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At the beginning of the last month of his mandate, Barack Obama thought about how to thank the closest team that had accompanied him during the eight years of his presidency. I imagined a quiet event, for no more than a hundred collaborators. Would Bruce Springsteen give a private concert at the White House? His first time was a performance at a rally for Obama’s first election campaign. The last one, a few weeks ago, when Springsteen was one of the personalities awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — it was also received that day by the actors Robert Redford and Tom Hanks, Bill Gates and Michael Jordan. The singer accepted the proposal. A few weeks in advance, he began to think about the show. He would play only with the acoustic guitar and, between song and song, he would intersperse the reading of excerpts from his autobiography Born to run. He tried that formula in his study, but it didn’t work. He tried another. Before each song he would pronounce a short monologue glossing the spirit that had led him to compose it. On January 12, 2017, Springsteen played in the East Room, the same room where Obama announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.
At that one-time concert, Springsteen sang 15 songs. He organized it in such a way that the display of his biography, while allowing him to denounce the distance between reality and the American dream, was proposed as a regeneration of the founding myth of the United States. He started from the origins – from the house and the small town, from the relationship with his parents, from the american way of life fifties – and culminated with a hopeful ode, Land of hope and dreams, the one that four years later would sing during the inauguration ceremony of Joe Biden. In the center of the set, Born in the USA. That night at the White House he explained again his disgust at the jingoistic interpretation of his most hymnical song and repeated that it was a bitter proclamation of critical patriotism. After 90 minutes of respectful silence, after applause at the end, Obama approached him. He asked his friend to find a way to spread the message of the concert. He would do this for months in a small New York theater. The last show was on September 4.
Like the flickering of a candle, especially during the Trump presidency, Springsteen on Broadway it resonated as the promise of demanding and hopeful progressivism to reconcile a country wounded by inequality, polarization and racial tension. It will be his great political legacy. During the summer of 2020 Obama and Springsteen were talking about revitalizing that legacy.
Those conversations, with high confessional voltage, were first a podcast and now also a splendid self-portrait of the two: renegades (publishes Debate in Spanish, Kultrum Books in Catalan). It’s not just merchandise for mythomaniacs like me. It also serves to discover the connection between man, family and community, it shows the power of the alliance of culture with good politics to commit to a country that thinks critically and positively from the conscience of its best tradition. At the beginning of the book, the memory of civil rights activist John Lewis flies overhead, at whose funeral Obama had delivered a memorable eulogy a few days earlier. “Someday when we finish that long journey to freedom; when we form a more perfect union, whether in years, or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries, John Lewis will be the founding father of that fuller, fairer and better America, “Obama said on that occasion. How to move forward on that journey? Recognize the sins of the country to overcome them, they say, pursue a collective redemption. How to connect reality with myth? “The only way to integrate them,” Obama tells Springsteen, “is through honest balance followed by work.” What is it? Let’s call it noble patriotism.
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