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<\/p>\nSIDE NOTE: \u00a0It’s amazing how life can derail a guy’s plans. \u00a0While – as is my wont with these long series – much of the rough material was put together in October and November, I held off on actually putting it into a written form, thinking it’d give me something to do during the two-month stretch between the election and the opening of the state legislature, when I’m usually too burned out on politics to care much.<\/p>\n
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Of course, this past eight weeks of battling for the Second Amendment has derailed a bit of that plan.<\/p>\n
But while the battle against Barack Rex<\/em> carries on, it’s time to make time for the fun stuff.<\/p>\n Or what is for me the fun stuff, anyway.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n This is a quick one, though.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Throughout this series – whose subject is “why Springsteen’s music resonates with conservatives” (not, as some self-proclaimed “fact-checkers” seem intent to believe, or at least keep repeating, “Springsteen is really a conservative and doesn’t know it”) – I’ve been digging up bits and pieces and snippets of music that illustrate intersections with what “being a conservative” means, and key ideals conservatives value.<\/p>\n The classical cultural conservative believes that human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults; they’re a part of the human condition. \u00a0Humanity is not perfectible; we just control our base natures, with a lot of work and consultation with the higher moral order we believe exists. \u00a0. \u00a0The conservative skepticism about human nature is a stark contrast to the progressive notion that humans can be perfected, and that human nature is fundamentally a good thing.<\/p>\n And Springsteens’ catalog is chock full of imperfectible people and the idea that we’re born this way: \u00a0the dismal miasma of “My Father’s House”, from\u00a0Nebraska<\/em>:<\/p>\n My fathers house shines hard and bright.<\/span><\/p>\n It stands like a beacon calling me in the night<\/p>\n Calling and calling, so cold and alone<\/p>\n Shining cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Springsteen’s best music acknowledges something conservatives take as a matter of ideological gospel; all of humanity’s gonna be going to summer school for remedial ethics and morals.<\/p>\n One of the best – and for me, personally, most resonant – examples is “Spare Parts”, from perhaps Springsteen’s most underrated album,\u00a0Tunnel of Love<\/em>, a dismal tale of a misbegotten couple…:<\/p>\n