A New Year's Blog

On the first Wednesday of November My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were on a Culinary Backstreets food tour through the Monzen-Nakacho neighborhood of Tokyo during our long-planned vacation there as the presidential election unfolded on the first Tuesday of November back in the United States. The tour was mostly about eating and drinking, but it included a stop at the Fukagawa Fudo-do temple for a Goma Fire Ceremony in which Buddhist monks of the Shingon school burn wooden sticks and stoke a fire meant to cleanse negative energy and induce enlightenment. Ironic, at least given the presidential election. The Enlightenment might have been the genesis of the American Revolution, the one ostensibly represented in the American flag t-shirts, baseball caps, and pocket squares sported by so many red-blooded citizens, yet they turned away from its ideas in droves by voting for an anti-intellectual loon. And though I told myself I would refrain from checking election results during the tour, I snuck a peak at my phone prior to entering the temple and saw the looming truth. That is why when it was my turn to provide a talisman to a monk to hold over the purifying fire, I gave him my phone, thinking maybe he could help? He couldn’t; it didn’t. Buddhists might believe the path to enlightenment is eschewing greed, hatred, and ignorance, but America evidently feels otherwise. One nation under a greedy, hateful idiot, divisible.

So, the second reign of His Imbecility is about to begin, but in other news, rejoice! My one-sided feud with Bruce Springsteen is over! Oh, not because he lowered his exorbitant ticket prices nor even that he issued a boilerplate denunciation of Ticketmaster. No, it was so many stories of fans disregarding the boundary between public and private lives of their favorite artists, like in the case of Chappell Roan, or in some assuming their status as Swifties granted them jurisdiction over their north star’s love life. Why, I wondered, did I so desperately need Bruce Springsteen to embody lofty ideals? Springsteen, after all, has a pre-song rap about a couple horrified fans encountering him in the parking lot of a strip club. “Bruce, you’re not supposed to be here,” these fans observe. “I’m not,” Bruce replies. “I am simply an errant figment of one of Bruce’s many selves. Bruce does not even know that I’m missing. He is at home right now doing good deeds.” If he over-indulges in his own mythos from time to time, he also understands it better than anyone, as that lampooning the consummate fan’s need for their heroes to be pure as snow illustrates. And besides, to paraphrase the 42nd President of the United States, it’s the music, stupid.

It might be 2024 but my favorite album of the year was from 1984 – the Boss’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” of course, which was released 40 years ago on June 4th and is why I spent this summer almost exclusively listening to it, again, and again, and again, the whole way through. And when the first Presidential debate went off the rails at the end of June and it quickly became clear where this whole American horror show might be headed in November, I figuratively, even literally on occasion, cranked the record even louder. Springsteen himself has deemed the 12 songs as a grab bag, but maybe only the person who made it could have sold it short. Repeatedly listening to it only reveals how sonically and thematically the album all hangs together, the different moods of the songs cohering because in their way, each one is about some kind of agony or disillusionment, foreshadowed in the immense title track, the music holding holy the promise of America while the lyrics cut it down to the bone. It’s the kind of duality that is hardly allowed to exist anymore in this country.

 

The studio version is still best, but I also like this one because Bruce’s voice in his sixties has a mixture of exhaustion and defiance that feels apropos to the country he’s singing about. 

In a book published this year in observation of the album’s anniversary, “There Was Nothing You Could Do,” Steven Hyden framed America’s newfound struggle for two meanings at once through a pair of new songs Springsteen wrote at the turn of the century. Unlike “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Land of Hopes and Dreams” was exactly what the title said, the American promissory note of MLK satisfied, an all-inclusive America aboard a train rolling “through fields where sunlight streams.” “American Skin (41 Shots),” on the other hand, culled from the real-life story of Amadou Diallo, was about the ongoing unpaid promissory note, the omnipresent fear of merely existing in America, of knowing you can be killed “just for living in your American Skin.” “Once,” Hyden wrote in hearkening back to “Born in the U.S.A.,” “it was possible to encompass the protest and the rallying cry in a single song. But in the new century, culture had fractured. Two songs now do the job of one. One for each side.” Occasionally, though, even in the new century, you can still do the job with just one.

Springsteen released “Long Walk Home” in 2007, toward the end of the George W. Bush administration, when jingoism born from war was curdling into recession. He was not prophesying, in other words, but it’s remarkable how much the song speaks equally to the present. It’s a heartland rocker told from the perspective of a character returning to his hometown. “I could smell the same deep green of summer,” he sings, the sense of smell activating his memory. But in the second verse, he finds his hometown is not how he remembers it at all. There’s likely been an economic downturn, as the “shuttered and boarded” diner suggests, but it’s more than that. It’s the people. “I looked into their faces,” Bruce sings, and in illustrating the connective tissue of American music, pulls the concluding part of the line from The Stanley Brothers, “but they were all rank strangers to me.” And when I am told to break bread with people who voted for the President-elect and thereby co-signed his attempts to subvert democracy in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and they did co-sign them, whether they like it or not, whether they participated in his efforts, cheered them on, laughed it off, or doltishly tell you not to take it so seriously or that it wasn’t so bad, I can’t, it’s impossible, these people are all rank strangers to me. 

In the third and final verse, Springsteen casts the character’s hometown in the light of American myth, how “everybody has a neighbor…a friend…a reason to begin again.” He may as well be singing about Mayberry. “Old flag flying over the courthouse,” Springsteen sings, “means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we want.” He is a shrewd enough songwriter to know that by saying this, he’s telling you it’s not true at all, that these things are not set in stone, that they can slip away if we are not vigilant and trusting you to understand. But if people still confuse the meaning of “Born in the U.S.A.” 40 years later, can we expect them to extract the double meaning of “Long Walk Home?” Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei, foremost opposition of Russia’s thug-in-chief, cautioned Americans not to take their democracy for granted, but they did anyway. I lost count of how many pundits decreed the election results proof that in an economy where prices are too high democracy becomes a luxury item. But a luxury item suggests something expensive, and it looked more to me like 49.9% of this country brushed off democracy as worth nothing at all. 

In live performances this year Springsteen would introduce “Long Walk Home” as “a prayer for my country,” which seemed significant to me. He might have campaigned for the President-elect’s opponent, indicating he grasped the stakes, and yet, by framing the song as an invocation, he came across as beseeching a higher authority for help, as if his faith in the people had wilted. In the unofficial rough draft of “Long Walk Home,” the one Springsteen played on his Seeger Sessions tour in 2006, he seemed past even the point of prayer. “When the party’s over / and the cheering is all gone,” he wondered in an additional verse at the end, “will you know me, will I know you?” What he’s describing may as well be the ruined aftermath of a demagogue’s spectacle. If this conclusion would have resonated even more right now, it says a lot that Springsteen cut it for the recorded version, not giving into the darkness but also not quite embracing the light. Instead, he ends somewhere in the middle, with his character amid that long walk home, all these thoughts reverberating in his head. Who are we? What do we want? What will we be? I guess we’re about to find out.