The boy is back in town this weekend for two sold-out Dublin concerts. And who better than Bob Dylan to bring it all back home - the 1960s, that is - as captured in Martin Scorsese's riveting TV documentary earlier this autumn, writes Anthony Glavin.
We'd have missed it, had our daughter not taped both nights, but we're still holding off on the second instalment, the way you try to prolong a great book or meal.
But let's give further credit where credit is due: in this instance to George W. Bush, who has also provided a flood of Sixties flashbacks, via a tragic conflict in Iraq that each day looks more and more like Vietnam War II. I tried suggesting as much with a large sign - "IRAQ 2003: VIETNAM FOR SLOW LEARNERS" when Bush came to Hillsborough for a war council with Tony Blair a few weeks after the invasion of Iraq. My slogan's debt to Seamus Mallon's views on the Good Friday Agreement vis-à-vis Sunningdale was not lost on Sinn Féin marchers that afternoon, judging by the wan looks in my direction.
One of the hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters in Washington DC this past September put it even better with another placard: "IRAQ IS ARABIC FOR VIETNAM". Much of the mainstream US media ignored that massive demonstration, though the Washington Post reported on the huge numbers who had never marched before, just like those of us who protested for the first time in the 1960s. And prominent among these first-timers were family members of US military, including a father with the sign: "PROUD OF OUR SOLDIER: ASHAMED OF THIS WAR".
You might question just how proud the US administration itself is of this war, given that it has banned any photographs of the flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. Nearly 2,100 US soldiers, and perhaps as many as 125,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, have died so far. Admittedly, this is far fewer than the 58,000 US soldiers and more than 1.5 million Vietnamese who died 30-odd years ago. But victims of war are not numbers, but individuals - sons, daughters, mothers and fathers - a point my old college room-mate Peter made in a recent letter, wherein he also recalled the Marine honour guard he saw so many mornings outside a funeral home near his Boston flat in the winter of 1969. "The image that sticks in my mind," he wrote, "is of these soldiers, who could not, of course, wear overcoats, blowing on their fingers to keep them warm."
You don't need a weatherman, Dylan sang, to know which way the wind blows. Yet weather channel and all, President Bush still managed to tune out for several days the force-five hurricane that laid waste to the US Gulf Coast and all those po' black folk in New Orleans. What's more, those TV images of the righteously angry, black urban poor of New Orleans were themselves another 1960s flashback, recalling the Civil Rights era, and an American racial divide that hasn't, as we like to say in Ireland, gone away, you know. "NO IRAQIS LEFT ME ON A ROOF TO DIE" was another sign spotted days later at that DC protest, carried by an African-American woman, whose simple eloquence echoed that other 1960s icon, Muhammed Ali, heavyweight champion and Vietnam-draft resister, who informed his America: "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger."
As if all this weren't bad enough, another 1960s spectre, namely Watergate, lurks in the shadows of the full-blown scandal currently stalking yet another Republican presidency. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, son of two immigrants from Co Clare, who last month indicted Scooter Libby, Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff, only last week convened a second grand jury. This has set Washington abuzz with speculation over which high-ranking administration official is now at risk in his investigation into the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame by a White House desperate to cover up its misuse of discredited intelligence in the march to war on Iraq.
It is all coming dreadfully unstuck, as if Dorothy's Toto had tugged back the curtain on the once invincible Bush presidency to reveal, not the Wizard of W, but what looks like, for my money, Dick Cheney at the clockwork controls, sweetheart dealing with his Halliburton pals, overseeing his secret Iraq policy group, and lobbying for the CIA's right to torture. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress, whose members, unlike Bush, must seek re-election, has stalled an unprecedented series of administration measures as it finally faces up to the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, all the while keeping a nervous eye on another burgeoning scandal involving the well-connected GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
None of this, however, is a case of "Roll on the Revolution", as a conservative member of the Irish commentariat shrugged last month, after I voiced my dismay at the swelling tide of cronyism and scandal that looks ever more certain to swamp the Bush/Cheney neo-con project. To whatever degree these troubled times resemble the 1960s, we need to do far better in realising the changes we first wished for ourselves, and our planet, way back then.
Still, if you want a sound track for what's going down, you could do worse than dig out your Dylan collection, as we did just last week from our daughter's bedroom. The Masters of War are still at their game, but even they might admit the waters around them have grown, and the times are once more a-changin'.