Springsteen Symposium Abstract



“Springsteen’s Right Side: A Liberal Icon’s Conservatism”

Christopher Borick and David Rosenwasser

Muhlenberg College

Paper presented at the Bruce Springsteen Symposium, West Long Branch, New Jersey, September 26, 2009.

In the mid-nineteenth century Walt Whitman advised a generation of fellow writers to “be radical, be radical, be not too damn radical.” In offering this advice the Good Gray Poet recognized the tenuous position of the artist as social critic. To affect societal change an artist must often challenge conventional ways of thinking and living. Yet in these challenges artists risk alienating their audience and thus jeopardize their ability to stimulate social change. Given these constraints artists must perennially struggle to reach a fragile balance between becoming so radical that their work is ignored or so conformist that they change nothing.

Throughout much of his career Bruce Springsteen has used his art to directly challenge many aspects of contemporary American life. While these critiques are multi faceted, it is generally accepted that Springsteen’s challenges are oriented towards the left wing of American politics. From his war of words with the Reagan White House to his direct assaults on the actions of the Bush Administration, Springsteen has been a persistent critic of conservative leaders and their policies. Most recently, Springsteen’s prominent role in the 2008 presidential campaign, capped by his pre-inaugural performance at the Lincoln Memorial, helped cement his prominent place on the left wing of American politics

Yet even through his long time antagonism of the right, Springsteen has remained a popular mainstream artist whose audience includes many of the same older white males that are the bedrock of the contemporary GOP in America. How is it that a liberal icon such as Springsteen has managed to preserve his appeal across ideological divides in the United States? In this paper we argue that Springsteen has consistently utilized both symbols and language that are widely embraced by American conservatives, thus mitigating much of the polarizing effects that his art might otherwise produce. From his focus on the honor of hard work to his utilization of the average man as a working class hero, Springsteen employees messages that are rife with conservative overtones. So what are Springsteen’s politics? Perhaps we will see him and his politics more accurately and understand his broad appeal more resonantly once we collapse the conventional binary of liberal or conservative and situate him in the more complex tangle of left and right, coast and heartland.

In this article we focus most of our attention on the albums of the Bush years. In many ways the 8 years that George Bush served in the White House were Bruce Springsteen’s most politically engaged period. From 2001 to 2009 Springsteen’s creative efforts turned more to political matters as he simultaneously became more intimately involved in political campaigns. Over the course of his career Springsteen shied away from endorsing candidates for public office. While often critical of policies emanating from Republican administrations, the New Jersey artist did not engage directly in American electoral politics.

This all changed in 2004 when Springsteen threw himself directly into the highly competitive presidential campaign between George Bush and John Kerry. During the campaign Springsteen leant his talents to the Vote for Change Tour that was seeking to raise both financial and voter support for Democratic nominee and his efforts to unseat Bush. Springsteen stated that the concerts were an effort “to put forward a group of ideals and change the administration in the White House. That's the success or failure (of this concert series), very clear cut and very simple."

As the 2004 race came to a close Springsteen made numerous appearances with Kerry at campaign rallies, often performing a number of songs at the events. During these events Springsteen discussed the reasons he had decided to jump into the electoral fray. He noted that he had “been writing about America for 30 years, about who we are, what we stand for, what we fight for. I believe that these essential ideals of American identity are what’s at stake on November 2.” He called on the nation to face “America’ hard truths, both the good and the bad. "That's where we find a deeper patriotism, that's where we find a more complete view of who we are. That's where we find a more authentic experience as citizens, and that's where we find the power to make our world a better and a safer place. (Nichols 1)" While Springsteen’s efforts to get Kerry elected were ultimately unsuccessful, the failure did not result in a retreat from involvement in presidential campaigns.

During the 2008 presidential race Springsteen once again emerged as a presence on the campaign trail, this time offering support for Democratic nominee Barack Obama. This time the popular artist held concerts by himself to rally support for Obama’s presidential bid. Springsteen performed at three large free events in key swing states (Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan). In a concert before 50,000 individuals on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Springsteen told the audience “I don’t know about you, but I want my house back, I want my America back, and I want my country back." He also stated that he had spent his life “ measuring the distance between the American Dream and the American Reality,” and that "Barack Obama has taken that measure as well. Never has the gap between the Dream and Reality been greater. In the end Springsteen called for an “American Reclamation Project” that would clean up the mess left behind by the Bush Administration (Panaritis et al. 1).

While the Bush years would prove to be the period of Springsteen’s most direct political involvement, they also marked an era where his artistry became more focused on political subject matter. During the time that George W. Bush resided in the White House Springsteen would release four albums of new material; The Rising (2002); Devils and Dust (2005); Magic (2007); and Working on A Dream (2009). With the exception of Working on a Dream, these albums regularly dealt with the politics of the times and the policies that Bush was enacting as Chief Executive. In The Rising Springsteen concentrates on the loss and emptiness that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, generally refraining from critiques on the policy questions that surrounded the event and its aftermath. One notable exception was the album’s first song, Lonesome Day, in which Springsteen offers a prophetic warning about the type of military response that would be enacted as a result of the terrorist strikes. In the song Springsteen advises those in power to “ask questions before you shoot/deceit and betrayal’s bitter fruit.” as the nation steadily moved towards war in Iraq. The eventual war that came would serve as the catalyst for much of Springsteen’s work in his next two albums, Devils and Dust and Magic. In these albums, and in particular Magic, Springsteen would delve deeper into political matters than he had done at anytime during his long career. We will explore these albums in more detail later in the article.

Springsteen’s actions on the campaign trails and his art clearly established him as one of George W. Bush’s most notable critics and positioned the artist on the left of American politics. But even as Springsteen became a more visible presence in the polarizing world of American politics, he remained a very popular figure in the entertainment world. His iconic status was verified in 2009 when he was invited to perform at the consummately mainstream Super Bowl halftime show. And despite modest attendance at his Seeger’s Sessions concerts in 2006, Springsteen’s tour stops with the E Street band continued to draw crowds similar to those throughout his career. His Magic album and its criticism of Bush administration policies sold over a million copies in the United States alone. By most measures Springsteen remains a popular figure who maintains a broad audience even as he has become more explicitly partisan in his politics.

In the remainder of the paper we explore the ways that Bruce Springsteen has been able to remain a popular mainstream artist while taking political stances that are often at odds with portions of his audience. Walt Whitman believed that an artist could lose his ability to connect with a larger audience by becoming too radical, thus reducing their cultural impact. Bruce Springsteen has held that he wants to “find an audience that would be a reflection of some imagined community that I had in my head, that lived according to the values in my music and a shared set of ideals” (Dawidoff 252). Notably he sees this audience not only made up of liberals but conservatives. Springtseen said that “people come to my shows with many different kinds of political beliefs; I like that, we welcome all.” But while Springsteen may welcome all, how do his politically charged art and personal statements avoid alienating his more conservative fans?

To answer this question we look at Springsteen’s artistic efforts in Devils and Dust and Magic through an examination of the language and writing techniques that he employs in his artistry. It is in these tools that Springsteen’s political engagement pushes beyond the partisan and reaches to a broader audience that includes both liberal and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. His choice of words and styles allows him to do the cultural work that he believes necessary. Springsteen is concerned about the direction that his country took under the leadership of the Bush Administration and is working to win support among fellow Americans who may or may not share his political leanings, but who he feels may share his broader values and ideals. He does not attempt to hide his politics as a means of avoiding the radicalism that Whitman warned about. Instead his selection of lyrics, use of individual relationships and dramatic monologues allows him to delve into political subject matter without assaulting conservatives. In fact Springsteen makes artistic choices that may resonate with conservatives as well as liberals.

While Springsteen’s words on the campaign trail may be overtly partisan, his art remains devoid of direct frontal assaults on both Republicans and conservatives. Springsteen never mentions the words George Bush, Dick Cheney, Republican, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, or torture in any of the Bush Albums. Instead the albums of the Bush years are filled with words such as home, drift, flag, work and blood. These lyrical choices by no means engender immediate anger from conservative leaning listeners. In fact many of Springsteen’s word choices may resonate with Republican political narratives that have emerged in the United States. For conservatives there is a longing for an America from the past. The sense that the nation has been taken off course by bad leadership permeates much of the contemporary conservative discourse and Republican narratives. The current backlash against President Barack Obama’s policy agenda provides a perfect example of this longing for a return to some vision of a past America. Without knowing Springsteen’s political leanings it would be hard to identify anything in the Bush Year albums that would peg him as a liberal. Instead his focus on veterans, work and home make his messages easily accessible to the conservatives in his audience. In addition, Springtseen’s regular use of heterosexual relationships as part of the political storylines of his songs provides an accessible entry point to his art for conservatives.

Perhaps no song better captures Springsteen’s Bush Era interests and stylistic choices than “Long Walk Home” off the Magic album. In this piece Springsteen deals in great measure with the concepts of home and drift within the realm of contemporary American life. The song is set in a typical American town, with common features such as grocery stores, a veterans’ hall, barbershop and courthouse. While the setting is familiar, the narrator of the song is not at home. The people of these familiar places are “rank strangers” to the narrator as he passes through town.

The lyrics in “Long Walk Home” could come as easily from a country music song as easily as they may eminent from a progressive rock artist. In the following stanza Springsteen calls on a vocabulary that would strike a chord with any conservative. A father and son, neighbors, flags and values set in stone all take central places in the song.

Here everybody has a neighbor

Everybody has a friend

Everybody has a reason to begin again

My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town,

It's a beautiful place to be born.

It just wraps its arms around you,

Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone"

"Your flag flyin' over the courthouse

Means certain things are set in stone.

Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't"

While Springsteen’s answers to “who we are, what we'll do and what we won't" are likely quite different than those of a conservative member of his audience, there is nothing in the song that would act to alienate a fan with right leaning politics. In particular Springsteen’s reference to “what we won’t” do seems to be referencing policies such as

torture of prisoners in Iraq, but leaves considerable room for interpretation on the part of his desired audience of liberals and conservatives.

* * *

So let’s briefly rehearse the story we are trying to tell about Springsteen’s artistry as it intersects with his politics. He is an artist who believes that his songs do cultural work. As Bryan Garman has demonstrated abundantly in his book A Race of Singers, Springsteen not only belongs in the tradition of Whitman and Guthrie but is keenly aware of himself as carrying on that tradition of—choose your term: populist singer of songs? visionary American idealist? Working class white guy on a social mission inseparable from his sense of sacred vocation? Springsteen says as much to Jon Stewart in his Daily Show interview last March: “you try to find a show that [. . .] contains some way to capture the moment that’s occurring out in the world right now.”

This notion of popular art as capturing the moment implies that Springsteen’s art is less interested in moralizing about what America should be doing than in allowing us to see ourselves. As Garman has put, “Springsteen does not issue a manifesto for change as much as he delivers a state of the union address” (211). In the Bush albums, we wish to suggest, the state of the union is one of existential homelessness and national anomie—a condition that leads Springsteen to press for the reconstitution of community as a first step in regaining some sense of individual and collective destiny.

As the Bush presidency continued to erode the faith of an increasing number of Americans in the integrity of our representative democracy, Springsteen’s sense of mission seems to intensify, issuing forth in the four albums we are calling the Bush albums. Like any artist, Springsteen has evolved, perhaps unconsciously, a vocabulary for this task, and as we have constructed our lexicon of Springsteen key terms, we’ve been struck by their homology with those that Thomas Frank, in What’s the Problem with Kansas?, identifies with the Republican narrative of individualism and victimization of the white working class, a narrative Frank argues has seduced this block of voters away from their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party.

Home, faith, flag, love, work . . . these are the terms, as Chris has suggested in his discussion of “Long Walk Home,” that dominate the Bush albums.

The opposite of home in the Bush albums is a place called Nowhere. Home and Nowhere comprise an essential ideological geography in Springsteen’s imagination. It is significant that in song after song the speaker does not actually get there. “Long Walk Home” is a signal instance, but we hear it as well in “This Life” from Working on a Dream: “This emptiness I’ve roamed/ Searching for a home.” This site is of course not just literal but a figure for nation. “I want my house back, I want my country back. I want my America back,” Springsteen has said; and we hear in these words the desire to enter some halcyon version of the past. And when that attempt inevitably fails, the singer is stranded in Nowhere.

As listeners to Nebraska know, his speakers have been there before. “State Trooper” ends with the haunting plea, “Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer/Hiho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere.” And this refrain is repeated two songs later, in “Open All Night”: “Radio’s jammed up with gospel stations lost souls callin’ long distance salvation/Hey, mister deejay, woncha hear my last prayer hey, ho, rock’n’roll, deliver me from nowhere.”

We have cited these songs to make clear that the song with which Springsteen opens Magic, “Radio Nowhere,” is a return to this earlier trope of rock’n’roll on the radio as the medium of deliverance.

It is of course a rousing tune—a rock anthem—but in the repeated chant that ends the song, “I just want to feel your rhythm,” we can also hear the tones of lament. A Utopian desire to constitute a community has not (yet) been fulfilled.

The opening line of the song makes clear the singer’s intent: he is “trying to find [his] way home” and can only hear the “drone” that is “crushin’ the last lone American night.” He is also “searchin’ for a world with some soul” and asking, “Is there anybody alive out there?”; this query gets repeated throughout the song. As these lines suggest, rather apocalyptically, the cultural default setting here is death and soullessness. The speaker is crying out for community on a last American night, and there is no evidence that anyone out there is alive.

Given the song’s placement as the first tune on Magic, it is difficult not, finally, to interpret it as an upbeat quest to transform Nowhere into a kind of home. It is an opening incantation, the beginning of the Magic Springsteen believes his songs, in league with the radio, can inspire. The album itself, like the singer in this first song, is “trying to make a connection to you.” This is the home Springsteen sees now, embodied in the bodilessness of the airwaves. An aural rather than a physical home is the only one his singer can inhabit as he attempts to create a community through his music.

It is tempting to see Magic as a response to the legacy of the Bush presidency—a desperate sense of dislocation, dispossession of our own land, alienation from our own idealism.

“Radio Nowhere” seeks to constitute an audience in Nowhere that wishes to have its old home back but realizes it cannot, and so must build a new one. One thinks of a line from a Springsteen interview: “What we need now is an American Reclamation Project.”

We are suggesting in short that “Radio Nowhere” is a kind of ars poetica for Springsteen, a declaration of his artistic project. And for this project, the radio is an apt and complex symbol of his attempt to maintain his patriotic hope in the face of displacement and change. Is the radio an emblem of invisible connection, cementing us together by the magic of a voice across the airwaves, as the tone of this rock anthem suggests? Or is it an increasingly anachronistic candle flickering as rock and roll expires, leaving the voice on the radio, plaintively, to repeat again and again. “I just want to hear some rhythm,” because, alas, he does not hear any?

In any case, it’s clear that the appeal to an audience by way of the radio is a standard and essential element of the way Springsteen thinks about the reception of his art. In one interview he speaks of listening to the radio as a boy and thinking, “It was music that gave me a sense that life could be and should be about more than I had in front of me” (Dawidoff 251). And later in the interview he comments, “I set out to find an audience that would be a reflection of some imagined community that I had in my head, that lived according to the values in my music and shared a similar set of ideals” (Dawidoff 252). It is this imagined community that is the locus of hope in the Bush albums.

Speaking to an audience on his European tour in 1981, Springsteen addresses what we might call his politics of radio, linking it, as delivery system, to the political message he wishes to communicate. He says, “It wasn’t until I started listening to the radio and I heard something in those singer’s voices that said there was more to life than what my old man was doing and the life that I was living. And they held out a promise, and it was a promise that every man had the right to live his life with some decency and some dignity. And it’s a promise that gets broken every day in the most violent way. But it’s a promise that never, ever dies, and it’s always inside of you.” (qtd in Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, Wesleyan University Press)

These words, which give voice to what we might call Springsteen’s sentimental faith in democracy, provide a useful gloss of “Radio Nowhere.” They suggest how powerfully his patriotism is situated in his working class roots, how strongly it is allied to his work ethic, and how inextricably it is woven into his sense of a communitarian voice uniting us across the airwaves. This is the conservative Springsteen, spreading the word for the American dream of unlimited possibility for the individual. But although Springsteen says this “promise never dies,” he also calls it “a promise that gets broken every day in the most violent way.”

We want to move now to what we find most interesting and most overlooked—at least in the Springsteen literature that I have sampled—about his politics and how he conveys this politics in his art.

In his interview with Jon Stewart, Springsteen jokes that when members of his audience who are conservative and blue-collared reject his political statements, they boo, but he pretends they are saying Bruce.

It seems clear that he wishes to reach an audience beyond the already converted, including those who may be skeptical of his apparently liberal positions. This faction of his audience, We believe, is a constituency that Springsteen does not see as alien to his political vision. They are genuine citizens of Nowhere; they just don’t know it yet, and this is what Springsteen’s art wishes to awaken them to.

We have seen already that the political content of Springsteen’s vision—particularly its vocabulary—blurs the line between conventionally liberal, Democratic politics and conventionally conservative, Republican politics. This is most evident in the recurrent reference to individualism, home, country, faith, etc.

But a second source of ambiguity lies in the mode of presentation of many of Springsteen’s songs. We are speaking of what in literary study is known as dramatic monologue: the creation of characters who are not Springsteen, or put another way, his fondness for ventriloquizing the voices of others in the first-person songs he sings. This is also a common feature of the ballad tradition of popular song. In any case, thinking of Springsteen’s method in these terms—and one would be hard pressed to find a popular artist who uses it more frequently than he does—provides a useful entry point into his politics, especially as we wish to suggest that his method implies a politics at the level of form.

M.H. Abrams, in his famous Glossary of Literary Terms, attributes three defining characteristics to the dramatic monologue: (1) a speaker who is not the poet uttering a speech that occupies the entire poem at a critical moment; (2) an auditor whom we know of, but only from clues in the speaker’s speech; and (3) the use of the speech primarily to reveal the character of the speaker. The emphasis, in other words, lies less on what the speech says about the world than on what it says about the speaker (M. H. Abrams & Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed., Boston: Wadsworth, 2005, p70).

As our exemplary instance, we’ve chosen “Devils & Dust,” the first song on the album of that name. Here’s the first stanzaz:

I got my finger on the trigger

But I don't know who to trust

When I look into your eyes

There's just devils and dust

We're a long, long way from home, Bobbie

Home's a long, long way from us

I feel a dirty wind blowing

Devils and dust

You can see how completely the song meets Abrams’ criteria. The singer is not Bruce Springsteen but an invented character, an American soldier “a long, long way from home,” and amidst the dust, probably therefore in Iraq. He is addressing an invisible auditor, Bobbie, and with his “finger on the trigger,” presumably in a moment of some crisis.

In the next stanza the speaker begins to confess his own fear-caused soul sickness.

I got God on my side

And I'm just trying to survive

What if what you do to survive

Kills the things you love?

Fear's a powerful thing, Bobbie

It can turn your heart black you can trust

It'll take your God filled soul

And fill it with devils and dust

We wish we had the time to dwell closely with the lyrics and the analysis they offer of the corrosive effects of fear, and the price that exacts on our sense of who we as Americans are in the world. It’s at that level, the level of sweat on the skin, that Springsteen politicizes. His is the embodied politics of the human voice. And in song after song, Springsteen gives us glimpses of American life less in his own voice than in the ventriloquized voice of one or another blue collared, working class characters—the same kinds of characters who speak the language that Thomas Frank claims the Republican Party captured from the Democrats 40 years ago.

Obviously, to present a song in this way is a lot different from telling it in the third person—“The soldier’s finger’s on the trigger/And he don’t know who to trust.” It’s also a lot different from lecturing his audience in declamatory fashion: “Our boys in Iraq are victims of an unthinking foreign policy that cynically conflates all Arabs with all terrorists, etc.”

The decision to rely on dramatic monologue is itself political, and so it’s worth pondering what the implicit politics are of this presentational mode.

Dramatic monologue is at least indirect if not actually evasive. Consider what is unsaid in Springsteen‘s song, the political terms one never finds: no policies, no liberals, no conservatives, no Democrats, no Republicans, no Bush, no Obama either.

Moreover, the way the form has speaking characters who are not the author reveal themselves creates interpretative challenges for the audience. For example, the speaker in “Devils & Dust” believes that he has God on his side, but does the song think so? Probably not, especially because the speaker comes to see that his fear has polluted his “God filled soul.” Dramatic monologue is always asking the listener to answer the question, what is the song’s (or Springsteen’s) point of view of the character’s (the speaker’s) point of view?

But as Springsteen has made clear in interviews, the use of dramatic monologue is not a canny and perhaps cynical political move to mask his real, radical political agenda. Rather, it seems to be less a strategic choice than a creative imperative. “I’m just trying to find a story,” he says; “I didn’t start out with a specific political point of view. I don’t sit down and write with political intentions. It’s much more internal” (Dawidoff 260, 264).

And again, describing his process: “I was creating intimate portraits of individuals that you can draw back from and look at them in the context of the country they live in. You have to find circumstances where those characters resonate with psychological, emotional and, by implication, political issues” (Dawidoff 259).

“I’m just trying to find a story.” Springsteen’s art begins with the voices he hears. “The things I’ve written about best [. . .],” he says, “are things I know about. The idea of the wasted life. The idea of the pure unkindness of the world’ (Dawidoff 24). It’s tempting, then, to see at the heart of his work the stories and sentiments he shares with a largely Republican and conservative constituency. “Devils & Dust” is the story of a boy like Springsteen who encounters the unkindness of the world and who, perhaps, is wasting his life:

Now every woman and every man

They wanna take a righteous stand

Find the love that God wills

And the faith that He commands

I've got my finger on the trigger

And tonight faith just ain't enough

When I look inside my heart

There's just devils and dust

To understand the tragedy of American involvement in Iraq, this song seems to be saying, simple and clear positions such as “pro-war” or “anti-war” won’t cut it. We need to step into the shoes of the soldier, sing along with “fear’s a dangerous thing.” If this song does not have a vision, it is at least doing the hard work of preparing us for a vision.

In “Devils & Dust” and the other dramatic monologues of the Bush albums, Springsteen invokes the “imagined community” of Radio Nowhere to listen. He does not tell them what to believe. Instead, he lets them hear what one invented person believes, one story. He asks them to sympathize with and evaluate this one person’s plight.

Which may bring us to the heart not only of the implicit politics of dramatic monologue but of Springsteen’s essential political vision.

Dramatic monologue gives its audience interpretive work to do—a kind of spiritual exercise worthy of Springsteen’s Catholic upbringing. His working class speakers may value plain speaking, but Springsteen clearly does not: we must psychologize and wrestle with the speaker’s chauvinistic appropriation of God in “Devils & Dust,” for instance.

Dramatic monologue exacts listening, requiring us to understand before we judge. It teaches tolerance and charity, for the voices Springsteen inhabits are never condescended to, probably because they are embodied rather than objectified. Dramatic monologue ventriloquizes the voices of others—it is a medium through which America can view itself.

The art of Springsteen, we am coming to see, is an art that straddles binaries, that protests the reductive and violent contrasts they require. Pro-war and anti-war, liberal and conservative—these are oppositions that the Bush albums belie. For all his storied brashness, the Springsteen of the last decade has been a humbler and more reflective voice among us.

Here is how he sees the Bush years, in that Daily Show interview: “We’ve had an enormous moral, spiritual, economic collapse. People go to storytellers when those times are like that. And our band is built from the beginning for hard times; that was the music we wrote, that was the way that we played. And so we think that trying to sort of, I think people out there right now, they’re looking for, the country’s lost its moral center.”

Springsteen knows too much to think he can supply that moral center. But he is storyteller enough to show us where and how to start looking for it.

Coda

We have argued that dramatic monologue gives the reader or listener a lot of interpretive work to do, and I have perhaps shirked mine in not carrying to completion what the implicit politics of “Devils & Dust” are.

Speaking to an audience on his European tour in 1981, Springsteen addresses what we might call his politics of radio, linking it, as delivery system, to the political message he wishes to communicate. He says, “It wasn’t until I started listening to the radio and I heard something in those singer’s voices that said there was more to life than what my old man was doing and the life that I was living. And they held out a promise, and it was a promise that every man had the right to live his life with some decency and some dignity. And it’s a promise that gets broken every day in the most violent way. But it’s a promise that never, ever dies, and it’s always inside of you.” (qtd in Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, Wesleyan University Press)

“Devils & Dust” tells a story of the speaker’s loss of faith and change of heart. By the end of the song, although he reasserts that “I’ve got God on my side,” he is also aware that what he has had to do to survive and the fear he has experienced have killed the things he loved, blackened his heart, and filled his soul with devils and dust.

So what? It suggests that the human cost of our presence in Iraq is impossibly high, and that is just considering the effect on our own people, not those whose country we have occupied. It suggests that the working class men and women who have believed in the promise of America—that every person had the right to live his or her life with some decency and some dignity—have become casualties.

On NPR recently a commentator was claiming that a new trend in the right has been to make strong claims for how the constitution and existing laws were passed down directly from God. “Devils & Dust” is a demonstration, an expose even, of the terrible toll exacted by the Right’s appeals to God and faith.

If the country is to find—to use Springsteen’s phrase to Jon Stewart—its moral center, “Devils & Dust” suggests it will not do so by cynically appealing to religious faith, nor will it do so as long as we keep our fingers on the trigger.

How finally then do we understand the politics of Springsteen? He’s got a Democratic ideology, a Republican vocabulary, and a Populist delivery system.

Works Cited

M. H. Abrams & Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed., Boston: Wadsworth, 2005

Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, Wesleyan University Press, 2005

Nicholas Dawidoff, “The Pop Populist” (originally in New York Times Magazine) in Racing in the Street: the Bruce Springsteen Reader, ed June Skinner Sawyers, Penguin

Thomas Frank,What’s the Problem with Kansas?, Metropolitan Books, 2004

Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen, UNC Press, 2000

John Nichols, “Springsteen’s Political Poetry,” The Nation, 10/29/2004,

Maria Panaritis ,Melissa Dribben and Amy S. Rosenberg, “As Springsteen Sings, Obama’s Camp Sings,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/ 5/ 2008

Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen Interview – The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

3/19/09,

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