The Boss Has a Way with Words
Springsteen Takes Down Trump as Only a Real Boss Can Do
“The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison's singing for the lonely
Hey, that's me and I want you only.”
OMG, how romantic is that? And it is a song seared into my brain 50 years ago by the Boss. I am among the devoted. The only complaint I have about his music is that when he finally wrote something about Tucson, it was “Tucson Train,” for me the saving grace being the electronic opening and closing clickety-clacks.
This past week in Manchester, England, Bruce and the “mighty” E-Street Band kicked off their European “The Land of Hope and Dreams Tour” with the Boss delivering a scathing pre-concert soliloquy about the evil days and frightening end times that Donald Trump has cast upon our nation.
He called the Trump Administration “corrupt, incompetent, and traitorous.” He closed with what we have come to expect from an artist who has chronicled America as we have lived it together for five decades. He calls on us to stand guard and to, in his own heartrending words from 9/11, “rise up.”
The E-Street team has celebrated and criticized our homeland with tough love since the days when “Born in the USA” became an anthem for the America we know, love and often criticize. That’s our job as citizens. To keep America as honest as possible in a world rife with dishonesty, greed, and cruelty.
As his peers, we came of age at a time when Richard Nixon and his cocksure cronies were trying to do what Trump appears to be succeeding at, but worse. Controlling us for personal power and financial gain.
Bruce is the “cool rocking Daddy” that Trump would love to be. When he heard Bruce’s words, he went on Truth Social and spit out his time-worn invectives that often sound more like a self-portrait. In this case he called Springsteen, a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!).”
Trump also warned that the bard of our times “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country . . . Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”
When he opened his show in Manchester and spoke his truth, the crowd roared its approval. After all, the Brits went through Hitler’s “blitzkrieg” — the eight-month bombing campaign by the führer’s Luftwaffe that killed an estimated 30,000 in London and environs, including Manchester.
As the reviewer of the concert that night wrote in The Guardian, the Boss touched Britons where they live, and offered a respite for their real concerns that once again the world is on the brink.
“There are few artists able to pluck hope from the darkest depths of the US, with such elegance and beauty, quite like Bruce Springsteen.”
Thanks here to Steven Beschloss for posting the text of Springsteen’s pre-concert introduction:
In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.
In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.
In my country, they are taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.
They are rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society.
They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.
They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.
They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.
A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.
The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment.
Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.