It was July 1984, a very late weeknight. My buddy Mike and I closed up Perkins Restaurant in Butler, Pennsylvania, and left about 1 a.m. with a six-pack of Budweiser pounders for the old Kaufman’s department store in downtown Pittsburgh. There we joined a long line of fellow 1980s degenerates sleeping out all night on the sidewalk in quest of coveted Bruce Springsteen concert tickets.
Perkins is a nice family restaurant chain. The restaurant where Mike and I worked — he as a junior manager and I as cook, dishwasher, and all-purpose grunt — flew a gigantic American flag on a high pole outside Clearview Mall. That flag always pleased patriotic Americans, of whom there were many in our hometown, including among classmates who had graduated from Butler High School the previous month.
My friends and I weren’t political or ideological. We loved our country but knew little about politics. I couldn’t define a Republican or a Democrat. Like almost everyone in America, however, we liked Ronald Reagan. Even Walter Cronkite had marveled about Reagan, “I never thought I’d see anyone that well-liked …. Nobody hates Reagan. It’s amazing.” That was evident when Reagan was reelected with nearly 60 percent of the vote, 49 of 50 states, and winning the Electoral College 525 to 13.
We patriotic teens also liked Bruce Springsteen. Already an established pop-rock star, he had just reexploded on the music scene with a smash album, Born in the U.S.A. The album cover and Bruce himself were bedecked in red, white, and blue. The stars and stripes were his theme. Old Glory was front and center for every performance during Springsteen’s enormously successful year-long-plus tour that hit major cities in America (Pittsburgh twice, both the Civic Arena and Three Rivers Stadium) and around the world.
When Springsteen, during those shows, belted out the title track to the album, the crowd went nuts with patriotic fervor, furiously waving small and large flags. It was a great American moment.
Or so it seemed.
Unfortunately, young people in that era had been conditioned through years of indiscernible lyrics to not listen carefully to the actual words of the often-fatuous ditties to which they hummed and tapped their toes and played air guitar. In days when you didn’t have phones to Google lyrics, you often had no idea what the hell rocker X, Y, or Z was saying. And if the lyrics were sung clearly enough to understand, we morons didn’t really think much about them.
And there were few starker examples of that than Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”
Mockery of the U.S.A.
When one paused to actually listen to the words of this seemingly patriotic anthem — which capitalized big-time on the surge in patriotism of the Reagan 1980s — you realized that Bruce’s signature song was in reality a protest. Quite incredibly, given how it fooled everyone (our fault for being mindless dupes as much as Springsteen’s fault), the Boss’ famous track was a mockery of the American dream.
As even Wikipedia wryly notes, “‘Born in the U.S.A.’ has been widely misunderstood. It has been treated as a flag-waving paean to America by politicians like Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan, reacting to the patriotic tone of the song’s chorus, without seeming to acknowledge the bitter critique of American policy and society present in the lyrics.” Wikipedia rightly adds: “‘Born in the U.S.A.’ was widely misinterpreted as purely nationalistic by those who heard the anthemic chorus but not the bitter verses.”
That’s for sure. Look at the lyrics.
The song launches right off with a grim take on the country. Its dismal subject is an American guy “Born down in a dead man’s town,” who received his “first kick … when [he] hit the ground.” He was sent off to Vietnam. “They put a rifle in my hand,” he laments, “sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man.” After these verses, you hear again and again this mocking refrain: “Born in the U.S.A.! I was born in the U.S.A.!”
The poor slob comes home from Vietnam to get a job, but he seems to be the only ambitious hardworking man in 1984 who can’t find a job at a time of booming economic growth under Ronald Reagan: “Come back home to the refinery, hiring man says, ‘son if it was up to me;’ Went down to see my V.A. man, he said, ‘Son, don’t you understand?’”
Again, the mockery: “Born in the U.S.A.! I was born in the U.S.A.!”
If that’s not bad enough, then we hear about this loser’s brother, whose life as an American was even more rotten:
I had a brother at Khe Sanh
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now
The brother’s American life sucked, too. Likewise, he had been sent off to kill the “yellow man,” and did not return. Probably just as well!
Here, Bruce returns back to the misery of the first dead-dog dude:
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go
Nope, no jobs. Again comes the chorus, as young concertgoers waved their flags, cheering patriotically, oblivious to the meaning of the lyrics:
Born in the U.S.A
I was born in the U.S.A. now
Born in the U.S.A
I’m a long-gone daddy in the U.S.A.!
Long gone. That’s what it was like to be born in the U.S.A. The land of opportunity? Oh, please. Hardly.
And yet, we teenage idiots, accustomed to years of not actually listening to or thinking about the ludicrous lyrics we mindlessly mouthed to whatever tune, assumed the words were positive — patriotic. It was the 1980s, the Reagan years, the end of the Nixon–Ford–Carter years. America was back. We figured this song was a tribute to that. It wasn’t.
Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” was not the Shining City on the Hill. It was not Morning in America. It was mourning in America. And yet, because of our stupidity, Bruce had amazingly become a blue-collar poster boy for the red, white, and blue. A staunch liberal Democrat, he cashed in on our patriotic feelings and juvenile gullibility. He ran our cash all the way to the bank.
Few spectacles were so ludicrous and directly attributable to our profound ignorance.
Blessing the USA: Lee Greenwood and Charlie Daniels
For an example of a song that was truly pro-America, well, that was Lee Greenwood’s anthem, “God Bless the U.S.A.” Greenwood’s beautiful piece concludes unmistakably, undoubtedly: “There ain’t no doubt I love this land, God bless the USA!”
Greenwood’s optimistic recording left no doubts, whereas Springsteen’s was filled with doubts, cynicism. Greenwood wasn’t fooling folks with fake patriotism. Greenwood was “proud to be an American.”
In retrospect, it’s remarkable that Greenwood’s track was released the month before Springsteen’s, and would enjoy nowhere near the immediate success (though in the long run, it arguably has been more successful).
Similarly, I would also commend a somewhat forgotten patriotic piece from the era, still heard in my neck of the woods on country music stations: Charlie Daniels’s “In America.”
It’s interesting that Daniels’s song was released in May 1980, during the doldrums of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise.” Daniels was a conservative and a Reagan supporter, but unlike Springsteen, he put aside his personal politics and wrote lyrics that sought to unite and rally Americans regardless. He urged: “We’ll all stick together, and you can take that to the bank, that’s the cowboys and the hippies and the rebels and the yanks.” He exhorted, “God Bless America Again.”
Bruce’s Big 50th
Alas, I mention all of this now because there’s currently much fanfare over Bruce Springsteen because of the 50th anniversary of his classic 1975 album Born to Run, another work of adolescent prattle about racing cars and using girls. Like the awful message in his 1980 song “Hungry Heart,” about a guy who left his wife and kids “and never went back” because he has a “hungry heart,” the liberal Springsteen frequently wrote about using girls for sex and noncommitment. Of course, liberal women always forgive such behavior from famous liberal men so long as they’re liberal Democrats who support abortion (see Bill Clinton).
All sins are washed clean at the altar of “abortion rights.”
As for Born to Run, the fact that our culture would recognize the golden anniversary of something so frivolous further demonstrates our shallowness. Springsteen’s strange 50th is accorded the sort of reverence that better people in better times would have reserved for, say, the bicentennials of the births of Bach and Beethoven. People are reacting as if it’s the flipping anniversary of the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And here again, Springsteen’s words are being seriously analyzed by adults who admired his music as teenagers but still haven’t figured out that the twaddle they hummed and strummed was mere juvenile poppycock.
Beyond the song/album “Born to Run,” our own John Mac Ghlionn, like myself, responded to this odd ceremonial occasion by writing about “Born in the U.S.A.” and Springsteen generally.
“Springsteen is not a patriot,” concluded Mac Ghlionn. “He isn’t the voice of American pride. He’s a salesman, a disingenuous one at that. He fooled a nation into cheering its own condemnation.”
That’s well put. And I was among the young fools, cluelessly cheering the condemnation and making this working-class liberal a rich man in the process.
READ MORE from Paul Kengor:
A Message to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: Get Married and Have a Baby