Make Springsteen Albums, Not War

When Eric Alterman traveled to Europe to investigate the new anti-Americanism, he found that most Europeans had big complaints about U.S. foreign policy but weren’t, in fact, anti-American. Exhibit A: the Bruce Springsteen concert Alterman attended in Paris. “You can tell a lot about a continent by the way it reacts to Bruce Springsteen,” he writes in The Nation. “Tonight, at the Bercy Stadium, the typically multigenerational, sold-out Springsteen audience could be from Anytown, USA. Everybody knows all the lyrics, even to the new songs. Toward the end of the evening, Bruce announces, in French, ‘I wrote this song about the Vietnam War. I want to do it for you tonight for peace,’ and 15,000 Parisians, standing in the historic home of cultural anti-Americanism, scream out at the top of their collective lungs, ‘I was born in the USA,’ fists in the air.”

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