Bob Dylan. Dylan, 79, is the hero of the Sixties counterculture, which makes him revered among today’s mainstream Left. Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and not too long after that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, for which he never would have been considered at all if he weren’t an idol of Leftists worldwide. But on his new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan sings a curious stanza that should have his Leftist followers, if they’re listening to the words, wondering if the grand old man is losing his grip. Conservatives, by contrast, should be cheering.

The lines come in a song entitled Mother of Muses, which begins by sending out a series of pleas to the spirits of inspiration. The speaker calls on the “mother of muses” to “sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea,” and to “sing of the lakes and the nymphs in the forest,” that sort of thing.

So far, that’s fairly conventional: the man wants to write a song, and he needs some help to do it. Poets going back to Homer and before that have asked the muses to visit them with something worthwhile to say, or sing, or write. But then Dylan shifts the tone slightly, asking this “mother of muses” to “sing of the Heroes who stood alone / Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone / Who struggled with pain so the world could go free.” Who might those heroes be? Bob Dylan is glad you asked. The song continues:

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott
Sing of Zhukov and Patton and the battles they fought
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved out the path for Martin Luther King
Who did what they did and then went on their way
Man, I could tell their stories all day. There is much more.