“Peter and the other apostles replied: ‘We must obey God rather than human beings!’” (Acts 5:29, NIV)
From GROK – Summary balance in the New Testament: Christians are called to be good citizens who respect and pray for leaders (see also Titus 3:1 and 1 Timothy 2:1-2), but ultimate allegiance belongs to God. When human authority contradicts God’s will, obedience to God takes precedence. This framework has guided Christians for centuries in varying political contexts.
“Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.”
Trump at Dylan
30th Anniversary Show – NYC, 1992
The only time I bumped into President Donald J. Trump (45-47) was in 1992 in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The event was Columbia Recording Artist’s 30th anniversary show celebrating Dylan’s life, work and song. A Beatle even showed up, and Johnny Cash and Ronnie Wood too.
I was with a good friend, and seated around us, watching performer after performer present a Dylan tune or two, were Martin Scorsese, Kris Kristofferson, Sean Lennon and others…. Early on in the evening, sometime after Gotta Serve Somebody was played by the backing band, Booker T. & The MG’s, almost as a sound check, in walks Donald J. Trump with what could have been a 17 person entourage. Donald Trump was just a few rows in front of us. He entered his row and as he stood there in his tall frame, slowly taking off his overcoat, my buddy feigned an angry cry and yelled, “hey Pal, DOWN in FRONT”! It was quite a show.
Trump at Dylan – 33rd Grammy Awards/1991
Here is Dylan about a year earlier performing Masters of War, again in New York City, his rage-filled song, condemning the military industrial complex characters, the ones Eisenhower warned us all about in 1961 and who still seem to be around us today in 2024.
Oh, and what’s this?? There is Donald Trump at 1 hour 39 min and 13 to 17 seconds in, standing, taking part in the celebration of Dylan’s work, and this quintessential ANTI WAR song.
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Finally, and remarkably so, I came across this information in the book, Dylan, Lennon, Marx and God, by Jon Stewart, Cambridge University Press. Copyright 2022.
Stewart writes, pulling from the late Artur Jarosinski book, Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Dylan Utterances. 2nd ed. 2006 and Jonathan Letham’s Rolling Stone article in 2006:
Below from Stewart’s work, Dylan, Lennon, Marx and God…..
As Dylan explained at the time: ‘Right now… there’s a big push on to make a big global country – one big country — where you can get all the materials from one place and assemble them someplace else and sell’em in another place’ (Jarosinski, A) In this context, ‘Union Sundown’ offered an anti-globalist critique that presaged the ‘America First’ protectionism of Donald Trump by three decades. Later, while reflecting on individualism during a Rolling Stone interview in 2006, Dylan celebrated the virtue of self-reliance in a passage that compared Trump’s tenacity to that of his literary forbears:
Who’s the last individual performer you can think of? I’m talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody’s reality but their own. Patsy Cline and Billy Lee Riley. Plato and Socrates. Whitman and Emerson. Slim Harpo and Donald Trump. Its a lost art form. I don’t know who else does it beside myself to tell you the truth. (Dylan in Jarosinski, 2006:1385)
For reference
Full Rolling Stone article
https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-genius-and-modern-times-of-bob-dylan-237203/6/ Jonathan Letham
https://www.boblinks.com/arturjarosinski.html
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With God On Our Side 6th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2FuDY6Q4M verse… Dylan warned us way back then… about Russia, Russia, Russia. It was Russia and the US that worked together to defeat Nazism. May we work together again.