Of His Satanic Majesty’s Thumbprints, Part 1

Wisdom has fled both old and young. But was it ever really there?

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Bob Dylan turned 85 years old on 24 May 2025, and I was impressed by how little was made of it by the numerous music/movie nostalgia pages on my feed. I suppose it had something to do with how far Dylan is into his 80s now, and how the powers that be would rather we not question, a) how is it all these major guys from the heavily drugged out 1960s music scene have made it to age 80 and beyond? and, b) why are all these ancient old things still touring when they have all the money they need to stay home and play with their great-grandchildren on the vast lawns of their favorite mansions?

This is the music of the younger generation, as I remember the saying in the late 1960s/early 1970s, we should pay attention to what they have to say. Here I am in my mid 60s wondering how many days I have left to me—will I make to age 65, let alone 70?— but at least I don’t have to be anywhere I don’t want to be. So what do these formerly young people have to say? Not much, other than variations on “Hello, Cleveland!” and “Can I get some more of my guitar in the monitor?”

While musing over this development, I recalled an incident from the summer of 2020, when my adopted home state was still under COVID-19 lockdown, despite flu season being long since over. A protest of citizens in my small crossroads town gathered in a public parking lot, with speakers—mostly middle-aged and older people—condemning the tyranny of the government in regards to a virus with 98% survival rate.

When the speakers were done with their speaking and prayers offered up, we all took signs calling for the end of the lockdown and for people to resist the mask mandates, etc., and went to stand on either side of the main boulevard where it ran past the parking lot. We got quite an encouraging bit of honks from the farmers, ranchers, and mechanics in their pickup trucks. But what did the young people have to say?

It was the young people shrieking out the windows, “Put your mask on!” “Listen to the experts!” And, my personal favorite: “You people are killing us all!”

Talk about your satanic inversions. Listen to the young people? ” As of 2020, the most staunch defenders of the government and media-orchestrated status quo are the once and long ago questioning and rebellious youth.

If this last isn’t a sign of the end times…well, it just is. We shouldn’t marvel because the precedent goes all the way back to the year The Beatles’ Revolver album was released, 1966 and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which was most vigorously prosecuted by the Chinese youth. All that art and culture destroyed…just another birth pang of the End, as Christ Jesus Himself described such things. It just so happened to manifest itself here, beginning with the “political correctness” say this/don’t say that movement on college campuses in the 1980s. Now we have the punitive, reality denying, thought policing that is called “woke.” Nothing short of what they would call (most cleverly, most innocently) “direct action” is going to make them go away.

So the youthful rebel heroes of yesteryear are now elderly relics on tour. Just this week I learned that Billy Idol, the one-time darling of MTV when it was a music channel and it mattered, is now a spokesman for the American Association for Retired People. He’s 69 years old and preparing to go on tour with a new album. I suppose he’s signed that devil’s contract, too. You’d think that somewhere around here, someone has had to have said, “I’m too old for this nonsense. I’ve invested my money, I’ve got plenty to live off of. Make another album? Whose buying it? Go on the road? Are you nuts? I’m 60-something years old! I feel sorry for anyone coming to see anything like that!”

Too bad, so sad. Those who sign the contract must tour as Satan’s dancing monkey until they die of a hideous, preternaturally extended old age. There’s simply too many of them doing this for this to be a coincidence.

As for the Young People of America™ to whom we should lend our ears, they were always conformist to some fashion or other. Indeed, the decades used to be recognized by what the young people wore and what they did with their hair. That was before Y2K, of course. Now we’ve had decades of septum piercings, pastel-dyed hair, and tattoos. Even the fashion they’re slavishly devoted to is frozen in time. As for what they have to say, it’s the same slogans and catchphrases from no later than 2010. Think of those creatures from the 1960s and early 1970s still prattling on about “the Establishment” and “the Man” and so in the 1990s. It makes as much sense.

Inversions of identity and purpose and the absolute death of creative effort are a sure sign that capital-E Evil is tightening the screws in anticipation  of its inevitable demise. No one is neutral in the final battle to come. Pick a side, or have it chosen for you. You won’t like the default, but, hey, you do you.

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