The Boss gets bossed

He should have sold Jeep one of his songs and donated the proceeds to COVID relief

Well, it looks like the Boss has done gone and got hisself taken for a ride on the proverbial ferris wheel of American advertising.  I’m using maundering slang to make the point that the camera work and narration in Springsteen’s ad for Jeep, which seeks to come across as unsullied Americana, is instead distressingly inarticulate, strained and naive.  It’s one more example of the folly of trying to mix commerce and political discourse.

I mean, you don’t have to go all the way out to Kansas and find a little clapboard chapel and some grain elevators and cornfields to imply that politics has disintegrated into a Hunger Games struggle between good and evil.  And that shot of the Asbury Park cowboy putting on the hat near the end…puh-leeze. 

I don’t know who wrote Springsteen’s narration, but it’s an inadvertent masterpiece of schmaltzy banality.  “The middle has been a hard place to get to lately,” he begins, “between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and fear”?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been under the rather naïve impression that one of the things many citizens in this country, especially those of color, need is freedom from fear, not a mythical “middle” between the two. 

And that’s the problem with the rest of the thing:  Springsteen’s celebration of some fairytale middle ends up as an awkward expression of a place that doesn’t exist, and if it did, we would not want to be there.  His hopeful assertion that “we need the middle” assumes that there is someplace to meet between openly armed white supremacist fascists who show no sign of wanting to lay down their guns and a left that’s just trying to do the right thing.  There is no middle when the people who are on the opposite side of Springsteen’s “divide” actually want to kill you – and did only a month ago when they attacked the Capitol and killed a cop and four others as they went hunting to kill Nancy Pelosi.  To reach a political middle means you have to compromise, and I don’t see any deals that could or should be made with people who have approved of separating immigrant mothers from their children and celebrate the kind of deadly attack we just saw on our nation’s seat of government. 

Steny Hoyer displayed a poster on the floor of the House last week showing Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing sunglasses and holding an AR-15 pointed at Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar with the words, “Squad’s Worst Nightmare” in large type below. It had been used as a campaign advertisement by the congresswoman from Georgia.  Where is the “middle” when the other side is holding a gun and threatening lives of members of Congress and openly bragging about it?  Where is the middle between life and death? 

“There’s hope…on the road…up ahead,” Springsteen intones almost mournfully, as the screen shows him driving his Jeep Wrangler down a road through the frozen farmlands of Kansas.  Then it cuts to a shot of the cliched little church on the prairie and ends with what is apparently his hand waving from the open window.

The “hope” Springsteen pines for is a middle that doesn’t and shouldn’t exist.  There is instead a choice between one side and the other, and what the Boss should have pushed is making the right choice.  But we all know if he’d insisted on that, they would have found another pop star to advertise Jeeps.