Tag: George W. Bush

Springsteen’s “Long Walk Home” and the Alienating Feeling of Election Results

Bruce Springsteen released “Long Walk Home” in 2007 on his Magic album.  He wrote the song to reflect how he felt during the years of the George W. Bush presidency.

Last night I stood at your doorstep,
Trying to figure out what went wrong.

“Long Walk Home” is about a guy coming back to his hometown and not recognizing anything.  As Springsteen explained about the singer’s character in The New York Times,  “The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers.”

Long Walk Home

In town I pass Sal’s grocery,
Barber shop on South Street;
I looked in their faces,
They’re all rank strangers to me.

The reference to “rank strangers” in Springsteen’s “A Long Walk Home” was inspired by the song “Rank Strangers to Me,” sometimes called “The Rank Stranger” or just “Rank Stranger.” Albert E. Brumley wrote “Rank Strangers to Me,” which was made famous by The Stanley Brothers.

“Rank Strangers to Me” is also about a man returning to the town of his youth.  As in Springsteen’s song, the singer discovers he does not recognize anything.

The meaning of “Rank Stranger” is open to interpretation. There is no resolution or explanation about why the singer does not recognize the people in his town. Has he died? Has everyone else died? It is a mystery that makes the song haunt you long after you have heard it.

Similarly, in Springsteen’s song, the unrecognizable world feels alien to the singer. The meaning would be mysterious too, except that Springsteen has provided context for “The Long Walk Home.” He explained about the alienation during the Bush administration, “I think that’s what’s happened in this country.”

It’s gonna be a long walk home;
Hey pretty darling, don’t wait up for me;
Gonna be a long walk home,
A long walk home.

While some celebrated the election results this week, many felt they were seeing their country in a way they could not recognize. Maybe Springsteen had a feeling about what was going to happen when he chose to play “Long Walk Home” outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall during a rally for Hillary Clinton the night before the election.

Either way, the song captures the disappointment that one side often feels after an election. But that is the nature of democracy. At one time or another, we all have to take a long walk to get back home.

Leave your two cents in the comments. Photo by Chimesfreedom.

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    Song of the Day: “If a Song Could Be President”

    vote here As our U.S. readers go to the polls, listen to one of the more hopeful songs about presidents, “If a Song Could Be President.”  The Ohio band Over the Rhine featured the song on their album, The Trumpet Child (2007).

    Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine were inspired to write “If a Song Could Be President” after receiving an invitation to visit the White House in 2005.  The band accepted the invitation even though they disagreed with policies of President George W. Bush’s administration.

    But, as they later wrote on Huffington Post, “we soon realized that what was so often missing from the current political climate in America were opportunities for folks who might have differing ideas to sit down face to face and actually engage in real conversation.”

    Detweiler and Bergquist came away from the White House visit thinking about how “American music is one of the last remaining communal enterprises in this country. Music and songwriting still have the potential to bring incredibly diverse people together.”

    They took the experience and put together a song that brought together a beautiful mix of American music.  They came up with a dream wondering what it would be like if a song could be president. Check out “If a Song Could Be President.”

    If a song could be president,
    We’d fly a jukebox to the moon;
    All our founding fathers’ 45’s,
    Lightnin’ Hopkins and Patsy Cline,
    If a song could be president.

    Happy election day.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    A Humbug Pill, a Dose of Dope, And a Great Big Bill

    How Can a Poor Man On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, Louisiana. The hurricane and its after effects devastated the city and surrounding areas along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

    The following year, Bruce Springsteen visited New Orleans and performed his version of the song “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live.” He used the first verse from the original by Blind Alfred Reed. But then he added three new verses that focused on the situation in New Orleans.

    Springsteen’s lyrics criticize the federal response to the emergency, invoking President George W. Bush‘s trip to the area: “He took a look around, gave a little pep talk, said ‘I’m with you’ then he took a little walk.” At his performance in New Orleans, he introduced the song with a reference to the “Bystander-in-Chief.”

    Springsteen released his version of “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” on We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (American Land Edition) (2006). Below is the original version of the song by Blind Alfred Reed, who wrote “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” in response to the Great Depression: “When we pay our grocery bill,/ We just feel like making our will.”

    Reed, who lived from 1880 to 1956, recorded his version in New York City on December 4, 1929, less than two months after the stock market crash. Check it out.

    Ry Cooder also recorded a variation on Reed’s original version, releasing it on his self-titled album in 1970. Musically, one can hear how Cooder’s version apparently influenced Springsteen’s version.

    Check out this video of Cooder’s 1987 performance of “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” at The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, California.

    Unfortunately, it seems like we will always need songs like these. Fortunately, we have artists like Reed, Cooder, and Springsteen to keep challenging us.

    Photo of Hurricane Katrina via NASA (Public Domain). Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Last Surviving U.S. WWI Veteran Passes

    Dixie Chicks – Travelin’ Soldier Live

    {Travelin’ Soldier (live) – Dixie Chicks }

    Frank Buckles — the last surviving U.S. veteran of the World War I forces — passed away Sunday at the age of 110. He enlisted in 1917 at the age of 16, lying about his age so he could serve his country. He later told a reporter, “I thought, well, ‘I want to get over there and see what it’s about.'”

    The WWI time period is a fascinating time and is not often covered in popular culture these days. Movies and popular culture pay little attention to WWI partly because that war was so long ago and partly because it does not have the heroic triumph over evil theme that World War II has. But there are several lessons to be learned from World War I and its time, and we hope to revisit the topic in the future on Chimesfreedom, especially because I just started reading Robert Graves’s memoir of the time period, Good-Bye to All That. For today, we wanted to make sure to note the death of Frank Buckles so it is not lost in less important news like the Oscars.

    World War I

    Today, we remember Frank Buckles and all of the other soldiers who served in “the Great War.” The above Dixie Chicks song, “Travelin’ Soldier” is off their 2003 Top Of The World Tour Live
    CD. The song was written and originally recorded by Bruce Robison, and The Dixie Chicks’s studio version of the song is on their 2002 Home album. In “Travelin’ Soldier,” the singer tells about “a girl with a bow” meeting a young man off to serve in the Vietnam war who asks her if she will write him because he has nobody else.

    I cried
    Never gonna hold the hand of another guy
    Too young for him they told her
    Waitin’ for the love of a travelin’ soldier
    Our love will never end
    Waitin’ for the soldier to come back again
    Never more to be alone when the letter said
    A soldier’s coming home.

    They exchange letters and she falls in love. But then she attends a football game where they read the names of the fallen. “And one name read but nobody really cared / But a pretty little girl with a bow in her hair.”

    It is ironic that this beautiful song about a woman supporting a man off to war was the victim of a campaign in the name of some sort of “patriotism.” The studio version “Travelin’ Soldier” was number one on the country charts as the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq eight years ago this month on March 12, 2003. Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines told an audience in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” A number of country radio stations stopped playing “Travelin’ Soldier,” and the song dropped off the charts.

    Many, like Merle Haggard defended Maines and her right to speak her mind. But as of today, “Travelin’ Soldier” is their last number one country song. The three made one more album together and went on hiatus. The 2006 documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing
    covers the reaction to the Bush quote and the impact on the group.

    Fortunately, unlike the soldier in the song and so many others, Frank Buckles returned home from World War I and lived a long life, outliving the almost five million Americans who served in the war. Only one Australian man and one British woman survive Buckles of all of the 65 million people from around the world who served in the war. Not only did he live through WWI, but he saw more than a century’s worth of history, even serving as a civilian prisoner for 38 months when Japanese soldiers captured him in 1941 while he was traveling around the world. In his later years, he campaigned to get the government to refurbish a neglected World War I monument in D.C. and rededicate it as a national memorial. You may donate to the cause at the World War I Memorial Foundation website.

    The West Virginia Congressional delegation from Buckles’s home state is proposing a plan for his body to lie in the U.S. Capitol. Buckles already had special government approval to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. It is good that he is so honored, because this honor is really about respecting all of the people who served in World War I, and hopefully the honor will continue to the WWI monument in DC. As for Frank Buckles, he is already home.

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    Is it Safe?: Torture American-Style

    In the movie Marathon Man, there’s a famous sequence where the Nazi war criminal (played by Laurence Olivier) uses dental tools on Dustin Hoffman’s mouth to torture him into answering the code question “Is it safe?”  I remember the movie from my youth, as well as movies like The Deer Hunter, which shows America’s enemies using torture techniques on American prisoners of war — played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage.  In The Deer Hunter, the captors force the three Americans to play Russian Roulette and punish the soldiers by putting them in an underwater cage full of live rats and dead bodies.

    Watching these movies as a kid, these torture techniques were things that our enemies did.  Americans do not torture.  If we adopt the techniques of the bad guys, then there is no longer a difference between us and them.

    Torture has been in the news lately because of the release of former Pres. George W. Bush’s book, Decision Points.  In it, he describes how when the CIA asked him whether he would support waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammad, he responded, “Damn right!”  Former Vice-President Cheney has stated he is a “big supporter” of waterboarding.

    Waterboarding is torture in violation of international law.  But what about when government officials feel the country is in danger and it is necessary?

    Pres. Obama has been criticized for his failure to investigate and prosecute the Americans who used torture techniques.  I understand his aversion to opening up a partisan fight.  Some claim, though, that the failure to pursue the perpetrators leaves a precedent for future presidents that torture techniques will be tolerated.

    There’s an old joke about a man who goes to a woman and asks, “Will you sleep with me for a million dollars?”

    The woman thinks for a few minutes, and responds, “Sure.”

    Then the man asks, “Will you sleep with me for ten dollars?”

    The woman says, “Certainly not!  What kind of woman do you think I am?”

    The man responds, “We’ve already established that.  Now we’re just negotiating on a price.”

    The joke reminds me of our attitudes about torture.  You’re either for it or against it, and then it’s just negotiating when to use it.  Nobody advocates torture for jaywalking.  If you’re for it, it’s for the extreme situations.  So you can’t rid yourself of the responsibility by saying “I only advocate it for certain situations.”  You’re pro-torture or anti-torture.  That part is simple.

    Unfortunately, the line about what my country does and tolerates is not as simple as I believed when I was a kid watching movies.

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