Cry, the Beloved Country

      I began sobbing at a concert the other night. In a stadium. In Lille, France.

      I don’t cry easily. A handful of movies maybe. A performance of “Porgy and Bess” some years ago. And it has been, happily, a while since someone close to me died. I certainly had never before cried at a concert.

      It was a Bruce Springsteen concert.

      I first saw Bruce in January 1981 on Long Island, with my wife who was about to give birth to our first child. I became a true convert in the 1990s, and every few years since I have gone to see him—in recent decades also securing tickets for that child and both of her younger brothers. (Though once was apparently enough for my wife).

      We saw him at the New York Meadowlands in 2016 when Bruce was setting records with shows that lasted just about four hours. (We wouldn’t have had it be any shorter.)

      I buy just about all of the albums, even the ones where he tries on new genres.

      The fact that Bruce is only a month and a week younger than I am has, I think, intensified my interest. We both lived through not just the sixties et cetera, but the sixties et cetera at the same stages in our lives—although, of course, his path through the et cetera provided somewhat more renown and renumeration than mine.

      One of the songs played on the sound system in that stadium in France before the band took the stage was “96 Tears,” by Question Mark & the Mysterians. I convinced myself that it had been selected by Bruce, hence took it as another sign that Bruce and I were steeped in the same culture. Cool, man!

      But there were surprises for me that night in Lille.

      I am dutybound to note, to begin with, that maybe a third, maybe even half, of the seats at this concert failed to contain a human tush—the first stretches of empty seats I have ever seen at a Springsteen concert.

     And something else distinguished this concert from the dozens of others I have seen: When Bruce and “the hard-working, Viagra-taking” E Street Band took the stage, instead of immediately launching into “Lonesome Day” or “No Surrender,” Bruce walked to the front of the stage and began to talk.

     You have perhaps read—in The New York Times, The Guardian or elsewhere—what Bruce has been saying on this European tour.

      Donald Trump has certainly heard about it. And, as Roy Cohn’s star pupil, the president attacked back hard, calling Springsteen "dumb as a rock," "highly overrated" and insisted that he "never liked him, never liked his music,” although last year Springsteen had to demand that Trump stop playing “Born in the USA” at his rallies.

      Bruce told his French audience that evening—and he seemed to have it written down, so it hasn’t varied from show to show on this European tour—that the United States is “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration” that has “no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”

      Myself, ever the journalism professor, I would have edited out the word “deeply.”

      But: Fuck yeah!

      And then Bruce Springsteen, wearing an old-fashioned vest and a purple tie (a tie?), was handed a guitar, and the E Street Band began playing a series of songs—unleavened by any of his hard-rocking hits—that were, in essence, about struggles, sadness and loss in America: “Death to My Hometown,” “My Hometown” (different song, similar theme), “Lonesome Day,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River,” “Youngstown.”

      “Rainmaker”—one of the more obscure of these songs—contains the Orwellian line: “Rainmaker says white's black and black's white/Says night's day and day's night” and also: “Rainmaker take everything that you have.” And, in another song released at the end of Trump I, “House of 1,000 Guitars,” Springsteen sings, “The criminal clown has stolen the throne.”

      The song that got me, however was the first they played, a song, after which Bruce has named this tour, which dates back to the end of the previous century: “Land of Hopes and Dreams.”

      For I realized, or just felt, that what Bruce wanted to say on this tour, when he sang, “Dreams will not be thwarted . . .Faith will be rewarded . . . Bells of freedom ringin',” is that maybe the America of our “hopes and dreams,” not the current Republican party’s survival-of-the-richest America (though guess who has now apparently become a billionaire?); the America that reaches out a hand to immigrants and the less fortunate at home and overseas; the America we knew and perhaps insufficiently treasured; maybe that America will somehow survive “the criminal clown” and his “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”

      Maybe it will survive, which of course leaves open the possibility that maybe it won’t.

      By then I was sobbing.

      Perhaps you have already cried over what is happening to our country. I had not, till then.

      And tears welled up on a few other occasions that evening, even during the de rigueur but always exhilarating run of seven extraordinary rock songs that ended the concert: “Badlands,” “Thunder Road,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Born to Run,” “Glory Days,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” (Springsteen and the two fellows who help him lead the E Street Band—Steven Van Zandt and Roy Bittan—have put together a music machine with James Brown-level dynamics.)

      Like many a person who has struggled with depression, Bruce Springsteen is a highly perceptive chronicler of loss. He is good at mourning. Toward the end of the concert would come, as always, the video of former bandmates who have died, including his longtime saxophonist, Clarence Clemons. And, many of those sad songs of his that he had strung together in the first half of the concert mourn the loss of decently-paid union jobs and tight, supportive neighborhoods.

      But I had the terrifying realization that night in faraway Lille, France, a few months into the second Trump administration that Bruce Springsteen is already mourning the loss of something even larger than that: our country.