Sunday Pages: "Badlands"

A song by Bruce Springsteen

Dear Reader,

Words were exchanged this week between the Jersey genius who wrote “Atlantic City” and the idiot from Queens who bankrupted casinos there. That’s right—the rock god who sang about how they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly and the mobbed-up real estate developer who had Philip Testa on speed dial quarreled.¹

As he kicked off his world tour across the Atlantic in Manchester, said Jersey genius rock god, Bruce Springsteen—who’s never, in his long and illustrious career, been shy about expressing his political opinions—used his enormous platform to shine a light on all the treasonous “shit” currently happening in the United States courtesy of Donald Trump, the idiotic mobbed-up real estate developer from Queens, telling the audience:

In my home, the America I love, 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.

Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!

A few songs into the set, he continued:

The last check, the last check on power after the checks and balances of government have failed are the people, you and me. It’s in the union of people around a common set of values now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. At the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.

Then, later on in the show, The Boss was even more explicit:

There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.

In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.

In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.

They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society.

They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.

They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.

A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.

The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.” Let’s pray.

Whereupon the mobbed-up idiot real estate developer from Queens, who is somehow also—and we’re almost a full decade into the Trump era and I still can’t quite believe it—the President of the United States (again!)—got wind of Springsteen’s comments and could not resist word-vomiting his displeasure:

“I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,” Donald Trump—or whichever of his analphabetic minions manages his social media—wrote on Truth Social. “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country. If I wasn’t elected, it would have been GONE by now! Sleepy Joe didn’t have a clue as to what he was doing, but Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,’ and couldn’t see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Even with one of the combatants ensconced in the newly-tacky Oval Office and entrusted with the nuclear launch codes, this is not a fair fight. Springsteen is as unassailably decent as Trump is unequivocally a piece of shit, as talented as Donald is artless. They stand in diametric opposition. Other than an affinity for Atlantic City, in fact, about the only thing the two men have in common is that they both started their careers in the 1970s but didn’t hit it really big until the 80s. They are, both of them, indelibly associated with that Lacoste-and-cocaine decade. Consider: The “girl who lives up the block” that Springsteen sings about in 1984’s “Glory Days” broke up with her husband Johnny in 1982 (“I guess it’s two years gone by now”)—more than four full decades ago. The work of pure fiction called The Art of the Deal came out in 1987. (The Chicken Man, incidentally, got blown up in ‘81.)

Not only are they of the 80s, they are, both of them, almost in their 80s. Trump was born in 1946; Springsteen is three years younger. And both of these septuagenarians are still out there leading the fight, one for good, the other for ill. Since the 80s, Springsteen has only become more decent, a champion of the working class and of democracy in general, while the piece of shit that is Donald Trump has swollen into a shit boulder, going Nazi and doing his level best to wreck the global economy, blow up our longtime alliances, fluff murderous strongmen, and destroy the American experiment. Not sure anyone reading about Donald’s Studio 54 hijinks on “Page Six” 40 years ago saw that coming.

In the year 2000, however, The Simpsons, famously, predicted a Trump presidency. In the seventeenth episode of the eleventh season, “Bart to the Future,” we fast-forward 20 years. Lisa Simpson is now the President of the United States. And in her first address to the White House press corps, she explains that the country is suffering through a massive debt crisis caused by Donald Trump, who is presumably her predecessor in the Oval Office.

A Trump presidency “just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom,” Dan Greaney, who wrote the episode, told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.” Truer words were never spoke.

A decade and a half earlier, and somewhat less famously, the cartoonist Berke Breathed predicted a Bruce Springsteen presidency. In a series of brilliant Bloom County panels, Brinkley, the inquisitive dreamer raised by the grumpy single dad, is introduced to his future self—as in the subsequent “Bart to the Future,” 20 years later. He has lost his hair and married his high school tormentor. His work life is similarly uninspiring, although he did serve as a union leader in the factory:

Thus did Breathed foresee, back in the Reagan years, that celebrity would one day trump (ha ha) other qualifications—relevant work experience, for example—in the dumb calculus the American voter uses to pick its leaders.

This comic strip was funny because, in the Born in the USA moment when it came out, as The Boss was putting his butt on album covers and pulling Courteney Cox out of the audience, the very notion of Springsteen as POTUS was inherently amusing—and also because there’s no way in hell a President Springsteen would fire factory workers for going on strike.²

Obviously we would all be much better off right now if Breathed’s prediction had been more on the nose than Greaney’s. In 2025—twenty years after the twenty years later that young Brinkley glimpsed—the idea of a President Springsteen no longer amuses us. Instead, it makes us wistful. We should be so lucky!

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Springsteen is at heart a storyteller. The first few lines of “Thunder Road,” for example, written out in prose form, might as well be the opening of a short story:

The screen door slams. Mary’s dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch, as the radio plays Roy Orbison, singing for the lonely.³

Colorful little details abound in his lyrics. What would “Born in the USA” be without the photograph of the brother who didn’t make it back from Saigon with his Vietnamese girlfriend? Or “Highway Patrolman” without the kid bleeding to death on the barroom floor? Or “Meeting Across the River” without knowing exactly how much—or rather how little—money it will take to convince the narrator to break the law? (“The two grand’s practically sitting here in my pocket.”) But like many of the tracks on Darkness on the Edge of Town—the best Springsteen album, in my opinion—“Badlands” is vaguer, more cryptic.

Although Republicans have always wrongly viewed “Born in the USA” as a patriotic anthem, it is in fact a searing critique of the government—an overtly political song that channels the disappointment and frustration of an American working class that can’t catch a break. Springsteen has plenty of songs like this: “The River,” “Working on the Highway,” “Johnny 99,” “Night,” and so forth. “Badlands” is not one of them. Nor is it a song of romantic passion, like “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run,” and “Rosalita.” Instead, “Badlands” concerns itself with harnessing raw ambition, with striving for better things, with not giving up on dreams, and, above all, with demanding respect. What the narrator demands is simple: for the badlands to start treating him good.

After I read Trump’s blasphemous post about Springsteen, I put on “Badlands” and listened to it over and over and over, a dozen times or more—a release valve I cannot recommend strongly enough:

I’m sure that, back in 1978, Springsteen didn’t intend for the song to be interpreted, almost half a century later, as a theme song of the resistance, an antifascist national anthem. But the genius of “Badlands” is that it can absolutely be read that way.

The first two words of the first song on Darkness on the Edge of Town are most appropriate:

Light’s out tonight—
Trouble in the heartland.

Darkness has fallen. The thousand points of light, the beacon of freedom, Lady Liberty’s torch of world-welcome—all of it extinguished. We are blind, we are fumbling around in the dark. And the threat—the “trouble”—is coming from the very heart of the country. America is in peril.

Got a head-on collision
Smashin’ in my guts, man.

If there is a better metaphor for our collective emotional state, four months into the Trump Redux, I have yet to encounter it.

I’m caught in a crossfire
That I don’t understand.

Caught, in other words, on the battleground of the information war. Blindly navigating the most sophisticated psyop ever orchestrated. Mindfucked to oblivion.

But there’s one thing I know for sure, girl:
I don’t give a damn
For the same old played out scenes.

This applies to Chuck Schumer and his ilk; the legacy media; and the same-old, same-old methods of governance and of journalism. Now is not the time for business as usual. (Speaking of which: Jake Tapper, please fuck off.)

I don’t give a damn
For just the in-betweens.
Honey, I want the heart, I want the soul,
I want control right now.
You better listen to me, baby.

This is not the moment for half measures. We the People have to seize control from the fascists—and also from the effete Old Guard of the Democratic Party. We know what we’re talking about, you moribund dinosaurs! Listen to us, ffs!

Talk about a dream,
Try to make it real.
You wake up in the night
With a fear so real.

The terror is not just a figment of our imagination. That anxiety that hits us hard in the middle of the night is justified.

You spend your life waiting
For a moment that just don’t come.

Let’s take inventory: A decades-long career engaging with homegrown mobsters like Sammy the Bull and imported Russian mobsters like Yaponchik. All manner of illicit financial dealings. Helicopter crashes. Epstein parties. Comey, Mueller, impeachment #1, covid, impeachment #2, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, the 36-count conviction, Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 2024 election. Drugs, STDs, frontal lobe dementia, clogged arteries…and still the train keeps a-rollin’.

Well don’t waste your time waiting.
Badlands, you gotta live it everyday.
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay.
We’ll keep pushin’ till it’s understood,
And these badlands start treating us good.

We cannot fritter (as the Dinosaur Dems fritter). We have to take action of some kind. There will be disappointments, failures, heartbreaks, sure—but that’s part of the process. And the key words: we’ll keep pushing. We must keep pushing until Trump and his fascist enablers are removed from power. Period. That’s when the badlands revert back to the good—when the lights come back on, when the balance is restored.

Working in the fields
Till you get your back burned,
Working ‘neath the wheels
Till you get your facts learned.
Baby, I got my facts
Learned real good right now.

He’s done his own research. Not through Google searches but through hands-on experience, through physical suffering—blood, sweat, and tears.

You better get it straight, darling:
Poor man wanna be rich,
Rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain’t satisfied
Till he rules everything.

Sometimes human nature really is that simple. In the case of Trump and the Musk/Thiel/Palantir/techbro/South Africa contingent, however, it’s not just rule everything; it’s own everything and control everyone.

I wanna go out tonight.
I wanna find out what I got.

He is taking stock of his situation. Not by sitting at home—by going out, by engaging with the outside world. Even something as simple as going out is still active.

The next section is my favorite part of the song—the exact energy I’ve tried all these years to summon with my “We shall prevail!” sign-off. This—this right here—is the Apostles’ Creed of the capital-R Resistance:

Well, I believe in the love that you gave me,
I believe in the faith that can save me,
I believe in the hope,
And I pray that some day
It may raise me above these badlands.

After the chorus repeats, the E Street Band brings it down. The song gets quiet, and then it builds and builds and builds, culminating in a moment of pure, visceral defiance:

For the ones who had a notion—
A notion deep inside—
That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,
I wanna find one face that ain’t looking through me.
I wanna find one place.
I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.

Until RFK Jr. fulfills his plan to Make Tuberculosis Great Again—so, I guess, until the end of the year—phlegm is not harmful, it’s just gross. Spitting in someone’s face, then, is a symbolic gesture. It is unapologetic dissent, mixed with disgust, mixed with disrespect, mixed with mucous. And it can be done even when your hands are tied behind your back.

In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough. As long as we believe in love, and faith, and hope, and the sanctity of human decency—in other words, as long as we don’t stop believin’; as long as we never relent in our demand for better, fairer treatment—and I have no doubt that we shall be relentless in that regard; as long as we continue to defy our oppressors—and we won’t ever acquiesce to Trump and his Nazi goons; as long as we keep pushing, the badlands will start treating us good, and we shall—we shall!—prevail.

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BOOKS

If you enjoy my “Sunday Pages” essays, please check out my book, The Age of Unreality—now available as an audiobook:

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Photo credit: Still shot from “Badlands” official video.

1. I don’t know if the Orange Man really knew the Chicken Man, but given his engagement with the Philly mob to develop his properties in A.C., it seems impossible that he didn’t.

2. Billy and the Boingers Bootleg was published in 1987, but I’m pretty sure the comic strips inside are older than that.

3. It is extremely unusual for a song to reference another song that’s playing!