Posted on 08/27/2002 10:57:42 AM PDT by xsysmgr
Bruce or Toby? That is the question. Is rueful lament a better answer to 9/11 than robust anger? The media elite have unquestionably opted for Bruce Springsteen's sad-song meditation on last September's tragedy. Not without reason, since Springsteen's The Rising brings the spirit and wit of "the Boss" at his best to bear upon the unbearable. As for me, I'll take country star Toby Keith — with his angry vow to kick al Qaeda butt; his unashamed love for his country; his grateful respect for the men and women who risk their lives to defend us; and his thumb-in-the-eye to the fools who look down on all this. Although we are much farther from recognizing it than we ought to be, it is Toby, not Bruce, who sits nobler in the mind.
Yet let us first praise Bruce. Remarkable as it seems, Springsteen's mere decision to sing of 9/11 took courage. Whereas Country Music Television has been awash in songs of patriotism and tribute from the moment of the attacks, MTV has remained, for the most part, the same vacuum-sealed world of private anger, lust, and alienation that it was before last September. There are, after all, guardians of the politico-musical faith, for whom even collective national mourning, much less patriotism and war, are anathema. These folks have already trashed The Rising as "commercial exploitation" of personal tragedy. Of course, the crocodile tears of politically correct music critics for the feelings of "exploited" 9/11 victims are only a cover for their hope that the memory of September 11, with its challenge to the Left's most cherished illusions, will fade away.
But Springsteen's friends may be scarier than his enemies. Even Time's laudatory cover story on the Boss couldn't help but knock, "Into the Fire" and the album's title song, "The Rising" (the most open celebrations of 9/11 heroism on the disk) as "rousing and redemptive" but "a little shallow." What Time really meant was that these tribute songs had to be shallow because they were rousing and redemptive.
Far from being shallow, the title song of The Rising is probably the most interesting effort on the album. It follows the mind of a fireman who's lost track of how far he's climbed, carrying a 60-pound load on his back and half a mile of line on his shoulder. He's rushed to the fire, "wearin' the cross of his calling." Yet in a moment, the lyrical realism explodes, like the Trade Center itself, into visions of "Mary in the garden of a thousand sighs with holy pictures of our children." At this point, the song becomes both the mind of the fireman at the moment of his death, and the picture of his transfiguration into a redemptive figure for us all. The allusions to the bearing of the cross, the holy family, and the resurrection ("the rising") are clear — except to secular rock critics. (Springsteen is a lapsed Catholic.)
Critical complaints about the "sameness" of the album — the pervasive metaphor of blood, for example — miss the point that Springsteen is weaving his redemptive imagery throughout The Rising, while repeatedly forcing us back to the subject of loss, in imitation of the actual experience of grief.
The critics may not like — or even recognize — Springsteen's redemptive heroism (these are the parts of The Rising they call "mawkish"), but radical rock critics are suckers for any hint of hopelessness or alienation. The same Time critic who finds Springsteen's tribute songs "shallow" has raves for "Your Missing." Why? Because, he says, it's the one song on the album that doesn't end hopefully. At the end of "Your Missing," "God's drifting in heaven," and the "Devil's in the mailbox." Ah yes, as any good rocker knows, sympathy for the Devil is de rigeur.
The hard Left despises The Rising. As far as they're concerned, just by singing about 9/11 Springsteen, whatever his intentions, is lending aid and comfort to the Bush war machine. The soggy Left, on the other hand, is simply looking for a way to commemorate 9/11 that doesn't upend any of their political or cultural assumptions. But their efforts to keep the Boss within acceptable cultural bounds aren't really necessary. That's because Springsteen's own leftward leanings have forced him to back away from even his own honest response to the events of September 11. However good The Rising may be, without a whisper on it about the country — much less the war — something fundamental and necessary is missing.
The omission is anything but incidental. The way most commentators handle it is to say that The Rising is really about September 12, not September 11 — that is, about the slow process of psychological recovery from our collective trauma, and not about the trauma's causes. But doesn't this mistakenly assume that therapy is the only thing that needs doing after September 11? Very few Americans — least of all Springsteen's pro-war working-class heroes — believe that. Bill Greider, formerly of Rolling Stone, and now at the lefty Nation, was more honest about the political significance of Springsteen's less-than-bellicose response to 9/11. Greider touts Springsteen's music as an antidote to "the self-righteousness of our leadership's geo-political view." But here's the kicker. To the consternation of his leftist allies and admirers, Springsteen is actually a supporter of America's war on Afghanistan, and has mostly praise for the administration's conduct of it. So how is it that Bruce could support that war, yet not bring himself to sing about it?
We come at last to ground zero in this controversy. In a widely publicized interview last month with the London Times, Springsteen argued that patriotism should not be allowed to remain the preserve of the political Right. "They try to co-opt everything that shows pride in place and people," he said. "What I've always thought was, 'No no. That flag belongs to me...and I'm not gonna cede that image to any particular party or ideology." Alright then, Bruce, why haven't you got a word about America, the flag, or the war on The Rising?
The background to all this is the infamous dispute over Ronald Reagan's use of Springsteen's song, "Born in the USA," during the 1984 presidential campaign. "Born in the USA" was clearly written as a complaint about America's treatment of its working-class heroes. Yet the song's ironic flag waving was taken at face value by the president, and Springsteen has never been able to live it down. Many on the Left still hold Springsteen responsible, charging him with barely concealed patriotism — as if that were the mark of Cain.
It's almost a parody of the leftism when Eric Alterman, another columnist for The Nation, and a Springsteen fan and biographer, carefully explicates the lyric of "Born in the USA" in order to exonerate Bruce of the charge of patriotism: "Nothing in this lyric can credibly be interpreted as optimistic, much less celebratory of life in the United States." Whew! That was close. For a second there, I was worried that the Boss might actually have said something good about the United States. Fortunately, his lefty political credentials are still in tact. Now what do you think would have happened with all of Bruce's friends over at The Nation had Springsteen done the right thing and put in a kind word for the U.S.A. in The Rising?
We can find the answer by looking at what happened to poor Paul McCartney and Neil Young after they penned patriotic tunes in the wake of 9/11. In, "Let's Roll," Young made the mistake of saying, "You've got to turn on evil/ When it's coming after you/ You've gotta face it down/ And when it tries to hide/ You've gotta go in after it/ And never be denied. Time is runnin' out — Let's roll...." McCartney's error was to sing, "I will fight for the right/ To live in freedom...." For these thought crimes, McCartney and Young have been dismissed in the pages of the New York Times as failures and jingoists, forever condemned to be compared unfavorably to Springsteen, with his lyrical "maturity."
But the mainstream media reserves its most contemptuous treatment for the likes of Toby Keith and his compatriots in country music. That controversial incident in which "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue" was banned from a Peter Jennings special is only the tip of the iceberg. Nearly every solemn consideration of American popular music in the post-9/11 era makes a point of taking a swipe at Keith for his anger, his jingoism, his quest for vengeance, his geo-political naïveté.
At the root of Keith's many crimes against conventional liberal wisdom is his anger. In fact, the subtitle of "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" is "The Angry American." Again and again, media critics are repulsed by Keith's unrepentant anger. Nowadays, we're not supposed to get angry — at least, we're not expected to stay that way. But this is an extraordinary novelty in American history, a novelty dating from the post WWII period — especially since the Sixties. (For more, see Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History, by Carol and Peter Stearns.)
In the traditional American mode, uncontrolled anger was a serious problem, yet the trick was not to stigmatize anger, but to channel it into healthy competition and strength of character. Here is the thinking of G. Stanley Hall, the most prominent American psychologist of the nineteenth century: "A certain choleric vein gives zest and force to all acts....The best work of the world is done in the tension between anger and control." In a nation that has seen a movement for the abolition of dodgeball, these pearls of wisdom are long forgotten and disallowed.
When the cultural change of the Sixties finally came, anger wasn't exactly denied — but it wasn't channeled either. Mr. Rogers's deadpan approach was, "This makes you feel angry, doesn't it?" Sesame Street put out a catchy song that went into delicious detail about anger, but provided no resolution. The implication was that, while anger might be inevitable, nothing good could come of it. Springsteen's The Rising offers a sophisticated version of the wisdom of Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. "A little revenge and/ This too shall pass." The critics love that line, explicitly contrasting Springsteen's quick exorcism of anger with Toby Keith's refusal to give anger up.
There was a time when young boys were given a pair of boxing gloves as part of their transition to manhood, when the spirited anger of competitive sports (always tempered by the code of good sportsmanship) was seen as a social good. As an ex-football player, Toby Keith comes straight out of what's left of that world. But it took Toby Keith a while to find his métier. He was a country singer of only middling rank until his breakthrough hit, "How Do You Like Me Now?" — a song about the revenge that his musical success allowed him to enjoy over a snobby beauty who'd rejected him when he was in high school. Surprisingly, women as well as men embraced the song, and Keith's career as a kind of countercultural standard-bearer for the forgotten macho man took off. "Courtesy" is the apotheosis of all that.
Angered by the events of September 11, and moved by the memory of his patriotic father, who had lost an eye in WWII, but who never complained (Keith didn't even know about his father's glass eye till he was in his teens), Keith penned "Courtesy," with its tribute to his father, and its promise to put an American boot up Osama's a**. He knew he had something controversial, though, and held the song back until he'd tried it out on military bases, where soldiers roared with joy. Toby Keith took righteous anger, more than justified by events, and placed it at the service of the men who carry the heaviest burden of all, as they march into fire of another sort. As Keith himself puts it, "it's the American way." At least it used to be.
Therapy alone is insufficient as a response to the events of September 11. Indeed, our post-Sixties culture itself is insufficient as a response to the deeper truths exposed by the events of last September. The fire that rained down on us that day was sent to us because we are Americans. It will rain down again. And we shall not be able to extinguish it unless we do so as Americans. So until someone like Bruce Springsteen can stop strutting around, in Hamlet-like anguish, long enough to sing about a war that he himself believes in, we shall not be out of the cultural wilderness. Is such a change still possible in America? That is the question.
— Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Proof of the existence of a divine being! ;-) (from a fellow Bay-stater)
I agree with the author. The right tone for the one year anniversary is defiance, not sitting around singing kumbaya. I'm not going to want to be around a TV in a couple of weeks.
Yep.
Toby Keith
Charlie Daniels
Hank Jr.
Aaron Tippon
All these guys recorded really great, patriotic, post- 9/11 songs.
(I'm slightly less enthusiastic about Alan Jackson's downbeat tune, but i'm sure it's better than anythin Springsteen could do.)
I hate to agree with the Time's on anything, but I think they're dead on here. To be fair, I've only heard "The Rising" but it sounded to me like something thrown together quickly, with no real meaning whatsoever.
Feel sorry for those three others who, to a lesser or greater degree, weren't quite sure what they were supposed to feel, awaiting instructions from the chattering NYC-LA classes or from the Central Committee of the Politburo, I dunno...
"Bruce Springsteen’s inert, equivalist wallow of a 9/11 album, The Rising, is a classic example of how even a supposed ‘blue-collar’ icon can’t bring himself to want America to win."
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