Yesterday, in endorsing Barack Obama, Bruce Springsteen wrote on his website:

He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where “. . . nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”

It’s true that Obama speaks to the America Springsteen usually writes about. But I’m not sure what he’s referring to in this description. Springsteen’s America is a soot-covered wasteland of junked cars, violent townies, shotgun weddings, racist cops, closed factories, and endless unemployment lines. If you think Obama was tough on small town mentalities, consider the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Wherever the tramps wound up, let’s hope they didn’t join the work force. Being out of work in this traumatized dystopia is paradise compared to what happens if you actually ever find a job:

Early in the morning factory whistle blows,
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes,
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,
It’s the working, the working, just the working life.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain,
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain,
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,
The working, the working, just the working life.

End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.
And you just better believe, boy,
somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight,
It’s the working, the working, just the working life.

When, in 1980, Springsteen wrote

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care

who could blame him? It was less than a year after Jimmy Carter had gone on television and made a speech diagnosing the country as clinically depressed and spiritually bankrupt:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Springsteen took the nation’s pulse and wrote about it. The problem is that his sense of America–forged during the Carter years–has not changed since. Sure, he came out with an inspirational post-9/11 album. But that came and went as fast as Yasir Arafat’s blood donation to the victims.

Springsteen said in his Obama letter: “After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken.” But it’s hard to imagine what exactly he wants to reclaim. The last time Springsteen’s lyrics reflected any consistent sense of romance and adventure in connection with America was during the Nixon years. Personally, I’d love to see him make music like that again. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.