Mr. Jones Wishes He Were the Lawyer of Someone Just a Little More Funky

I wish I were Bob Dylan's lawyer. Right now I could be racking up the billable hours by writing up the cease-and-desist letters – a separate letter for each offender, mind you – demanding that each and every newspaper, TV and radio station, wire service, and blogger who have quoted the final verse to his song "Masters of War" without paying the licensing fee. Writing up all those letters would take hours and hours and hours, and I could then present Dylan with a hefty bill for my services.

Here's the story: A group of students in Boulder, Colorado, put together a band for a high-school talent show. They call themselves the Coalition of the Willing, and the song they intend to play in this show is "Masters of War". The last verse of the song expresses the singers wish that the unnamed and unidentified masters of war were dead, and the singer's intention to follow the masters' casket to the grave to be sure of it.

Some other students heard the band rehearsing, and were upset by this. Someone complained to a (presumably right-wing) radio talk show about the band's rehearsing a song that finished with a death-threat to President Bush.

Enter the Secret Service, whose solemn duty it is to investigate every known presidential death threat. SS officers appeared at the school to find out more. A teacher gave them a copy of the song lyrics, and the officers went home.

Now the story of how the SS is investigating high school students who sing protest songs is all over the Web, and most every version of the story quotes the last verse of Dylan's song.

The scary thing here is not that the SS investigated – it's the SS's job to investigate identified threats to the President – but that someone thought that calling in the heavy artillery was an appropriate thing to do in the first place. That's what the civil libertarians refer to as a "chilling effect": wingnuts' provoking over-the-top official responses to dissent is intended to harass dissenters ... and give them investigation (if not actual arrest) records.

What's next? Are the wingers going to sic ASCAP on the bloggers who report this story and quote Dylan?