It’s pretty shocking that a conservative just now sat down with the lyrics sheet to “Born in the USA”. Oh, no, wait. No it’s not. Pete Chianca’s take on this is right on:
“Finally, a conservative gets “Born in the USA” right — it’s “anti-American propoganda!” So says Glenn Beck, who was apparently so desperate for material for his radio show yesterday that he finally listened to the 26-year-old song, and discovered that it wasn’t the flag-waving rah-rah anthem that Ronald Reagan loved so much back when he didn’t listen to it.
Anyway, if you can listen to Glenn Beck’s recitation of the lyrics and not hope and pray with every fiber of your being that he releases a CD entitled “Glenn Beck Speaks the Hits of the 1980s,” there is something wrong with you.”
I’d buy that CD. And is that the Strokes as bed music, too? Bet they love that!
But beyond that, Beck makes the tragic flaw here of conflating a storytelling type song (this song has a definite lead character and POV) as indicative of an entire body of work of an artist. Sure, Springsteen’s very liberal, but I think that the Boss celebrates and narrates various American stories, mostly working class kinda stuff and a lot of it car-centric, to be sure, but there’s a lot more diversity there than just AMERICA SUXXIT. And how out in left field is this story? This is about a Vietnam vet coming back home and having a tough go of it, not a story that’s even close to out of the bounds of reality, right? What percentage of America’s homeless are vets (FOX NEWS tells me about a quarter)? This hard-luck vet story was pretty fresh on the country’s mind in the 80s (see also: First Blood), and we’re already starting to see stories like this percolating out from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Vets get treated badly by a society that supposedly reveres them. Beck tries to paint this sentiment as socialist and anti-American, but it’s sadly American. And what bothers me most about Beck and his ilk is that they’re supposedly individualists, and yet they try to paint this picture of America as having a single, unifying narrative, something to do with flags and fireworks and meritocracy and Horatio Alger and freedom, no deviations please or you’re a socialist. And it CAN be all those things and that’s fantastic! But, in my mind, the fact that we don’t have a single narrative, that we’re squirrelly and squishy and evasive and refuse to be boxed in, that we’re individuals with exciting, divergent stories to tell via film and literature and awesome Bruce Springsteen songs, is what makes this country frustrating, intriguing, messy, and, ultimately, fabulous.
—Lucas
(via; HT: Thierry Côté)
