinatra could have anyone beaten up with impunity.  When he was offended by President Kennedy, Kennedy was shot.  There are those who maintain Frank had a hand in it.  Never been proven but there are reasons to so believe.  Frank Sinatra had ‘freedom’ while he escaped the most serious consquences dying in bed a very old man.  Alone and despised perhaps but then one can’t escape all the consequences.

     So while limiting himself to a field in which he could be successful Bob has perhaps been the most ‘free’ of the Rock ‘n Rollers.  He never took on Frank however and if he had he would have discovered the limits of his ‘freedom.’  Although Albert Grossman may have limited Bob’s ‘freedom’ somewhat I find it interesting that Bob came out at least even in his brush with the current Hollywood hard-on, David Geffen. 

     Now, Bob wasn’t so free that he could achieve his goals without leaning on or being dependent on others.  However to compensate himself he destroyed, trashed whoever and whatever he had used as stepping stones to achieve his ‘freedom.’  In the pursuit of his freedom he became a very vicious and nasty man.

     There is no reason to believe that at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival he wasn’t trashing the whole Folk scene that he had used to get him to the launching pad of his Rock ‘n Roll dream.

     The arguments about how or who brought Folk Rock into existence may well be interminable.  The fact is that both Folk and Rock at the time were stagnant.  Whether the music died in that corn field in Iowa in 1959 or not the big labels had pretty well tamed the music of the fifties.  Columbia had separated Dion from the Belmonts and had him singing standards to syrupy instrumentals.  Ruby Baby was his last great effort before Columbia detourned him.  Safe teen acts and emasculated falsettos dominated the airwaves .  By late 1963 and early 1964 the Folk ethic had worn out as Folk groups dressed in loden green pull overs and sang like the Brothers Four.  Even the emasculated and detourned version of   Michael Row The Boat Ashore couldn’t prop up Folk for long.

     So musicians had to be searching for something different if not new.  Folk Rock was as new as anything while the electric blues served as different.  Thus as the middle sixties came in one had Folk Rock, the electric blues and rough sounding garage bands like the Seeds.  Oh yes, that was another development temper tantrum teenagers screaming ‘I don’t want to be like anybody else.’  Not to worry. 

     Folk rock would have or did develop without any real help from Bob.  He already had electric recordings out so that if he didn’t want to stick it in their ear he could have done an acoustic set at Newport and let his electric side take its natural course.

     I’m not so sure even then that electricity was the problem.  Personally I welcomed the electric Bob.  I was glad to see him leave the Folk stuff behind.  I was on the West Coast but I didn’t run into many or any people who were emotionally involved.  Even Greil Marcus doesn’t seem to be put out by the change.

     I think you had to be emotionally invested in Bob the protest singer.  When that fellow in Manchester cried out Judas I would have to think that his problem wasn’t an electric guitar but the fact that Bob seemingly betrayed the political stuff he had been singing.  He had pandered to the protest crowd and now he wasn’t letting them down easy.  He was turning his back on them.  Rathr than being the standard bearer of spokesman for the generation that he had let them believe he was he now trashed everything they believed in.  They had given him his and now he didn’t need them anymore.

     His whole career was based on trashing his believers.  Not that I understood any of this at the time.  I didn’t even know about it and if I had I wouldn’t have cared.

     Positively Fourth Street was his ‘kiss my ass’ song to all those Folkies he had used and abused and now abandoned.

     An interesting aside that could use closer examination was his visit to Carl Sandburg in 1964.  All the biographers assume that Carl Sandburg snubbed Bob because he hadn’t heard of him.  Maybe, I can’t say but it is significant that Sandburg was a folksinger himself or, at least, he sang folk songs.  While Bob and Greil are enthusiastic about Harry Smith Sandburg himself had published his American Songbag in 1928 and then followed it up in 1950 with a new collection.  Unless he was brain dead in ’64 there is little reason to believe he hadn’t maintained his interest in folk into the sixties and kept up with it.

     After all the Christies were doing a number of songs from the 1928 Songbag so Sandburg must have experienced great satisfaction that everything he had been hoping for had come to pass.  I don’t know his singing style, and he did publicly perform the songs, but I suspect it was more Christy style than the cacophony of Bob.

     I don’t think it improbable that he in fact knew exactly who Bob Dylan was, had probably heard him on record and/or the radio and fully detested him,  so that when he opened his door and found Bob Dylan, let us say the folk devil himself, standing there he just froze.  It would be nice to know exactly what was said.  I think it unlikely that he would have been familiar with Paul Clayton but as Clinton Heylin suggests if he had dropped the needle into the groove there is little doubt which record would have been played through.

     If Sandburg had shown any preference for Clayton at all for any reason, manners for instance, there is little doubt that that sealed Clayton’s fate with Bob.

     If It’s All Over Now Baby Blue was a put down of Clayton which seems likely then the odds are that it was resentment over something that was said or done at Sandburg’s is the reason.

    That would have been added to the fact that Bob had stolen a couple tunes from Clayton that required the trashing of the man in ’64 to cover up the evidence.  One can’t hold it against Bob that Clayton committed suicide, after all, we’re all big boys here, but he must certainly have contributed to a deteriorating mental state.

      The trashing of Joan Baez also at this time doesn’t require further comment in this place.  Suffice it to say that Bob had taken hers to keep with his and now it was her turn for the circular file.  It is hard to believe Bob didn’t enjoy what he was doing amidst the flashing gongs on the road to ‘freedom.’

     In ’66 Bob’s mind broke.  He had what used to be called a nervous breakdown.  In his terms a motorcycle accident.  There was a long recovery period of several years.  I certainly  don’t hold the nervous breakdown against him.  He was pushing too hard.  Even if he had been straight he would have become distraught, but under the influence of what all his biographers agree were monumental amounts of drugs washed down with quantities of alcohol it is a wonder if not a miracle that he lasted as long as he did.  Apparently he was driven to complete the sound in his head and vomit out all his rage accumulated up there in the North country before he cracked.

     When he went down he went down hard but in pleasant enough circumstances.

     Why he came out isn’t clear unless it was to trash his fans.  It didn’t take much for me to catch on back then but then on the first hearing of Blonde on Blonde I realized he’d ridden his board all the way to shore.  From there he would have to start all over again while he would never catch a wave like that again. 

     Bob still had a lot of past to bury though.

     He achieved this in spectacular fashion in 1975 on his Rolling Thunder tour as an overseer on his very own Maggie’s Farm.  The tour mayby be considered as a vision of Plantation Bob.  And he was a sadistic overseer too.

     As Heylin points out the shows were over four hours long while Bob may have been on stage only a few minutes to a half hour or possibly a little more.  Thus his cast of characters were slaving on Maggie’s Farm while Maggie or Bob showed up from time to time to make sure his darkies were singing as they slaved.  A very good joke.  If you step back and look at it the gig is pretty transparent.

     Now, Dylan asked people if they were for it.  As the only ‘free’ man in the group Bob had no trouble in getting his victims to come on board his ship that had just come in.  The performers couldn’t have been paid much if at all.  The payroll and expenses of such an extravaganza couldn’t have been recouped at all.  If there was any money left over it went into Bob’s pocket.

     Bob reached way back in the past to bring Ramblin’ Jack Elliot aboard.  Bob owed Elliot a lot so the old man had to be trashed.  McGuinn was brought along because he had traded on Bob’s talent or else had done such sparkling versions of Bob’s songs that he had made Bob look bad.

     Phil Ochs wasn’t allowed to come along not because Bob had pity on his fragile mental state but simply because Bob didn’t owe him anything.  If he had had reason to trash Ochs you may be sure he would have.

     One may guess that he was already finished with Sara, his wife, as he not only allowed her to come along to witness his degenerate behavior but actually cast her as a prositute in his movie Reynaldo and Clara.  One just doesn’t allow the mother of one’s children much less a woman one respects to play a prostitute.  I find it unforgiveable while Sara took him for much much more than thirty-five million if Heylin and Sounes are correct which is pretty good wages of sin.

     As if that wasn’t enough Bob brought along his old inamorata Joan Baez to confront his wife, Sara.  Gratuitously cruel and unnecessary so I suppose Bob was attempting to trash his entire pre-1975 past.  Like a snake shedding his skin he was attempting to begin a new existence.

     Here his Frankist upbringing rose up to bite him because you can’t pour out that quart and half of evil.  As Bob said you can change your name but you can’t run from yourself.  Bob wasn’t released and one can never be released, only the truth can set you free.  You have to come to terms with yourself and acept things as they were and are.  Even then your freedom is conditional; at best you are only out on parole.  You can’t trash reality.

End of Exhuming Bob 2-2