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For Springsteen Fans Now Angry with Bruce
Stephen Colbert is off the air. I waited to write this to make sure that our democracy, despite what Colbert and his regular guest Bruce Springteen are saying, remains intact. It does.
Colbert and the old Springsteen are mourned because the two saw a chance to make a very large amount of money telling people already pre-positioned to believe the sky has fallen. They are living embodiments of the blurring among entertainment, righteous protest, and partisan affirmation. Their audiences increasingly want just confirmation. Springsteen in particular sounds like he’s reciting some AI-scrubbed version of outtakes from the Declaration of Independence; the poetry that reached a hand across barriers seems lost.
They are men of their times. We live in a world of constant media stimulation, with every day being the day the doctor calls with the test results. Americans have convinced themselves they are living through a uniquely apocalyptic moment for freedom in general and the First Amendment in the particular. Every unpleasant event becomes evidence of democracy dying. Social media posts become the Reichstag Fire. A conservative commencement speaker becomes the death of free inquiry. A television cancellation becomes political persecution. It’s all about as shallow as a puddle.
Nothing can simply happen anymore. Not sure? One of the seemingly most critical issues facing our government today is whether to build a ballroom next to the White House. If every Trump-driven event is an existential threat, then every minor programming change must also be existential. Something as transient through our pop culture as a TV show can’t just have become old or irrelevant like “I Love Lucy” and “Father Knows Best”. Every era produces another so-called permanent cultural fixture that instead still ends up disappearing so completely younger people assume it was a local fast-food chain. Vaudeville disappeared. Radio drama disappeared. Video rental stores disappeared. And television shows end. They always end. That is literally the business model.
Instead, fascist, anti-democratic forces must be silencing truth-tellers. We’ll soon, it all suggests, be passing video loops of Colbert hand-to-hand like Soviet-era dissidents shuffling mimeographed manifestos around smoky coffee shops.
It’s funny the resistance chose as its spokesman Colbert, hardly a rebel broadcasting via pirate radio. He hosted one of the most expensive network television programs in the country. He operated with corporate backing and fawning celebrity access. This is a wealthy comic employed by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Springsteen is reputed to be a billionaire himself, and plays to audiences who can swing thousands of dollars for a ticket. But this isn’t an argument that only poor artists can discover truth, but instead a reminder that Colbert and his supporting acts are part of a system of money and influence and corporate greed as big or bigger than MAGA. Their comedy/commentary is no longer sharp or clever. It is simply mocking and humiliating, as crude as when Colbert called Trump “Putin’s c*ckholster” and Springsteen claimed (on Colbert’s show) that those who supported Trump were “small-minded people who got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.” It is likely Colbert could stand in front of an audience and just say “Trump sucks” over and over to applause. That takes no courage. Our American political culture is exhausted, and the progressive electorate is now dependent on such one-sided narration to tell it what to believe. That cheapens us.
Despite being a Springsteen fan since I was 17, and Bruce was not much older, I’ve never met him. But I suspect today if we met, he would not be interested in talking with a guy like me. Bruce at his angriest in songs like Born in the USA or The Ghost of Tom Joad, was an inclusive populist, talking about the hardships we all shared in one form or another as Americans no matter how we voted. In the blistering song about the death of industrialization in the Midwest, Youngstown, Springsteen does not ask if the forgotten steel workers are Republicans or Democrats. What if in the aftermath of 9/11 Springsteen wrote a song condemning half of all Muslims instead of the prayer that became The Rising?
In his very best music, like his own hero, Woody Guthrie, before him, Springsteen retains hope — at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe, everything that dies someday comes back, I believe there’s a promised land. Artists who once, like Guthrie, translated shared American pain into art now too often exploit partisan identity into dollars. Bruce once not too long ago allowed for sincere beliefs that differed between honest men and women without condemning those who disagreed, because what we shared mattered more than how we differed. He professed we need a conscience, not a party affiliation, to make America great. I am mourning here something larger than just celebrity political disagreement. I mourn the loss of a shared American vocabulary. Bruuuuce!!! Bruce?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Who Said This? Fun Quiz!
Fun quiz! Who said the following on TV this week? (The answer is below and will surprise you!)
“Nature abhors a vacuum, and if we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum. And we will step away from the world stage in a significant way that might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world in my opinion.”
Answer: Stephen Colbert, who supposedly is a comedian with a silly late night show, but instead ends up reading neocon talking points to millenials.
The ever-sharp Caitlan Johnstone has the whole story here; Colbert was in the process of tearing apart Tulsi Gabbard for daring oppose American interventions.
The correct answer is reading what Gabbard said:
“The United States should not be intervening to overthrow these dictators and these regimes that we don’t like, like Assad, like Saddam Hussein, like Gaddafi, and like Kim Jong Un. There are bad people in the world, but history has shown us that every time the United States goes in and topples these dictators we don’t like, trying to end up like the world’s police, we end up increasing the suffering of the people in these countries. We end up increasing the loss of life, but American lives and the lives of people in these countries. We end up undermining our own security, what to speak of the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s spent on these wars that we need to be using right here at home.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Help Your Country, Win Valuable Prizes
In Peter’s book, one pervasive theme is the incredible amount of money that was wasted in Iraq; one chapter is entitled “Money and our Meth Habit,” and compares the waste he saw around him as a PRT Team Leader with the dope budget for Guns n’ Roses.Among the more celebrated pissing away of cash episodes is the unsolved mystery of what happened to the $6.6 billion dollars the US Government lost in Iraq (some put the total missing as high as $18 billion).
After the March 2003 invasion, the Bush administration flooded the conquered country with cash to pay for reconstruction. Altogether between March 2003 and May 2004 $12 billion in cash was airlifted into Iraq. Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. Along the way, $6.6 billion was lost. Can’t be found, Unaccounted for. Gone.
Let’s take a second to figure out how much money $6.6 billion is. To begin with, it is about three entire fucking airplanes full of hundred dollar bills. The LA Times says it is enough money to run the Los Angeles Unified School District for a year. You can buy more than 20,000 Rolls Royce’s with that money (your cost may vary, dealer tax and prep applies).
Anyway, the money is gone and we have to find it, citizens.
This website hereby officially requests you to send in clues as to where the money is now located. You can stay anonymous, or, if you include your name, we will offer the following valuable prizes to the best clue:
— A free copy of WE MEANT WELL, plus author Peter Van Buren will call you and personally apologize for the parts that are not really that funny.
— Bloggeteer Jason, as part of a younger demographic (though Jason is a real person, he is not a gay girl in Damascus), will give up one of his private “stash” of now-rare Four Lokos, if you are old enough and physically attractive.
We also have feelers out to Gary Busey’s people, and hear Gary may donate some socks. We asked people near the subway for money, and will also throw in the $3.58 we got, plus the one Canadian coin (a “shilling”).
If you are famous or clever and want to donate a prize, you can write to us about that also. Don’t back down Colbert, we know you weren’t that drunk when you promised.
Send your clues to info@wemeantwell.com. Do not include the word “Viagra” in the subject line, and don’t type in ALL CAPS LIKE YOUR MOTHER. Offer void if it gets us in trouble.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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