On the Worship of Chronology

or the belief that Thursday is better than Tuesday because it's later in the week:

...The young counterculture’s self-conception—its ideology—was as fluffy as an angora rabbit. What exactly it meant no one quite knew, except that the old world (their parents’ world) was dying and deserved it and the new one was a-borning and would be much better, if not transcendently better.

For that, the song, with its string of images unrelated to any proposition, proved an excellent anthem. (And the tune was catchy, too.) As one critic of Dylan’s music wrote, “Dylan's aim was to ride upon the unvoiced sentiment of a mass public—to give that inchoate sentiment an anthem and give its clamour an outlet. He succeeded, but the language of the song is nevertheless imprecisely and very generally directed.”

Imprecision and generality are the friends of the ideologue and the romantic.

But the times didn’t change. Or they didn’t change for long. People remained what they had been. After the brief period when the new society seemed real and permanent, people acted as St. Paul would have been predicted, if anyone had thought to consult his letters...