A few weeks ago
HERE I noted the article about
Rex Ryan Chris Christie thinking he and Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen would be BFF, if only it weren't for that pesky little fact that Bruce can't fucking stand him, perhaps due to Bruce being a normal human being, and today Eric Alterman
expounds on the article:
Undoubtedly the most egregious aspect of Gov. Christie's self-justifying analysis is his attempt to reduce Springsteen's principles and politics to pure pop psychology. "He feels guilty," he says. "He feels guilty that he has so much money, and he thinks it's all a zero-sum game: in order to get poor people more money, it has to be taken away from the rich."
This is actually a slander of Springsteen, who, though self-educated, has gone through a long process of reading American history, together with philosophy, literature, and political tracts as a means of connecting his political life with the feelings inspired by his music. As I noted in The Nation, Springsteen began to ask questions of himself about what really determined the contours of the lives of the working-class characters whose tribune he had become:
'A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it? What does it mean? "Promised Land," "Badlands,'" he would explain in 2009, decades after the transformation took place. 'I've seen people singing those songs back to me all over the world. I'd seen that country on a grassroots level…. And I met people who were always working toward the country being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very far away.'
As a result, he spent much of this period, as he put it, "tryin' to figure out now where do aesthetic issues that you write about intersect with some sort of concrete action, some direct involvement, in the communities that your audience comes from."
This is exactly the opposite reaction to hard times evinced by Gov. Christie and Tea Party conservatives, who seek to separate themselves from the masses of Americans who have been victimized by a political and an economic system tilted toward the very rich. The governor fools himself into believing, "If Bruce and I sat down and talked, he would reluctantly come to the conclusion that we disagree on a lot less than he thinks."
This is self-serving nonsense.
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