Well my thankful mood was brought to an abrupt end this morning by reading David Brooks' homage to Bruce Springsteen and the "second education" that the Boss has provided to him over the last thirty-five years. (And yes, the words "epic fail" leap to mind.)
Now I try very hard to avoid the Zhdanovist view of art. As one of my internet heroes, Roy Edroso, constantly points out, the reductivist view of art as simply a form of political advocacy is indicative of a cramped mind with a bankrupt imagination. But I find Mr. McBobo's ("the intellectually near-sighted pundit") invocations of Springsteen maddening -- this is the second time this month that he has done this, the first in a fatuous column bemoaning the demise of courtship rituals in our cell phone age. (Okay, not as maddening as when both George Will and Ronald Reagan tried to appropriate Springsteen and Born in the USA in the 1984 presidential campaign.)
Brooks is a smug, prissy, pseudo-intellectual, with all of the feel for the common man as a Bourbon prince. He is the Anti-Springsteen. I have a hard time finding any sense in Brooks's work and ideology that he has actually been touched by Springsteen's work, a body of songs that are frequently withering in their critique of capitalism and deeply dark in their depiction of familial and romantic relationships.
During the height of the Reagan recession of 1982, the appearance of "Nebraska" was a rebuke to all of the happy horseshit that was being shoveled at us by the Gipper and his acolytes. It was a bracing cri de coeur, a stark and brave work about the human wreckage of the Reagan Revolution. I wonder how often Brooks spins this little ditty on his ipod:
Now judge judge I had debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they was takin' my house away
Now I ain't sayin' that makes me an innocent man
But it was more 'n all this that put that gun in my hand
Well your honor I do believe I'd be better off dead
And if you can take a man's life for the thoughts that's in his head
Then won't you sit back in that chair and think it over judge one more time
And let 'em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line.
When I saw Springsteen shortly after its release, he changed the word "execution" to "killing" as if to make clear his artistic commitment to a sense of what's true, a feature totally missing from the work of our Mr. Brooks.
