Voices

Lay off the Boss: Hardly any song more American than 'Born in the U.S.A.'

Fox News opinion commentators and other ultra-right-wing columnists are critical of Bruce Springsteen's performance at the Concert for Valor held on the National Mall on the evening of Veterans Day. They label the songs of the Boss anti-military and anti-American.

They are wrong.

I was among the 300,000 or so people attending the show that featured Rihanna, Metallica, Carrie Underwood, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen and a bunch of people I had never heard of (although the young crowd around me obviously had). My space on the lawn was near the Washington Monument, just under a mile from the stage up near the Capitol. Three jumbo-screens back, the show was pretty good and the sound was excellent.

With a producer other than Tom Hanks, the Concert for Valor may have become a paean to American exceptionalism and the exaltation of war to protect it. That is, apparently, what right-wing commentators have in mind when they think of valor. It would have been easy to stoke the crowd with dramatic songs of men and women going to war provoking an un-thoughtful patriotism the likes of which we saw before the invasion of Iraq.

But Hanks gave us a different patriotism and a different valor, asking us to consider the sobering cost of war through the broken bodies and broken psyches of the men and women who have returned -- some courageously holding it together, some not. Vignettes by the president, first lady and celebrities highlighted the valor of men and women who heroically gave their legs or their lives for whatever it is we're fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The singers were an eclectic mix good old rock and roll, rhythm and blues, rap and country. Something for everyone. (Best act of the night: Metallica.) But Tom Hanks embedded the theme of the night in Bruce Springsteen.

With acoustic guitar and gravelly voice he sang John Fogerty's "Fortunate Son."

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It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate son.

Fogerty said the wedding of David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War inspired the song. At a time when the life of every male under 30 was governed by whether or not he was going to Vietnam, everyone knew David and his privileged chums were not going to war. The wealthy elite don't fight wars, they send others to fight for them and their corporate investments and convince the young soldiers it is their patriotic duty to do so.

Later Springsteen sung his signature "Born in the U.S.A." On stage, he said, "I wrote this thirty years ago. I think it's held up pretty good." Had he sung it with a raucous electric band, the crowd might have missed, as many have, what Jefferson Cowie and Lauren Bohem have called the dichotomy between the "anthemic chorus and the verses' desperate narrative." But it was just the singer, his guitar and a few hundred thousand straining to hear what at times was an amplified whisper.

Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man
… Had a brother at Khe Sahn, fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
Born in the U.S.A.

The message was sobering and, sadly, the Boss is right: It has held up pretty good. The privileged and their politicians are still sending men and women to fight wars we can't win for resources we don't need, and using unbridled religious patriotism to justify it. Make no mistake, Vietnam was not about communism, it was about the world's richest rice-producing area, the Mekong Delta. Iraq is not about terrorism, it's about oil and, initially, the threat to move from petro-dollars to petro-euros.

That is not to deny that ordinary men and women who reach within themselves to do the extraordinary have performed heroic acts of valor. Some get credit for it, most don't. They just do it and the lucky move on, carrying their PTSD burden with them the rest of their lives.

In losing the Vietnam War, it was not our troops who let us down; it was our leaders, steeped in David and Julie privilege, that betrayed us. And now we have another generation of combat veterans hobbling up the steps of the post office on a crutch and one leg to collect their meager VA benefits.

Bring them home, President Obama. Bring them home now.

Alan Boraas is a professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

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