I confess to being a fan of Bruce Springsteen.  Springsteen is the Homer of my generation.  I make the assertion without apology.  At the Tony Awards televised live on CBS  from Radio City Music Hall Springsteen delivered an abbreviated rendition of his song My Hometown which was prefaced by a moving soliloquy remembering Freehold New Jersey where he grew up.  Springsteen’s love for the place of his upbringing is palpable.  The words were a slice of his Broadway show, Springsteen on Broadway.  

I grew up in Durham North Carolina in roughly the same time frame as Springsteen’s memory of his youth.  Similar to his story of the aroma of the coffee grounds unifying the inhabitants of Freehold New Jersey, for those who called Durham home, it was the sweet smell of cured tobacco in the autumn of every year.  Tobacco farmers would bring in truck loads of cured tobacco for sale at auction in the big warehouses.  The air carried the delicious aroma for miles.  Durham was a blue collar town Duke University notwithstanding.  And like Springsteen, church and God structured the day to day activities of many of our lives.

Times have changed as they always do.  There is naturally a sadness, a nostalgia when we remember what was, and what has passed.  I was asked my reason for asserting that Springsteen’s delivery of this tune at the Tony’s was a act of resistance to the present administration.  My reason in the main is the failure of neoliberal economic policy left hometowns like Springsteen’s and mine a shell of themselves, and devastated the lives of families, uprooting them from their neighborhoods.  Profit uber alles, the financialization of the economy left downtowns with derelict store fronts, like the bones of a past generation, and the suburbs ringed with failing shopping center properties.  These in turn are being devastated by globalized tech driven commerce.  I do not accept that this is the normal, natural course of things, the way things have to be, as if a metaphysical necessity.  Neither does Springsteen.  Yet this is the way things are.

Our President, Donald J. Trump is the poster child of the “creative” destruction that some of us believe is necessary to our economy, from which our society must suffer.  Its an unending march to greater profits, never mind the devastation that is left in its wake.  The President’s love for any place is limited by the profit that he imagines that he is able to extract.

Think about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x6i4xeNvG0

A further note.  The downtown area of Durham, where I grew up is making a come back.  Many of the old buildings have been re-purposed into restaurants, art galleries, and other public spaces where all are welcome.  I have written about some of those businesses in past blog entries.  I note that it took thirty to forty years for the revitalization to happen after Main Street fell into decrepitude in the 1980s.

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Full lyrics of My Hometown.

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He’d tousle my hair and say son take a good look around this is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown

In ’65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come to my hometown
My hometown
My hometown
My hometown

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed
talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
I’m thirty-five we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around
This is your hometown