Reply #22: The Automatic Earth does Springsteen. Your Home Town-video included.

[Dr.Phool]

Yeah, yeah, I know we're Monkees this week, but I thought it was a good coincidence that TAE did this. I just copped some Springsteen tickets Friday morning. The guy sings about us. Hell, he's sung my entire life, from "Your Hometown", to "Atlantic City", "Youngstown", "Rosalita", and many more. We gotta have a Springsteen week-end soon.

There used to be a bar back in the early '70s, on W.25th St, in Cleveland, called the Smiling Dog Saloon. They had a steady line-up of acts that hadn't broken yet, and a lot that never would break, and a few older, washed up bands. Me and a friend used to go down there regularly, even if we'd never heard of the act. One was a guy named Bruce Springsteen, about 2 years before he broke big-time.
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http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

Ilargi: Was that just me, or did Google News fail all over for a while? As in, the while I needed........

Anywaydeedelydays, 6 more banks were closed, and Guaranty, Texas' no 2. bank, will likely -self announced- follow as early as this weekend, and be the biggest failure in 2009 at $14 billion. Which would bankrupt the FDIC. Lovely! So let's go for a more timeless take, shall we? I’m all for it. My buddy whom I never met at EconomicDisconnect asked me today for a song to contribute to his regular Friday upbeat helping. What popped into my head within 2 seconds, for no specific reason, there's after all a million songs out there that have something to say, was Springsteen's 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


Written in the early 80's, in the recession then that seemed really heavy in Jersey and other places, a recession which will look like an exuberant Vegas top notch penthouse suite birthday bash compared to what’s around the Asbury corner. You'd have to go all the way back to Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly to find a song that better describes what lies ahead for America. Springsteen captured the coming decade almost 30 years before it happened, and I suggest you listen very closely, with your eyes closed, and see in your minds' eyes the images he evokes. That's what you'll be living.

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


The whole country that America once proudly was is breaking into ever smaller shattering pieces, while you're watching Wall Street numbers go up. Hey, say what you will about God, you can't claim her sense of irony ain't dead on. California will take many years just to appear normal, forget about recovery. The mayor of Detroit throws the towel, without acknowledging he does (as is the spirit of politics). The Motor City is broke, and there's nothing on the horizon that could possibly prevent complete and utter bankruptcy. Neither in Detroit nor anywhere else, that is.

They're down to praying for miracles now. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It‘s just that there's a million other towns, counties, states and countries praying for the same sort of preferential heavenly treatment. And even if one of them miraculously got what they prayed for, don't you think they'd likely be overrun by all the rest that didn't?

Tax revenues for all levels of government, all over the country, are plummeting at frightening and astonishing rates. It's over people, the experiment that is America has failed. In its present form, that is.

Open your eyes. Put your son in your lap, as in the Springsteen song, and drive through your town. To what extent are his interests best served by your belief in some opaque sort of change to believe in, by your blind running after green shoots that are always one inch beyond your receding horizons? Isn't it perhaps a better idea to put your kids' feet down on solid ground instead of some belief based soil?

What do you think? Or do you even think to begin with? Not to insult you, but if you actually do believe in Obama's green shoots, take it from me: you ain't thinking straight. And while you're at it, take this from me too: I don't care about what you do to yourself. It's that kid on your lap I'm worried about, who's apt to fall prey to your inability to face your own reality, your own frustrations and your own failed dreams.

Will you at least consider the option that it's over, and it will not ever come back? That you need to build your next set of dreams on a foundation of your own making, and not a media slash politics induced one? That for your kid to survive, you may need to come up with a plan of your own, instead of one hammered into your dainty little skull since kindergarten? Something of your own making,


Video at link:
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/