We can agree to disagree about "Ohio". I think it's absurdly easy to take an emotionally charged situation and dash off a quick song that "burns like bad whiskey going down". That's bumper-sticker politics, and we have entirely too much of that in our society today -- in fact, it's quite similar to what the "demons" (Johnson, Nixon, etc.) were doing at the time to try to maintain support for what they were up to. I'm not inclined to let Neil off the hook for Ohio, any more than I'm inclined to let Johnson (or Congress) off the hook for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

As an aside, like a lot of my peers I owned Four Way Street, but I don't know what it means to "appraise it in the context of [that] album". What am I missing here?

I wasn't at Kent State, or Jackson State, because I was only twelve years old at the time. But I was very aware of the events of the day (my big brother got his draft notice), and since those were my formative years, these were formative experiences. Perhaps I don't have the same level of emotional attachment to those times, or those causes, as those of you do who were just a little older than me. But I prefer to recognize that everyone involved in that struggle -- whether they were on the "right side" or the "wrong side" -- was human, with human failings. If I'm willing to point out errors of judgment on one side of the issue, I should be prepared to recognize similar errors of judgment on the other side.