Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

that listed all the instances in which Dylan used certain key words. Weberman learned out that when Dylan used the word rain, he actually meant violence, as in A Hard Ragan's A-Gonna Fall, and so on. Naturally enough, Weberman's next step was to discover that such symbolic messages were embedded in the songs of other musicians, too. Pretty soon, he had formulated what he called the "Secret Language of Rock," which, like Sevareid's "Secret Language of Presidents," was used to send messages to the initiated.

Now, I would judge Weberman's theories reasonable, if not believable, up to this point. It is true that songwriters

for use with down, the best example being D. A. McLean's parable of the Sottery. American Pre-Once in a while, performers do not received messages to each other, as in Carly Somers's You're So Famous, attested to Warren Beatty. Using a concordance to analyze a writer's work is a solid scholarly technique that has been applied to Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton.

But when Weberman began to claim that certain songs contained secret messages directed at him, that's when the situation became problematic. One could argue with Weberman over whether or not a song said this or that. But to tell him, "No, man, Watching.

No, Averil Howe is our Driving was at wishing you to leave his passage alone, was kind of touch. It would have it on his whole cosmos. Like telling Patent the earth was not the center of the universe.

But then again, what to say? It is a fact, seen to be true, that one day, on Bloeker Street, after yet another garbage road, Welchman was welting home when suddenly an enraised Bob Dylan rode up on a ten-speed bicycle and delivered a hail of blows to his head. "The pump don't work 'cause the sandals stole the handles," as Dylan once said, which means that the New Improved Paranoia makes sense, even when it shouldn't.

Not only is the New Improved Paranoia sensible; it's clue, too. Remember how socially important it was to be on Nixon's enemies list! It's also considered very statusy to have had a tax audit. And is there anyone gauche enough to say that his telephone isn't tapped? You'll be the envy of all your friends if men in a black Plymouth actually do stake out your house every day. It is very an courant to live just west of the San Andreas Fault—and to complain about it. The ultimate is to be an ex-CIA agent, for as anybody conversant with the New Improved Paranoia knows, there is no such thing as an ex-CIA agent.

Perhaps, after all, you are thinking that this stuff about the New Improved Paranoia is a lot of bunk. Perhaps you imagine that you are immune to it, that you are a sane, rational human being not given to delusions either of grandeur or of persecution. Well, then, ask yourself one question: Do you jiggle the coin-return slot in pay phones after every call you make? You do, don't you? And do you know why you do it? You do it because you think that the entire telephone company's mammoth technology is going to disrupt itself just for you and return your ten cents. Or else you imagine that out of the 10,000 people who use that particular phone, one of them left a dime there for your benefit, and you fancy that you are the only person in the entire world who jiggle coin-return slots. Now, if that's not paranoid behavior with delusions of grandeur, I don't know what is. And it is not very far from believing that the telephone company is for you to believing that the telephone company is against you, is it?

But that's no reason to stop checking those coin-return slots. Because you know and I know that sometimes—not often, but sometimes—the dime is there.