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Today's
Stories
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Recent
Stories
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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August
23, 2003
Springsteen's America
Trying
in Vain to Breathe the Fire We Was Born In
By RON JACOBS
Two of my friends had finally scored. They had
been standing outside of the Carter Barron Theater in Washington,
DC every evening during that July week in 1975 hoping to find
somebody willing to let go of a couple tickets to see Bruce Springsteen
and the E Street Band. It had taken them all week, but they had
managed to find tickets to the last show. I had purchased mine
weeks earlier after standing in line for most of a night.
Bruce and his band weren't yet the larger-than-life
phenomenon they were to eventually become. Indeed, he could still
claim to be the working stiff's rocker. His lyricswhile always
convincingwere still being drawn from the band's common experiences.
These were experiences they shred with their (then) mostly East
Coast audiences. The local FM radio station in DC had been playing
the single "Born to Run" from the group's forthcoming
album as often as they could all summer. In addition, the station
had obtained some acetates of a couple other tunes from the album
of the same name and were playing the shit out of them, too.
Bruce was about to break loose. He was going national.
That was all unimportant, though. What
was important was the music and the words. Springsteen's lyrics
weren't transcendent or decadent. Unlike the Grateful Dead's
Workingman's Dead or The Band's repertoire, his songs weren't
about a land that harkened back to the days of the pioneers.
Nor did they tell of an ideal Woodstock Nation like that found
in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's Deja Vu and the rest of
the Dead's songbook. They certainly weren't frivolous like the
disco then hustling its way onto the national dance floor nor
pseudo-surreal like the progressive rock of Pink Floyd or Yes.
No, Bruce sang about lives lived where one knew that when s/he
grew up s/he was going to go to work at some shit job just to
pay the bills. Either that, or end up in jail trying to avoid
such a life.
Still, there was a tinge of hope in the
songs on Born To Run. This hope is implicit in the title song.
"Baby this town rips the bones from your back,it roars,
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap, We gotta get out while
we're young `Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run."
Climb in your car, find a lover, and get on the road. That was
the answer. Of course, as the song continues, we discover that
"There's no place left to hide." This means, of course,
that we probably never will get out of the death trap that our
destiny has set for us and the best we can do is just run, even
if there's no place to go.
If one recalls, 1975 was the year that
the US military lost in Vietnam. The president was Gerald Ford,
who was there because he promised to pardon the previous occupier
of the White House for all crimes he might have been convicted
of. The lie had been exposed for the cheap charade that it was.
There was no morality at the top. Even the government's supporters
were admitting what was so obvious to the rest of us. This country
was run by a bunch of self-serving crooks that would stop at
nothing to keep their power. If this was the case, then what
was wrong with running your own hustle, especially if it's for
love? This is exactly the scenario in "Meeting Across the
River." A pair of young wannabe gangsters is hoping to finally
make the big score, but only if they don't screw up like they
usually do. Of course, if they screwed up, they would have to
answer for it, unlike the guys at the top. Everything on this
album is ultimately for love. This is the one true salvation
in a world where nothing is as it seems. So jump in.
Such is not the case on Springsteen's
other master work, Born In the USA. Love has run its course by
the time this album is through. Desolation and despair are the
just as likely results of adolescent hopes and infatuations.
Growing older has only made life more desperate. Running has
only brought us to an abyss even greater than those we faced
back in our years fresh out of high school when the world was
falling apart but our lives were still fresh. From the burned-out
and bitter Vietnam veteran whose song opens the album to the
working class hard luck cases in the songs "Working On the
Highway"and "Downbound Train," running has only
brought them closer to the end. There is no hope at the end of
the trail, only more running and the back seat of a black-and-white.
Despite the overriding despair, some
of the songs still ache for even a trace of hope. Hope in the
simple things, like refusing to surrender or something as seemingly
silly as changing ones looks. Any hope one finds, however, is
based on the slimmest of premises in a world of shadows and liesa
world made even more false in the fake morning light of Ronald
Reagans presidency. Born In the USA (the album and the song)
spell out the shallowness and hypocrisy of 1980s America, whether
its in the dead-end life of a veteran of Americas war on the
Vietnamese or the dead-end lives of young guys from Manhattan
heading to Jersey for the Fourth of July (with one of them ending
up handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper's Ford.) In an
ironic twist, Mr. Reagan actually used the song Born In the USAas
a backdrop to a couple of his re-election campaign rallies in
New Jersey before Springsteen demanded that he stop. While its
not surprising that Reagan's workers didn't understand the nuances
of the song, the fact of its brief appearance in the Reagan campaign
belies that campaign's very shallowness. (In a similar show of
right-wingers not "getting" this song, a group of pro-war
students here in Burlington, VT blared the chorus this past winter
from their car stereo in a vain attempt to drown out an antiwar
rally.)
The last time I saw Springsteen and the
E Street band in concert was in September 1985. He was playing
a two-night stand in Oakland Coliseum. I had obtained a ticket
through pure luck: some friends had found one on the ground as
they walked through the Coliseum parking lot from the BART train
stop. I happened to cross paths with them and they handed me
the ducat. The show rocked from beginning to end. Towards the
end of the second set, Springsteen introduced the Woody Guthrie
song "This Land Is Your Land" with a request that we
leave a couple bucks with the folks in the lobby who were collecting
money for the homeless shelters and food banks that were springing
up like mushrooms after a rain in Mr. Reagan's America. Then
he told the audience which United States it was that Woody had
been writing about when he wrote that tune. In so many words,
it wasn't the America that Mr. Reagan was working for. It is,
however, an America that is always there, even in the darkest
of times.
Ron Jacobs
is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground.
He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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