JOE McGINNISS

No, I’m not happy about the concessions President Obama is making to the right wing in a last, desperate attempt to save us all from a constitutional and financial meltdown whose consequences most of us can’t even imagine.

The belligerent–and (though I think it’s juvenile to make fun of people’s names) boehnheaded Republican leadership represented by John Boehner (and cheered on from afar by newly-minted millionaire Sarah Palin, who wants to keep all she’s got) would be willing to sink the ship on which we all find ourselves in 2011 in order to drown the president in 2012.

There’s a word for that. The word is “treason.”

President Obama has been forced to abandon his hopes of moving us forward. Now it’s all hands on deck to save us from drowning.

Among those whom I’d guess are sickened by the way the Republican right has dragged us all into this Sargasso Sea of self-destructive selfishness is Bruce Springsteen.

It was my admiration for the way Springsteen has maintained his artistic integrity over forty years–even as he matured and came to see that rock and roll was not in and of itself a cure for the human condition– that first interested me in writing about him.
Not to mention my flat out love for his music, both with and without the E Street Band.

But what’s come to interest me about him more, the more I’ve learned, has been my growing awareness of his unwavering concern about the gap–now a chasm–between the glorious promise that America once offered and the sordid reality of 21st century capitalism and the blighted political system that supports it.

The extraordinary journalist/essayist Mikal Gilmore interviewed Springsteen almost twenty-five years ago for a story included in Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll.

Here’s what Bruce Springsteen said, in 1987:

“The idea of America as a family is naive, maybe sentimental or simplistic, but it’s a good idea. And if people are sick and hurting and lost, I guess it falls on everybody to address these problems in some fashion. Because injustice, and the price of that injustice, falls on everyone’s heads. The economic injustice falls on everyone’s head and steals everyone’s freedom. Your wife can’t walk down the street at night. People keep guns in their homes. They live with a greater sense of apprehension, anxiety, and fear than they would in a more just and open society. It’s not an accident, and it’s not simply that there are ‘bad’ people out there. It’s an inbred part of the way that we are all living. It’s a product of what we have accepted, what we have acceded to. And whether we mean it or not, our silence has spoken for us in some fashion.”

How much worse is it now, almost twenty-five years later?

Boehner says sink the ship and Sarah says reload.

And even those of us who can converse on the internet are not the real victims.

The real victims are those who cannot.