In “The Promised Land” – a song that constantly flits about the top of most hard-core Springsteen fans’ lists of favorite songs – paints a bleak picture for the everyday schlub:<\/p>\n
I done my best to live the right way
\nI get up every morning and go to work each day.
\nBut your eyes go blind, and your blood runs cold,
\nsometimes I feel so weak I just wanna explode<\/p>\nExplode and tear this old town apart,
\ntake a knife and cut this pain from my heart,
\nfind somebody itchin’ for something to start…<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd then the last verse tees up:<\/p>\n
Well, there’s a dark cloud rising, ‘cross the desert floor
\nI’ve packed my bags, and I’m headed straight into the storm
\nGonna be a twister to blow everything down
\nthat ain’t got the faith to stand its ground.<\/p>\nBlow away the dreams that break your heart.<\/p>\n
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
\nBlow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted…<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe song – which is on the surface about a young buck butting his head against a status quo leaving him, in the immortal words of Howard the Duck, “trapped in a world that he never made”. \u00a0And beneath the surface? \u00a0It’s about\u00a0everyone\u00a0<\/em>trying to stake their claim in the world while they can, and railing against the petty and not-so-petty things that badger and hector you on the way there…<\/p>\n
…and noting, obliquely, another of the key facets of what being a conservative really means: the idea that the only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law.<\/p>\n
Humans and the societies they build are intensely imperfect, and that the only justice you’re ever going to see is from something – a higher power, in this case, in the metaphorical form of a tornado – that cares not for your specifics, or of that against which you’re banging your head.<\/p>\n
The notion that there\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>an existing, higher moral order<\/a>\u00a0is easy; every political and cultural liberal believes it (although cultural liberals and conservative see the source of that order differently). \u00a0The idea that we, petty humans that we are, stand on the shoulders of giants<\/a> and can only rarely improve on them and their ideas is harder; the idea that we can change the world “for the better” is so wound up in the ideals of liberals that they call themselves “progressives”.<\/p>\n
But the idea that absolute equality only exists (outside of the purely legalistic, and then only when everyone involves has a\u00a0lot\u00a0<\/em>of integrity) above and beyond this world is the province of the cultural conservative.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In “The Promised Land” – a song that constantly flits about the top of most hard-core Springsteen fans’ lists of favorite songs – paints a bleak picture for the everyday schlub: I done my best to live the right way I get up every morning and go to work each day. But your eyes go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[240,172],"class_list":["post-31783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-music","tag-conservatism-and-springsteen","tag-springsteen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31783"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34588,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31783\/revisions\/34588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}