Meeting Across the River Wednesday, August 04, 2004

News story on AOL: Boss has had enough of Bush.

Don't reach for that Lady Remington, Ms. Scialfa! Bruce elaborates:

"We're trying to put forward a group of progressive ideals and change the administration in the White House," Springsteen told The Associated Press in the most overtly political statements of his 30-year career. "That's the success or failure, very clear cut and very simple."

Progressive ideals...testicles retreat into body cavity...am flooded with visions of Henry Fonda, overloaded dust-bowl jalopies and guitars with This Machine Kills Fascists written on them. (And Supports Stalin left off in the interest of brevity.)

Progressive ideals...OK, Tom Joad, explain please which of those will remove the threat of, say, Pakistani madrassas or of Iran developing a nuclear weapon? Maybe the far-sighted notion a Kerry adviser proposed in an interview the other day: "calling Iran's bluff" by supplying the mullahs with nuclear fuel. As in: You say you just want fuel to feed a reactor? Fine, here's fuel. Feed your reactor. Just think about how stupid you'll look in front of a Congressional committee if we catch you building a bomb with it!

I know, I know. Bruce wrote "Thunder Road" and he's a friend to the hard-workin' fucked-over man and when he drives down the Turnpike the Carmena Burena starts playing and trees begin to blossom.

But I'm getting tired of his schtick: the "Brando mumbles," the furrowed forehead, the concern he gives off like gamma rays. And I resent that he reduced 9/11, on that much-grammied record of his, into another goddamn story about feelin' real bad cause you can't be with your baby. That's part of it, sure; but it's not all of it, and not realizing that is a tremendous failure of imagination. It's hard to get around the notion that he doesn't recognize the world is bigger than Wendy and the Magic Rat--and the Ghost of Tom Joad. That's his progressive ideal: GWB is just another mean ol' daddy keepin' his daughter locked up at night.

Of course, maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe he's got a detailed policy platform stashed at the manse (similar to the "secret plan" Kerry mentioned the other day for withdrawing from Iraq; any day now, he's going to be drawing up an Enemies List and bombing Cambodia). But I doubt the hell out of it. To all appearances, it looks like Bruce is coasting on the virtue vibe and "outrage." It's tiring, it's humorless and grim--as sentimental and stupid as a soccer hooligan.

I'm very fond of this quote from Stanley Crouch, in a Salon interview years ago:

We would be better off if we didn't always sentimentalize everything and everyone. We sentimentalize the great figures of our past, and then we find out that they were human beings who did both things that were exceptional and other things that perhaps weren't savory at all. Then people want to reject the whole deal. That's the adolescent morality that you find in rock 'n' roll. We have to be able to see both the good and the bad. That's what being grown-up is all about. We have to strive toward what I call an unsentimental patriotism, one that faces 200 years of slavery, the decimation of the Indians, the second-class citizenship of women, child exploitation and terrible labor conditions, but one that also recognizes that we came through with the unions, that women and minorities moved themselves into the center of the dialogue and therefore took the country closer to being the thing that it was originally conceived as.


What can I say? Rock on.

@ 9:14:00 PM,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home