The Boss is shrill:
“I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream,” Springsteen told the conference, where the album was aired for the first time. It was written, he claimed, not just out of fury but out of patriotism, a patriotism traduced.
“What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account,” he later told the Guardian. “There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.”
***Springsteen, 62, says he is not afraid of how the album will be received in election-year America: “The temper has changed. And people on the streets did it. Occupy Wall Street changed the national conversation – the Tea Party had set it for a while. The first three years of Obama were under them.
“Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous – a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community … In Easy Money the guy is going out to kill and rob, just like the robbery spree that has occurred at the top of the pyramid – he’s imitating the guys on Wall Street. An enormous fault line cracked the American system right open whose repercussion we are only starting to be feel.
I like it, but I’ve come to realize that this actually is what America is all about, built on the backs of slaves, then whatever cheap immigrant labor could come along until we had a brief period of union strength and a dominant middle class, and now that is being crushed so the robber barons, the financiers, and the monied classes can profit. We’ve had our fits of patriotism every now and then with a good solid war, but even then the rich make it richer while the poor go off to die. And when we aren’t exploiting our own, we’re profiting at the expense of someone else in another land who we will never have to hear about. Maybe I am just pessimistic tonight, but what has happened to America isn’t un-American, it’s as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, and Halliburton, and always has been. It just took me 35+ years to figure it out.
Raven
It’s the journey not the destination. Hang in there.
Scotty
Don’t forget to mention this period only occurred because Europe (our economic competition)destroyed itself with 2 world wars and most other areas of the world were struggling to break apart from colonial overlords.
Chuck Butcher
I told you years ago that if you weren’t careful you’d wind up on the Left. Now you’ve fucking done it.
Lavocat
You’re spot on, John.
The only difference between then and now is that the 1% have engaged in an overreach so blatant that even their vaunted PR machine can’t spin shit into gold anymore.
The 99% are waking up and they are angry as motherfucking hell.
poco
Love you, Cole.
Amen!!
Omnes Omnibus
Accept the duality of nature. The US has both the good and the bad. Acknowledging the bad in the past and the present does not mean condoning it. As a matter of fact, one cannot really strive against it if one is unwilling to accept that it exists. OTOH, one shouldn’t let an acknowledgment of the bad in the country obscure the good that is here as well.
barath
And a shit ton of fossil fuels, also too. Increasingly scarce.
I should add: Cole sounds angry enough to watch this talk, which lays out the case in a way few do.
Chuck Butcher
@Scotty:
The Marshal Plan says that is entire horseshit. In point of fact by the late ’60s our industrial infrastructure was majority antiquated compared to Europe and Japan, pre WWI mostly. fucking common wisdom…
When everything is blown up modernization isn’t like optional
hilzoy
I think the idealism is American, and so is the rapacious greed and exploitation, and it’s up to us to decide which version of America we want to work for.
One of the things that I dislike about what the GOP calls “American exceptionalism” is the idea that America’s moral character is just there, not requiring us to do anything. Whereas I think: America now is only as good as we make it. America’s past, good and bad, is an inheritance which we can protect or squander.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus:
Pogue Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Private Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Where’d you get it?
Private Joker: I don’t remember, sir.
Pogue Colonel: What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Private Joker: “Born to Kill”, sir.
Pogue Colonel: You write “Born to Kill” on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Private Joker: No, sir.
Pogue Colonel: You’d better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you.
Private Joker: Yes, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man.
Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Pogue Colonel: The what?
Private Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?
Private Joker: Our side, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Don’t you love your country?
Private Joker: Yes, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Then how about getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
Private Joker: Yes, sir.
Pogue Colonel: Son, all I’ve ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It’s a hardball world, son. We’ve gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Private Joker: Aye-aye, sir.
jl
Glad Cole put ‘years’ after than plus. Otherwise I would be worried.
Brachiator
Pretty much every country has been built on exploitation. The question is how you choose to make it better.
Some bonehead wrote some crap about how Obama is not asked about the slaves that built Washington and the White House. But you know what? I would bet some good money that if asked what his presence in the White House, as president, represents, he could boldly answer, “A measure of redemption.”
amk
what did chevrolet ever do to be bracketed with hotdog and halliburton ?
jrg
Many Americans are window-licking mooks who need to be taken advantage of. It happens because it has to happen.
barath
A few statements that sum it up:
slag
What Omnes Omnibus said.
wilfred
Capitalism – love it or leave it.
Baud
Looks like someone has the President’s Day blues.
Raven
@amk: Proly drives a Ford. . .or a rice burner! Bowties forever!
Linda Featheringill
The US does have a dark side. You’ll get no quarrel from me about that.
We also have the gifts of empathy, generosity, energy, and imagination.
Like hilzoy said, we have to make decisions.
WyldPirate
Cole was blind, but now he sees….
Villago Delenda Est
@hilzoy:
And this is their greatest sin.
When Benjamin Franklin (the historical figure, not the commentor) was asked about the Constitution, and what it was, he reportedly said, “a Republic, if you can keep it.”
The implication is that this is, as Raven said at the top of the comments, a journey, not a destination. It’s, pardon the cliche, a never ending journey. It requires us to renew our idealism and our conviction again and again, in the pursuit of a more perfect union, knowing that perfection is unobtainable.
We made great strides during the WWII and the immediate post war period, and starting about 30 years ago, we started stumbling…very badly.
MikeInSewickley
You are not being pessimistic, you are being realistic.
It has taken me as many years as you to finally realize that my children will never have the chances I had, as limited as they where.
This disgusts and fills me with so much sorrow for what could be in this country.
One of my favorite films of all time is “Gangs of New York”. And what is most sad is I am seeing this as the model of what our country is rapidly becoming – layers of abject poverty, totally corrupt politicians, the rich oblivious to the lower classes (forget a middle class).
I don’t want this country to be every man or woman for him/herself but that is exactly what these upper crust bastards want so they can keep going to the bank. They keep us fighting among ourselves, even convincing some that middle class institutions like public school and unions are evil incarnate.
And we keep running to the Apple store to get the new iPad17 or whatever the fuck latest thing keeps us amused. We’re getting to the point where we are not even having bread and circuses… just circuses.
And for those who say we can make a moral choice – that doesn’t put food on the table or pay the student loans.
Nuts…
General Stuck
Imperialism comes in different forms. We were spawned as a country from one kind, the colonial kind. It can be naked unbound violent kind ,such as WW2 Japan or Germany, or it can be done via economic exploitation hand in glove with soft invasion, like we have done a lot of places, meddling in the local politics like in Central and South American.
This is the preferred American kind, as our natives don’t much care for the military kind half assed to look like we are doing good, spreading democracy and shit, whether folks want it or not. Too much ugly for most well scrubbed murricans, all those red white and blue draped coffins coming in and foreign bodies on CNN. Besides, we always tell ourselves we are the good guys, the anti colonialist, or this or that anti something or other. It is our corporations that do the invading, mostly, with a little sekret help from our spook types that paves the way for most of our aggression. Leaving behind a few Oligarchs and a junta or two in our wake. Along with a lot more poor people, who aren’t stoopid, and hate us for our phony helping hands. We didn’t do that in Libya, and what a change of pace that was.
Raven
@MikeInSewickley: This country is exactly what it always has been. Take a walk.
JPL
@wilfred: Capitalism has always had to be balanced by taxation. Unfortunately, Americans have forgotten that. Democracy means for the common good and we have representatives preaching individual good is what’s important. This is especially true in the South and it will destroy our country. Democracy was a nice experiment.
Benjamin Franklin
This…
Nicole
Well thank God Downton Abbey is here to let us know that the aristocracy will always be ready and able to rescue the working class from its own follies.
Seriously, Julien Fellowes would be right at home in the GOP. That show glorifies the upper class so much I find I’ve started rooting for Thomas, the evil footman.
And yet we eat it up. I think the real American Dream is to be born rich.
Raven
Some guy wrote this too:
We’ve given each other some
hard lessons lately
But we ain’t learnin’
We’re the same sad story
that’s a fact
One step up and two steps back.
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: Progressive and regressive elements have been present here (and everywhere) forever. I personally think we are getting ready for a pendulum swing back toward progress. The 40 year regressive bit is clearly running out of steam. Fuck that giving up shit.
pseudonymous in nc
@hilzoy:
I think the two are more deeply intertwined than that. These are decisions made on a gradual, immanent basis, usually never explicitly so, or placing you at one extreme or the other, but instead offering a series of forked paths one way or the other, where it’s not always easy to tell which path leads which way. Push-pull; pull-push. Or tectonic: push-pull, pull-push, then a snap.
(Or think of Churchill’s line: that America always does the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.)
I prescribe a course of John Steinbeck. Or Tennessee Williams. Or pretty much any great writer in the American grain.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Fuckin A dawg! I’m gettin my ass up at 5 and flyin to Berkeley to celebrate my homeboy’s 60th. There will be a bunch of people there who NEVER thought they’d live to see it.
Raven
@pseudonymous in nc: Yea, read “In Dubious Battle”. You think things are bad now? shit
Benjamin Franklin
we would’ve taken better care of ourselves, had we known.
gnomedad
@barath:
God knows civilization could use some debunking, but if you start by asking your reader to accept these as premises, what’s left to say? (I started to read that book and quickly decided I could find more helpful things to read. Like maybe the Unabomber.)
slag
@pseudonymous in nc:
I gotta suggest Thoreau or Whitman in this particular case.
WyldPirate
In other news the Obama Administration asks the SCOTUS if it can weasel out of a little legal challange to the warrant-less wiretapping FISA laws.
Ho dare the ACLU and that pesky old 4th amendment mess up a perfectly good piece of toilet paper the government wants to use to wipe its ass…
Satanicpanic
Cole you’re sounding like my communist brother. Not that I totally disagree, but once you reach the point he’s at, it gets really hard to convince people to do anything.
barath
@gnomedad:
Yeah, I feel like Jensen is like Marx in that way. They say that everything Marx said about capitalism is right, but everything he said about communism is wrong. You might say that what Jensen says about civilization is right, but what he says to do about it is wrong. Though given that he never advocates violence against people, I think that’s an extreme comparison you’ve made…
MikeInSewickley
I know that a lot of this seems to be same old, same old. “Just look around – take a walk”.
I just don’t think so. Starting 1/20/1981, we have been getting set up for this because of what looked like success. We were starting to get a strong middle class after WW II and people still managed to get rich, just not rich enough I guess.
I tell my students that there are no American companies with International Divisions – they are all International companies with an American division. Now the upper level are the same – America means absolutely nothing – they are now a Global elite and fuck anyone who gets in their way.
They would have no qualms leaving this country a vast, hungry waste land as long as they could settle someplace else. Fair play, fair share??? Not possible until we start to see the pendulum start to swing backwards, as someone said. Frankly, I think we are running out of time and patience to do that peaceably — which really scares me.
Omnes Omnibus
@slag:
Yep.
@WyldPirate: I hope the ACLU wins.
Chuck Butcher
@Satanicpanic:
maybe it’ll be ok to be Left of St Ronnie RayGun and not be called a far-leftist, just a Democrat.
Raven
@Benjamin Franklin: That’s another funny thing. This is a gathering of some former hard core folks and hardly any of us drink or get loaded at all anymore. I remember 20 years ago when a group of us went to see Neil and ate popcorn and drank water. We looked at each other and said “Damn” nobody would have believed this!
Of course, there are more than a few that kept runnin at that pace and they are no longer with us.
gnomedad
@barath:
Yeah, sorry, I meant the Unabomber’s analysis, not the violence he advocated or practiced. And my starting point is that we’re basically stuck with civilization and technology unless you don’t mind killing off 99% of the population so we can go back to being hunter-gatherers. So we should be looking for ways to make it, you know, nicer.
Jimbo316
I agree with Cole’s analysis of the decadence of American (and, in fact, global) Capitalism and the strategy of ultimately world-destroying, through the promise of endless economic growth, rampant natural resources and labor exploitation.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to increase economic growth; it is, in fact, essential to our future. It’s how you get there. Capitalism, despite its assertions otherwise always exploits the easy resource access and environmental or human “externality” (stuff it sloughs onto the public). But these are still costs. So we still get screwed. It’s just that the firm gets all the short term profits from shitting outside the firm.
BTW, this is what Bain and Romney and Wall St. are all about.
General Stuck
@WyldPirate:
The law sunsets in 10 months, and will have to be re debated and re passed. Or modified in some way. I agree the courts should be able to decide on the merits of its constitutionality, and the SCOTUS can, if it wants, not only rule it open to litigation and judicial review, it can do that now if it wants. I don’t believe Obama has invoked the States Secret priviledge, that would piss me off. But just moving it to the Supremes is actually normal due process.
Unless you don’t believe in due process.
barath
@gnomedad:
Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve watched his talk (linked above) – it’s pretty entertaining FWIW.
WyldPirate
@Omnes Omnibus:
At least Obama, unlike Dubya, hasn’t implied that the Constitution is “just a piece of paper”.
Mike in NC
To paraphrase Tony Zinni, if you thought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were great, then you’ll just love the coming war with Iran.
Satanicpanic
@Chuck Butcher: I’m just sayin, no matter how true it is, no one likes having America’s many sins constantly being repeated, especially trade related ones that basically every country in the world engages in when able.
gnomedad
@barath:
The Star Wars riff was entertaining, but I figured he was headed the same place as with his book and switched off.
scav
@gnomedad: It’s like he never heard of the destroyed environments around Ur (salinization of over-irrigation if I remember correctly) or the American SW (same, or maybe it was more running out of trees, I remember dendrochonology and analysis of beams was involved) and the Mayans had to contend with some serious erosion and malnutrition (even of the elite) along with the warfare at the end. The mythic environmental wisdom or societal equilibrium (they’ve often got some solid murder rates) of traditional cultures is pretty much a crock. They could just move away from their environmental mistakes with a little more facility than we can manage. Bigger groups of people do tend to have bigger armies and weaponry, however, that is true.
WyldPirate
@General Stuck:
True there is that the sunset thing going on, Stuck. I just find it a bit dismaying that the Obama administration took up the Bush gauntlet to battle the challange to FISA out of the gate.
And pardon me if I don’t expect the Congress to make improvements when it comes up for extension.
Scott Alloway
@amk: From the old ad pre-Cole’s birth (1966ish): “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet…” set to music and a song.
General Stuck
@WyldPirate:
If Obama was bad as Bush on this issue, he would be invoking the State Secrets priv, where about no court would venture to deny them that privilege. And standing wouldn’t even be considered. If Obama does that, I will be the first to scream fail.
Chuck Butcher
@Satanicpanic:
And I’m just saying that if you expect something different to happen it would help a hell of a lot if the so-called liberals would land somewhere left of fucking Reagan.
Omnes Omnibus
@WyldPirate: There are legitimate legal arguments that can be on each side (which, of course, is why the case exists). I did, under Bush, and do now come down against the government side. You are right, though; there is a difference between making a legit legal argument on behalf of the executive branch’s power and more or less saying “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want.”
barath
@scav:
Permaculturist Toby Hemenway makes a good case that those societies that have managed to not develop full-fledged agriculture but instead remained horticultural have tended to actually remain sustainable over a long time without (most of) the negatives you describe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo
Chuck Butcher
@General Stuck:
Oh fuck me, “you have no standing because we won’t tell you who has standing because its secret” is just exactly what the hell?
WyldPirate
General Stuck:
I don’t think the Obama administration is in the same category as the Bushies on this issue either. I hope that isn’t wishful thinking on my part, but denial of the appeal by the SCOTUS might get them closer to playing the state secret joker in the deck.
JC
Well, there is no doubt that the one percenters have been very successful lo these last 30 years. And they own the media, and both the Democrats and the Rethugs need to feed at the trough of the Wall Streeters, so it doesn’t look hopeful.
Add to that, Europe is doing it’s own version of IMF’ing Greece, you’ll see, as Krugman has pointed out, that most of history is elites fucking over the rest of society.
Still and all – socially things are getting better. Things can, and do, change suddenly. If Obama is elected, 30 million more people covered by health insurance.
There is more information, more decentralization, and more things – like this blog – that have an effect, however small. You can’t get away with the type of godawful lies that were espoused in the 90’s, and that Clinton had to deal with – Issa’s little power plays are exposed as the trash they are, and the journalist KNOW – they they keep silent – just how trashy Issa and company are.
A black man was elected President.
Countries are modernizing – South America is doing pretty well, thank you very much – and much better than it was.
I don’t know how the U.S. resolves it’s elite problem – Occupy Wall Street is a start. People are ‘drugged’ by media, and confused by B.S., and as long as they aren’t starving, are going to go along to get along. That’s human nature.
But things change, things get better. I keep thinking people will wake up.
scav
@barath: All I was saying is that there have been some stunning failures of smaller scale societies — it’s not a failing limited to “civilization” (the definition of which is another can of worms). It seemed a leap of faith to accept the premises as premises given the counterexamples. And I know there’s still a lot of arguments about whether of not humans were in charge of the continent-wide environmental changes and death of mega-fauna in North American and Australia, so I didn’t bring them up. As the scale of societies increase (both in complexity and geographic spread), the consequences of failures increases. But smaller scale societies haven’t necessarily got things 100% wired. Interesting about horticulturalists, but even hunter-gatherers can occasionally mess things up so I’ll reserve judgement until I read though the evidence.
ETA: maybe all I’m saying is People iz People and People aren’t perfect at any scale (let alone in or outside of America either). Nor are they intrinsically and inevitably bad in either setting, for that matter.
GG
Yeah, America has a duality of progressive/reactionary thinking, and a lotta people who don’t much care about politics until they’ve prodded, if then. What gets me all “I’m Leaving It” is how hard the ubiquitous media fights on the side of the 1%. Faux News is just the poster child of that.
Harry Truman never spoke a truer word when at the end of his Autobiography he said [I paraphrase] that the only serious worry he had about the future of the country was that all the Advertising Executives were Republican.
JC, I typed the stuff above before I read your comment, so we’re on the same page re the media thing.
The good news is that people are less and less susceptible to advertising.
Bruce S
Sorry, but Halliburton has nada to do with hot dogs and Chevrolets. You’re mixing pineapples and hand grenades.
WyldPirate
@Omnes Omnibus:
I agree that there are legit arguments the government could present. While the government has likely had the ability to scoop up every bit of all bit of transmitted data for a long time, I would prefer that they be held to the strictest interpretation of probable cause standards possible before they go looking.
Part of me is hoping the the administration is simply dragging its feet in so the bill sunsets and something more airtight can be put so the SCOTUS doesn’t get a whack at establishing more restrictive legal precedence on the matter.
barath
@scav:
I guess you make the point, though – that if the failures happen at a small scale, they don’t really screw things up in a way that affects life in that region for a long time. The mismanagement of agriculture in Mesopotamia is in large part the reason their environment is the way it is today.
Bago
@Bruce S: Clever boy.
Gin & Tonic
@Raven:
I just missed the “opportunity” to go to Vietnam in the early 1970’s, but I have been there recently, and there’s more truth to that line than you may think. They *like* Americans.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I think there are two sorts of American Exceptionalism that get it wrong. The more common kind is the Happy Talk USA #1 Foam Fingers variety, which hilzoy skewers in #9. But the other kind is a mirror image of the first, focusing on American crimes and follies and refusing to see the good, or to judge the USA in a historical context by comparison with how other nations and cultures have behaved.
It seems to me that the USA is neither uniquely good nor uniquely bad as nations go, and none of the imperial powers which came before us (nor in all likelihood the ones that will follow after us once we’ve departed the scene) had clean hands. We just aren’t that different from other nations, as much as we’d like to think so. Even American Exceptionalism isn’t all that exceptional, really; every major nation and culture has viewed itself as being somehow special and unique, particularly during an upswing in their fortunes.
I think we do need to build on the aspirational aspects of our American heritage, to push forward for something better. But also I think we need to just get over ourselves a bit and stop trying so hard to be so darned special all the time. Maybe we can do a better job of learning from the experiences of others that way. IIRC, Bismark once said that learning from his mistakes wasn’t what he aspired to, he wanted to learn from other people’s mistakes. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Gwangung
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
To me, that IS American exceptionaliism…building things up to a higher point than before. Nothing unusual about and nothing wrong, except when you don’t put the work into it….
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Gwangung:
Yes, but I think that sense of progress, of improving things, is actually pretty common. From my recollection, the English, French and Germans all each felt at some point or another that they were in some unique and special way making the world a better place (or that they would finally at long last be able to do so at some point in the near future if only their pestiferous enemies would submit to their greatness and get out of the way). The sense of a civilizing mission is pretty much a common factor in every self-confident nation.
If the USA is uniquely endowed in this way, I’d argue that it is because our sense of natural limitations imposing on our ability to pursue this sort of messianic mission were strongly influenced by the unprecedented ecological bounty which colonizing Europeans found here in the New World, which were a consequence of the demographic catastrophe suffered by Native Americans (e.g. the population losses inflicted via European epidemic diseases). This left a seemingly empty continent ripe for the plucking, from the standpoint of the colonizers. The USA has always been a land of the Great Real Estate Bubble as a consequence (the one which imploded in 2008 being only the most recent of many), and that has warped our sense of what we can do and what we can get away with.
Rawk Chawk
yup
Satanicpanic
@Chuck Butcher: That must be the problem.
pseudonymous in nc
As is so often noted, the USA is a country created on an idea. It is also a country created with an eye towards making the most of a relatively small group of people’s economic and political interests. Simultaneously. Neither negates the other. So it goes.
SqueakyRat
@General Stuck: Americans love the military. It’s war they’re not sure about.
Chris
@Brachiator:
First, you have to want to make it better; and before that, you have to acknowledge that it needs to be made better. You have to actually acknowledge the things Cole just did, and frankly I don’t think the average American has the emotional maturity for it. We prefer to sweep these things under the carpet, stick our fingers in our ears, sing loudly and nod approvingly at the jackass on the podium telling us that we should ignore our sins, that it’s all a horrible liberal plot to make us feel bad.
Hart Williams
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
~ George Bernard Shaw
b-psycho
John, those sound like the words of someone concluding it’s Revolt Time.
thepete
Good for you for catching on! Now we just need to educate the rest of America. Incidentally, if you read the history books, pretty much all capitalism has ever been is exploitive. From the British East India Company “colonizing” India to the robber barons of the late 1800s/early 1900s, to the Chiquita company paying terrorists protection money so they can keep growing cheap bananas in South America, capitalism is based on someone getting exploited. It’s not and has never been a right vs left issue. It’s always been about one thing: money (or greed, really). Once you realize this and look at current events you really can’t help but realize that there is no hope for change at all.