Born in the USA -- Why Springsteen Endorsed Obama

So Bruce Springsteen endorsed Barack Obama. No surprise there for Springsteen and Obama share the same elitist and disdainful view of working class America.

Am I really saying that Springsteen, "the champion of the working man," holds the people he sings about in ill-regard? Absolutely. In fact, he, like Obama, always has. Springsteen's songs may be populated with working class people in working class towns -- just as Obama might talk about their hopes and their dreams -- but his description of them like Obama's is unfailingly insulting, condescending and even hateful.

Time and again Springsteen describes Middle America as a place of unmitigated horrors. "Babe this town rips the bones from your back," he screams in his iconic "Born to Run," embellishing this by saying small town America is "a death trap," and "a suicide rap."

In "Thunder Road" Springsteen is desperately trying to escape a "town full of losers," while in "Sandy (Fourth of July)" he describes the denizens of small town America as having "stony faces" and as people "left stranded" in America (on the Fourth of July, no less). In Springsteen's cartoonish vision of small town America everyone is a rube who rides the "tilt-a-whirl" and is condemned to "never get off..."

What makes Springsteen believe that small town America is "full of losers" is the same thing that makes the elitist Obama think so: unlike them, these people have jobs.

Thus, in "Rosalita" Springsteen attempts to confiscate yet another "loser" girl (like "Mary" in "Thunder Road") and save her from the horrors of ever having to work a job. Springsteen knows a place, a virtual paradise, where, instead of earning a living "they play guitar all night and all day," just like Springsteen himself.

In Springsteen's world -- as it is to a good many Democrats -- having a job is the ultimate in hell. It is much preferable to be a rock star, or to marry the inheritor of John Heinz's fortune or to get in good with mobsters like Tony Rezko who help you buy your mansions than to do an honest day's work). These "losers" are losers because they "cling to" their beliefs rather than selling out, marrying for money or aligning oneself with a hate church to establish their "authenticity" in search of votes.

Work to the Modern Liberal is the ultimate in hell with absolutely nothing good to be said of it. Thus, in "Adam Raised a Cain" Springsteen's "daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain," while those who work in a factory are so dehumanized by having a job that they no longer even have a name -- they're just called "man:"


"End of the day
Factory whistle cries
Man walks through these gates
With death in their eyes..."

Along with his "daddy" and the factory worker, the mechanic is a loser in Springsteen's world condemned to "working all day in my daddy's garage" while "driving all night chasing some mirage." Those who work on the highway are equally condemned to a living hell where they do nothing but "hold a red flag and watch the traffic (life) pass me by." The same is true if you do manual labor: "Now I work down at the car wash, where all it ever does is rain."

The office worker, the policeman and the soldier are no better in Springsteen (and the Democrats') view. In fact, according to Springsteen, a living "death" is the consequence of "the work, the workin' just the workin' life."

Of course, this is only the way the rock star (Springsteen and Obama and the San Francisco Elite and the Hollywood actor) see the world. The reality is, as always with the Modern Liberal, exactly the opposite. The overwhelming majority of Americans have jobs and find a great deal of satisfaction, pride and pleasure in their efforts. In fact, there is a television show called "Dirty Jobs" where the star, Mike Rowe, seeks out what he can only imagine are the worst jobs possible. In one ad for an upcoming season he declares that the people he has worked with "are some of the happiest people I've ever met."

Since Springsteen and Obama believe that having a job is hell, leaving everyone's "daddy" working their whole lives for nothing but the pain, what follows is a given: bitterness, anger and frustration which, in turn, leads to violence.

Springsteen's "daddy" now "walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame, while the "factory worker" goes home and beats his child ("and you'd just better believe, boy, someone's gonna get hurt tonight"). The highway worker takes out his frustration "...looking to get hurt" and "...going down to Scovell's wearing trouble on their shirt."

Perhaps it's Springsteen's mechanic who says it best of all. Because he has a job:

"Sometimes I feel so weak I just wanna explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.
Find someone itchin' for somethin' to start..."

In Springsteen and Obama's view, the hell of having a job is compounded by the constant fear of losing that job. Everyone is but one paycheck away from hell in an economy that, no matter the realities of the past thirty-five years, is constantly on the brink of The Great Depression. In Obama's slander of what he would likely call "typical white people" delivered to the elite in San Francisco, the people of Pennsylvania have been unemployed nonstop for a quarter of a century (and THAT'S why they believe in things as stupid as God). Of course not only isn't this true, it's ludicrous (how did they pay their bills for twenty-five straight years?).

In Springsteen's world everyone has "debts no honest man could pay" or are standing on a breadline somewhere, every town is a ghost town and every job "going, boys, and they ain't coming back..."

For thirty-five years -- most of them seeing unprecedented economic expansion -- Springsteen's towns have been unchanged, all of them with Main Streets filled with
"white washed window and vacant stores" ("My Hometown") then (1983) while today (2007):

"The diner was shuttered and boarded
With a sign that just said 'gone'"

One would think that Obama and Springsteen were talking about the dust bowl of three-quarters of a century ago, with its inhabitants all characters in "The Grapes of Wrath" (the first book Springsteen ever read -- when he was well into his twenties!). In fact, Springsteen DOES see it just like that. Not long ago Springsteen released an entire album filled with nothing but misery entitled "The
Ghost of Tom Joad" including lines that describe the dust bowl era like "shelter lines stretchin' around the corner." This album was released in 1995 -- when America was going through its second longest period of sustained economic growth in history.

Springsteen's world -- like that of Obama and all Modern Liberals - is a world filled with paranoia where boogeymen are all out to get you. Jeremiah Wright -- Obama's spiritual guru, personal mentor and campaign adviser -- has the decency to name these horrible people, they are Jews and what Obama himself would call your "typical white person." Obama, too, names the boogeymen, they are the Americans who work at pharmaceutical companies and at the energy companies. Springsteen is a bit more mysterious, typically referring to these evil forces that keep Americans having to have jobs as "they" or "them." Thus, in "Something in the Night" Springsteen whines:

"Well now you're born with nothing
And better off that way
Cause soon as you got something
They send someone to try and take it away..."

Meanwhile in another song, "Night" he whimpers:

"well all day, they're busting you up on the outside..."

It is because of this paranoia that Springsteen advises:

"Trust none of what you hear
And less of what you see..."

Springsteen's vision of an evil America who force the losers to remain in those hellish small towns and actually have to have jobs is shared by another of Obama's top advisers, his wife Michelle. Given the chance to express her beliefs about the country that provided her with affirmative action programs, scholarships to college, a cushy quarter-million-dollar-a-year-job and a husband who is a United States Senator (not bad for an "oppressed minority" where the white people create AIDS just to get her), Ms. Obama took the opportunity to testify about how horrible it is to have been born in the United States.

So, too, did Springsteen. So, when testifying to the world about what it is like to have been "born in the USA," rather than tell the story of a country that saw a bus driver's son who never had a job becoming a superstar with, in his own words, "a life of leisure and a pirate's treasure," Springsteen instead told the world that being "Born in the USA" is a horrible curse:

"Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
End up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up."

Of course, that's no more an accurate description of an American than is the idea that small towns "rip the bones from your back" (but they do in Hollywoood and Washington DC if they can -- home to Springsteen and Obama) and that the people of Pennsylvania live in "towns full of losers." Nor is it any more accurate than the idea that people who have jobs all go home and beat their children (when they're not clinging to the bibles). But this IS how the Modern Liberal sees America and it's not surprising that one -- Springsteen -- would be endorsing another.