How much hypocritical, unmitigated, oblivious gall does it take to denigrate a man who’s taken a bullet for his country on national television, while knowing full well that you lied and cheated and weasled your way out of the military draft during the Vietnam War?
Bruce Springsteen doesn’t know the answer to that question. He’s so swept up in his own self-importance and his macabre despondency over America’s choice of President Trump to fix Joe Biden’s God-awful mess that his own hypocrisy will never register with him.
So it was easy for him, with his vast array of security guards, entrenched Leftist supporters, Barack Obama socialist secret decoder ring and millions of dollars in the bank, to stand on a British stage earlier in May and castigate the American President and by extension, America herself. He joined that exclusive club of tactless, spoiled elitists like Jane Fonda, Natalie Maines and Neil Young who’ve suckled at America’s nurturing teat to be lauded with its love and its riches – before going overseas to bite down hard.
“My home America, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” Springsteen told a Manchester, England, concert audience.
So to hell with you, 77 million Trump voters.
It’s a crybaby irony that saddles this self-anointed, sore loser American “everyman” whose five decades of three-chord requiems have sought to provide excuses for the average working stiff’s shortcomings. If only his loyalty to the “beacon of hope and liberty” was so apparent before he got rich, when the nation he now claims to love so much asked him to pick a rifle to defend it against communism.
Because, if you’ll remember correctly, communism isn’t really buddies with hope and liberty. We got a taste of that the last four years.
Stepping up to the plate for his country was too much of an ask for The Boss. When Uncle Sam called him along with others of his era in 1967 to stop communist aggression in Vietnam and halt the Soviet/Chinese contest to dominate U.S. interests in Indochina, Springsteen executed a plan as a “stone-cold draft dodger,” who “carried out everything in the draft dodger’s textbook” in his own words. The 19 year-old Boss claimed a concussion from a motorcycle wreck when he was 17 – one ChatGPT can find no official report or documentation of, mind you, and one apparently only backed up by Sprintgsteen’s own recounting.
But there was more. In a 1984 Rolling Stone interview, Springsteen admitted how he added theatrics to his supposed years-old concussion to be more convincing to the draft board. “I did the basic Sixties rag, you know: fillin’ out the forms all crazy, not takin’ the tests. When I was nineteen, I wasn’t ready to be that generous with my life.”
Knowing other men went to Vietnam and were injured and died while he hung out in New Jersey clubs drinking beer and playing the guitar made him feel guilty, so he says now.
Well, at least there’s that.
But that supposed guilt didn’t mute Springsteen’s vaunted support of Leftism for long. He became besties with liberal A-listers like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and most recently sounded a heralding campaign trumpet for the raw merit and intellectual substance of Kamala Harris. Springsteen channeled his 19 year-old draft-dodging self into a new superhero for American Socialism – all while charging his “everyman” audiences hundreds of dollars for concert tickets.
So when Springsteen defines the Trump presidency as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous,” the rest of us “everymen” have to ask – what kind of America would Bruce Springsteen like to see?
Maybe the America Springsteen wants to see is one whose open Southern border allows a free flow of unchecked illegal immigrants, many of them criminals, gang members and murderers, and an unchecked pathway for poisonous illegal drugs.
Maybe the America Springsteen wants to see is one in which young women who have worked tirelessly to become master competitors within their sports can receive a beatdown by boys interloping in their competitions, and who get to share their bathrooms and showers as well.
Maybe the America Springsteen wants to see is one where skin color or membership in some bogus “oppressed group” or one’s sexual proclivities – instead of competence, hard work and achievement – determines who gets a job or a scholarship or a raise or promotion within companies, organizations and government.
The truth is a majority of voters said they’ve had enough of Bruce Springsteen’s America. They’ll side with a guy who stood in the open and took a bullet trying to Make America Great Again rather than somebody who ran from the fight.
If The Boss wants to continue down that punk road, bad mouthing his country and its leaders and the majority of American voters on foreign shores while lining his own pockets, maybe he and the Dixie Chicks should share a tour bus.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
