Weekend Song

If you've been watching the Ken Burns/ Lynn Novick "The Vietnam War" documentary on PBS this week (and we hope you have), you'll have heard Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" in the opening episode. Written in 1962, it's been described as a "protest song" that covers a lot of ground: "injustice, suffering, rising seas, pollution and warfare." Even without the connection made by the film, it struck us as a foreshadowing of the natural events of recent months: the devastating Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, and the earthquakes in Mexico. The tragedy of Vietnam was the result of human misjudgment, ignorance, self- deception and stubborn egotism playing out over decades, human frailties that seem to know no end, for which we all end up paying. We're featuring it as an encore (having posted it almost a year ago on the occasion of Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature).