Moon of Alabama Brecht quote
August 5, 2004
“I want to Guard Your Dreams and Visions”

The Boss has an OpEd in the NYT: Chords for Change


Like many others, in the aftermath of 9/11, I felt the country’s unity. I don’t remember anything quite like it. I supported the decision to enter Afghanistan and I hoped that the seriousness of the times would bring forth strength, humility and wisdom in our leaders. Instead, we dived headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq, offering up the lives of our young men and women under circumstances that are now discredited. We ran record deficits, while simultaneously cutting and squeezing services like afterschool programs. We granted tax cuts to the richest 1 percent (corporate bigwigs, well-to-do guitar players), increasing the division of wealth that threatens to destroy our social contract with one another and render mute the promise of “one nation indivisible.”

It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities – respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals – that we come to life in God’s eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

Comments

Hey Bernhard, Jerome, teuton & others friends from across the ocean, send me an email of when you plan to hit the Springsteen tour over here and you’ll have a place to stay. Just keep Bono over there please.

Posted by: Juannie | Aug 5 2004 7:31 utc | 1

@Juannie
Thanks a lot! But… sorry, no I will not come to states anymore if there is no professional demand to make me do so. There are other great countries I haven´t seen yet and where I don´t have to give my credit card number to dubious databases etc. Cuba sounds good to me right now. They can put my Euros to good use and -as there have recently been promising oil explorations off the Cuban coast- it may be the last chance to see that country without GIs around.
In case you ever come to Hamburg though, of course you can stay at my flat.

Posted by: b | Aug 5 2004 8:28 utc | 2

Ok Folks, if you want the skinny, go to moveonpac.org
to find out the concert schedule, and the growing list of musical lumenaries
who will be gracing the stage. Personally, I got goosebumps on my arms just reading Bruce’s statement.
BTW, personal shoutout to annie.
moveon and act both are letting folks register for
advance tickets. Go for it!

Posted by: possum | Aug 5 2004 9:44 utc | 3

Bernhard:
Ole “Boss” does damned good with prose too.

Posted by: FLASHHARRY | Aug 5 2004 12:20 utc | 4

thanks possum, i got my email yesterday , volunteered and have already heard from them.

Posted by: annie | Aug 5 2004 13:42 utc | 5

i meant , heard back from them.

Posted by: annie | Aug 5 2004 13:43 utc | 6

You know, when I think back all the way to highschool and the evolution, both forwards and backwards (first found him with Darkness when trying to shake off the late ’70’s rust of bloated stadium Rock), I can honestly say that Bruce has never let me down.
And now this!
We’ll know the Rovians are really spooked when they go back over Springsteen’s lyrics and suggest something nefarious is at work in Rosalita or I’m on Fire.
But screw them, because they only try to try to kill what scares them most.
And True Dreams and Visions cannot be killed.
Just ask Mary Queen of Arkansas.

Posted by: RossK | Aug 5 2004 15:25 utc | 7

@ b at 4:28 AM
I have to tell you b, your reply to me has been gnawing at me since I read it this morning. Nothing against you, but the realization that we Americans, and I have to include myself because I have certainly been complacent through the easy years, have screwed up such a great opportunity so badly. It really hurts to hear our friends say they won’t come to visit us but I don’t blame them at all, just ourselves.
Cuba sounds like a wonderful place these days. Visit it before the gagsters here have to invade to destroy the intolerable (to them) contrast. If I ever get the chance to visit Europe again I’ll sure try to look some of you up. Like I said before, Y’all feel like my tribe.

Posted by: Juannie | Aug 5 2004 15:53 utc | 8

once when i was living on the beach in mexico w/ a bunch of europeans one of them told me they wouldn’t vivit america because there was no culture here. another told me we didn’t have good food. she was english.

Posted by: annie | Aug 5 2004 19:50 utc | 9

@juannie
Since I was 12 years old I have been together with US folks. A German Boy Scout of America in Germany, later smoking joints with GIs, then extensive travel in the US, intense working with US programmers, manager with an US company, partner of an US enterprise. Some 30 years with US folks and sad to say – they have changed – the general mood has changed in the US and it was not 9/11 that did it. I did sense the change in 94/95 – guess it happened earlier – it was a general greed that creeped into anything. “May I help you” was not an offer for help like I had experienced before, it was a sales pitch – everywhere.
It was a mood change, not a change of the singel person. There are still many I love, but I want to do vacation where “help” means “help” and not “buy”.

Posted by: b | Aug 5 2004 20:26 utc | 10

annie
another told me we didn’t have good food. she was english.
Ouch – that must have hurt!
Hey they eat cocked wild boar in peppermint souce – ieeehh…

Posted by: b | Aug 5 2004 20:30 utc | 11

God, b.
That is so sad. But so true.
I was born Canadian & moved to Pennsylvania as an 11 year old. I bought into the American mind-set because after WWII there was a psychic knowledge among we middle class that the American dream was really happening. But the sales job had already affected us all. The mind control drug par excellance, TV, was addicting us all. I joined the USAF because I really believed in our mission of equality/justice/democracy for the rest of the subjugated world (but also, probably primarily, because I had a passion to fly).
After discharge and in college (back in Canada, 1965) I wrote to my school rag that “the only reason a Canadian wouldn’t support the American position in Viet Nam was either they were a Communist or they couldn’t think”. Arrrauguh!!!
My mind started to recognize a more accurate truth shortly thereafter, probably because for the first time I indulged in the most irrationally banned healing herb on the planet.
I like to say (in the fashion of Ayn Rand) that I am an American by choice, not chance. Now I’m totally stuck with my so brash and naive philosophical declaration and I have to try to live up to it. Arrauguh!!!
Thank God there are people like you within our species b, that hang out on this Moon. If I never meet you in the physical ( maybe a disappointment for we both, but then again, probably not), I have met you in the psychical and that is no disappointment.

Posted by: Juannie | Aug 5 2004 21:32 utc | 12