Now that the National Security Agency has apparently cataloged all of our intimate tele-talkage, up to and including pleading with a monolithic credit card company’s “customer service representative” in Bangalore that you can’t pay them until said credit card monolith’s publishing arm reimburses your expenses for the goddamned story one of their magazines sent you to write, it’s time once again to acknowledge the weird majesty that is Neil Young.

Not so much the “Heart of Gold” Neil Young but rather the “This Note’s for You” Neil Young who from time to time likes to discomfit the marketplace of ideas with his blistering version of reality. In this endeavor he is often, as a lifestyle consultant once told me in another context, “walking north on an airplane flying south.” But this time Young’s timing seems auspicious as he lets fly against all that he perceives mendacious about our approval-ratings-challenged President’s many adventures in Living with War.

Young said recently that he got tired of waiting for the Millennial Generation to put down their iPods and rage against the war machinery and so decided to do it himself. Bracing concept, youth of America. Try it sometime.

So now we have Young rejoining his mostly off-again collaborators David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash on a summer tour that should give what has inevitably become a restful retrospective a blast of the here and now. The boys play the Hollywood Bowl–Hollywood Bowl! Is this the last civic auditorium with unsold naming rights?–on July 31 and, thanks to Young, it’ll probably be a barn-burner.

CSN and sometimes Y have been excoriated over the years for irony-proof lyrics and a patouli-in-the-limo worldview. Fair enough. But CSNY’s “music,” as David Crosby inevitably termed it with maximum gravitas even as he fired up his crack pipe, has for good or ill endured. As Graham Nash described the milieu for writing said songs during an interview for LAUREL CANYON:

“There was a freedom and a sense of hope in the air and a sense that we could really change the world, that we really maybe could help stop the Vietmam war if we talked to enough people. We were optimistic and full of piss and vinegar and we were writing these great songs.”

Piss, vinegar and great songs. Just what a beleaguered democracy could use right about now.