Fare you well, my Bobby.

Bob Weir spent sixty years teaching us how to laugh at the joke beneath the anthem, how to recognize when the music sounds celebratory but the story is rotten underneath. That was always the gift of U.S. Blues. Red, white, and blue waved high while the con runs underneath, empire dressed like a parade, power assuming it is earned just because it arrived “first”. The Dead knew. Art has always met the moment, but sometimes you have to wonder if we are stuck in time. Fifty-two years later… I was not even a thought in 1974, but I understand the America that led to this composition, and all of it feels just as urgent now.

What I loved about the Dead, and about Bob in particular, was never patriotism. It was clarity. A refusal to confuse symbols with truth. A reminder that freedom is not loud, it is practiced. Bob did not write most of the lyrics, but he conceptualized many of the songs, and his guitar was the vessel that brought the sound to our ears. There is something good and pleasant about being in the company of fellow travellers when any Dead tune is played, strangers becoming family for a few bars, all of us hearing the same question underneath the melody.

Bob died at home surrounded by his family earlier today. We will see what the President says, if he says anything at all. He has a pattern now. Mock the dead who did not bow. Stay silent when the moment calls for grace. Dance on graves because he cannot build anything worth standing on. He called Rob Reiner “deranged” hours after he was murdered. He used Jimmy Carter’s funeral to score points against Biden. Cruelty mistaken for strength. Grievance dressed as governance. Bob did not answer to that frequency, and that silence, or whatever petty jab might come, will tell you everything about the distance between the two Americas we are living in right now.

Meanwhile, this week. Venezuela’s ground measured in barrels before the smoke clears. Renée Good killed in Minneapolis, a poet and a mother, and the system calls it an incident instead of a reckoning. The song always knew this version of America was coming. Bob just gave us the soundtrack to survive it, rambling, wandering, refusing to settle for the story we are told.

Thank you for the music, Bob. Thank you for teaching us to hear when the punchline is us, and choosing still to stand for the people instead of the flag. That hope is the work now: to turn grief, clarity, and that Deadhead sense of possibility into daily choices that inch this country toward something kinder and more just. May the America fifty-two years from now look back at this week and say not “nothing changed,” but “that was the moment ordinary people refused to confuse flags for freedom, and finally chose to love their neighbors more than their narratives.”

Fare you well, our Bobby.