The announcement was not entirely without precedent: Springsteen has long supported Democratic presidential candidates. He endorsed John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden; he stumped for Obama on the campaign trail and performed “This Land is Your Land” with Pete Seeger at the 2009 inauguration, including even the more political verses decrying private property, at Seeger’s request. Springsteen bought what Obama was selling in 2008, but then again, so did almost everyone to the left of John McCain. That 2009 Lincoln Memorial concert was supposed to be a moment of anointing, Seeger passing a torch to Springsteen even as the old Civil Rights veterans passed the torch to Obama. Twelve years later, Seeger is dead, the Civil Rights project remains as incomplete as ever, and Springsteen and Obama have joined forces with Spotify, Comcast, and Dollar Shave Club to bring you a podcast.
Now, safe inside Springsteen’s own mansion on a hill, both men again dust off the memory machine to take stock of where they have been. But they do not answer the question of how Bruce Springsteen, draft dodger, hero of the steelworkers of the 1980s, former punching bag of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, came to enthusiastically embrace liberalism. Was Bruce always a liberal, or has he changed? (...)
The overwhelming political orientation of Renegades, from both hosts, is one of liberal faith in the possibility of the nation as redeemable (like any good Catholic, especially a lapsed one, Springsteen loves a redemption story). Yet the topics of racism and white supremacy put a momentary crack in that certainty: Springsteen admits to losing some of his faith in his neighbors after the 2016 election, and both men have read their Ta-Nehisi Coates. In one of the podcast’s few explicitly political exchanges, Springsteen presses Obama on the question of reparations for Black people in this country: Obama admits that they sound like a good idea, but not one that is politically possible. Again, they scratch their heads and retreat into the safe redoubt of the arc of history and its well-known propensity to bend toward justice.
The moment is one of multiple missed opportunities. At another point in the episode, Obama recalls Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, describing the scene in which Mookie, played by Lee, confronts Pino, the racist older son of the owner of the pizza shop where he works. Mookie’s point is that while Pino treats Black people he knows with hatred, he idolizes Black athletes, comedians, and performers. Pino cops to loving Magic Johnson and Eddie Murphy, but when Mookie asserts that Pino’s favorite rock star is Prince, he counters: “Bruce. The Boss.” I’d wondered what Springsteen thought of this moment in one of the film’s most famous scenes. Yet the podcast skips right over it: Obama describes the scene without mentioning the Springsteen reference. He uses the film to illustrate white Americans’ long history of loving Black culture without loving Black people, and Bruce happily picks up the thread. But they avoid the harder question of why Pino, or Spike Lee who wrote the screenplay, could see Bruce as a great white hope. Once more, the men return to the comfortable world of liberal platitude.
This newly zen attitude would have been foreign to the 2012 Bruce Springsteen, who wrote and released Wrecking Ball during Obama’s presidency. He intended it as a return to social critique; he wanted to write a statement on the financial crisis that would match the success of his post-9/11 The Rising (2002). The songs on Wrecking Ball celebrate resilience, but they also indict the plutocrats who turned the markets into casinos and threw billions of lives into chaos. Introducing the album in 2012, Springsteen praised Occupy Wall Street. He confirmed that while he’d campaigned for Obama in 2008, he wasn’t planning to do so in 2012. The President’s record was a mixed bag. Why, Springsteen asks throughout the record, did these bastards get bailed out? Wasn’t someone going to make them pay? Despite his protestation, he ultimately did campaign for Obama in 2012. Perhaps he got nervous after watching the debates. Perhaps, as a Guardian article from 2012 suggests, he was just scared of blowing his political capital too early.
While listening to the podcast, I hoped Springsteen would have the courage to disagree with Obama as he had done even as recently as 2017, in conversation with David Remnick (himself an Obama biographer). It never happens. Discussing Springsteen’s draft dodging, Obama agrees that the draft was bad, but he will not condemn the war. He asserts that the country matured after Vietnam, but not because people developed skepticism toward military intervention. Rather, it’s because they started performing troop worship: “I think something very valuable had happened and I think this was a hard learned lesson from Vietnam. The American public had come to recognize and revere the service of our troops, even those who were critical of certain aspects of U.S. Military interventions.” Springsteen offers only a weak “Mhm.” A later episode about class, money, and income inequality performs exactly the move that Eriksen wrongly accused The River of making: Obama and Springsteen rehearse the death of the class compromise, focusing on the ’70s and ’80s. Yes, there are some structural problems: plant closures, skyrocketing CEO pay, the decline of unions. Yes, Reagan is to blame. Both men see the situation as primarily cultural, however: we’ve lost our way amid the greed and the striving for what Obama calls “the almighty dollar.”
Despite its limitations, the podcast does achieve moments of real poignancy: After discussing the riots in Freehold, Springsteen plays an acoustic version of “My Hometown.” “There was a lot of fights between black and white / there was nothing you could do. / Two cars at a light, on a Saturday night / In the backseat there was a gun. / Words were passed, a shotgun blast. Troubled times had come.” Springsteen’s performance and presence, even in this impromptu rendition, are magnificent. In a later episode, the two relive Obama’s “Amazing Grace” speech, delivered as the eulogy for the parishioners of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston after their murder by a white supremacist. Describing his drafting process, his correspondence with the author Marilynne Robinson, his anger, sadness, and frustration at a country that would not, will not, stop murdering innocent people, and his own powerlessness to change it, you can sense the mask slipping. This is the tragedy of Obama-style liberalism, whether he knows it or not. The world’s most powerful man is not so powerful after all. It’s almost the stuff of a Springsteen song.
The moment is one of multiple missed opportunities. At another point in the episode, Obama recalls Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, describing the scene in which Mookie, played by Lee, confronts Pino, the racist older son of the owner of the pizza shop where he works. Mookie’s point is that while Pino treats Black people he knows with hatred, he idolizes Black athletes, comedians, and performers. Pino cops to loving Magic Johnson and Eddie Murphy, but when Mookie asserts that Pino’s favorite rock star is Prince, he counters: “Bruce. The Boss.” I’d wondered what Springsteen thought of this moment in one of the film’s most famous scenes. Yet the podcast skips right over it: Obama describes the scene without mentioning the Springsteen reference. He uses the film to illustrate white Americans’ long history of loving Black culture without loving Black people, and Bruce happily picks up the thread. But they avoid the harder question of why Pino, or Spike Lee who wrote the screenplay, could see Bruce as a great white hope. Once more, the men return to the comfortable world of liberal platitude.
This newly zen attitude would have been foreign to the 2012 Bruce Springsteen, who wrote and released Wrecking Ball during Obama’s presidency. He intended it as a return to social critique; he wanted to write a statement on the financial crisis that would match the success of his post-9/11 The Rising (2002). The songs on Wrecking Ball celebrate resilience, but they also indict the plutocrats who turned the markets into casinos and threw billions of lives into chaos. Introducing the album in 2012, Springsteen praised Occupy Wall Street. He confirmed that while he’d campaigned for Obama in 2008, he wasn’t planning to do so in 2012. The President’s record was a mixed bag. Why, Springsteen asks throughout the record, did these bastards get bailed out? Wasn’t someone going to make them pay? Despite his protestation, he ultimately did campaign for Obama in 2012. Perhaps he got nervous after watching the debates. Perhaps, as a Guardian article from 2012 suggests, he was just scared of blowing his political capital too early.
While listening to the podcast, I hoped Springsteen would have the courage to disagree with Obama as he had done even as recently as 2017, in conversation with David Remnick (himself an Obama biographer). It never happens. Discussing Springsteen’s draft dodging, Obama agrees that the draft was bad, but he will not condemn the war. He asserts that the country matured after Vietnam, but not because people developed skepticism toward military intervention. Rather, it’s because they started performing troop worship: “I think something very valuable had happened and I think this was a hard learned lesson from Vietnam. The American public had come to recognize and revere the service of our troops, even those who were critical of certain aspects of U.S. Military interventions.” Springsteen offers only a weak “Mhm.” A later episode about class, money, and income inequality performs exactly the move that Eriksen wrongly accused The River of making: Obama and Springsteen rehearse the death of the class compromise, focusing on the ’70s and ’80s. Yes, there are some structural problems: plant closures, skyrocketing CEO pay, the decline of unions. Yes, Reagan is to blame. Both men see the situation as primarily cultural, however: we’ve lost our way amid the greed and the striving for what Obama calls “the almighty dollar.”
Despite its limitations, the podcast does achieve moments of real poignancy: After discussing the riots in Freehold, Springsteen plays an acoustic version of “My Hometown.” “There was a lot of fights between black and white / there was nothing you could do. / Two cars at a light, on a Saturday night / In the backseat there was a gun. / Words were passed, a shotgun blast. Troubled times had come.” Springsteen’s performance and presence, even in this impromptu rendition, are magnificent. In a later episode, the two relive Obama’s “Amazing Grace” speech, delivered as the eulogy for the parishioners of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston after their murder by a white supremacist. Describing his drafting process, his correspondence with the author Marilynne Robinson, his anger, sadness, and frustration at a country that would not, will not, stop murdering innocent people, and his own powerlessness to change it, you can sense the mask slipping. This is the tragedy of Obama-style liberalism, whether he knows it or not. The world’s most powerful man is not so powerful after all. It’s almost the stuff of a Springsteen song.
by Dennis M. Hogan, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Pete Souza
[ed. See also: Disgraceland: Steve Van Zant (from Bruce's E Street Band) Rips on Paul Simon (Dangerous Minds).]
[ed. See also: Disgraceland: Steve Van Zant (from Bruce's E Street Band) Rips on Paul Simon (Dangerous Minds).]
