This week, I’m just kicking back and chilling with this coffee table book published last year featuring two magnificent Americans: Renegades: Born in the USA, by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. The intelligence and decency woven throughout their conversations is just so refreshing after surviving four years of Trump and the continuing daily barrage of the inane, hateful and utter dishonesty spouted daily by rightwing politicians and media. It’s just two guys who can express their love of country while also recognizing its faults and challenges; two guys who are proud of their work while also being able to express their doubts, and to acknowledge how much of their success was built on the support of others; two guys who think deeply and honestly about life.
Two guys you wish you could sit and have a beer with.
I’ve never been much of a podcast listener or video watcher, so I never listened to the original Renegades: Born in the USA podcast on Spotify. Perhaps you did. If so, much of the material in this book will be familiar to you. Even so, the book adds the pleasure of reading, rereading and savoring, as well as additional material and glorious photos of both Obama and Springsteen at all ages.
Their attitudes about their accomplishments and fame are expressed in the first chapter:
President Obama: If a musician is looking for a way to channel and work through pain, demons, personal questions, so is a politician getting into public life.
Bruce Springsteen: But you gotta have two things going, which is very difficult. One, you’ve got to have the egotism—
President Obama: The megalomania—
Bruce Springsteen: The megalomania to believe that you have a voice that is worth being heard by the whole world. Yet on the other hand, you’ve got to have the tremendous empathy for other people.
President Obama: It’s a hard trick to pull off. You start with ego, but then at some point you become a vessel for people’s hopes and dreams. You just become a conduit.
The book is filled with personal reflections about their childhoods, their absent fathers, their marriages, their experiences of being a father. But always, the personal is mixed with the political. Springsteen recalls the racism in the small New Jersey town where he grew up, the Newark riots in the 1960s which spread to his town of Freehold, and to the Jersey Shore town of Asbury Park, where Springsteen first found fame. Photos in this section include very evocative shots of a group of mostly young Black women, hands on hips, staring at the armed white National Guardsmen patrolling the streets, and of the smoking wreckage in the street outside the Milk Bar in Asbury Park in 1970. Asbury Park businesses had traditionally employed Blacks as part of the summer beach season, but more and more the jobs were given to whites instead, leading to the outbreak of frustrated rage.
Here is a snippet of their discussion of masculinity:
President Obama: And I talk a lot with my male friends, but, after about an hour, I kind of run out of stuff and then we’ll turn on a ball game or we’ll play a ball game, so there is some activity. But the sort of sustained ability to share and connect—we don’t teach our boys to do that.
Bruce Springsteen: From when I was a young man, I lived with a man who suffered from that loss of status and I saw it every single day. It was all tied to lack of work, inconsistency working, and I just watched the low self-esteem. That was part of my daily life living with my father. It taught me one thing: work is essential. That’s why if we can’t get people working in this country, we’re going to have an awfully hard time.
President Obama: It is. It is central to how people define themselves in the sense of self-worth.
And I think about young men coming up behind me. For all the changes that happened in America, when it comes to “What does it mean to be a man?” I still see that same confusion, and the same limited measures of manliness today, as I had back then. And that’s true, whether you’re talking about African American boys or white boys. They don’t have rituals, road maps, and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.
I talk to my daughters’ friends about boys growing up, and much of the popular culture tells them that the only clear, defining thing about being a man, about being masculine, is excelling in sports and sexual conquest—
Bruce Springsteen: And violence.
President Obama: And violence. Those are the three things. Violence, if it’s healthy at least, gets subsumed into sports. Later, you add to that definition: making money. How much money can you make?
The discussion continues, as they examine how in their lives they have sometimes perpetuated these attitudes (Springsteen: “we sort of ended up being just sixties versions of our dads, carrying all the same sexism”) and how they’ve struggled to overcome it. Just the sort of conversation I imagine Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan having in the halls of Congress.
I don’t know. It’s hard to distill the pleasure of this book into a review. They both are so honest, intelligent, informed, thoughtful and open. They display decency, goodness, empathy, intellectual curiosity. They display humanity. The pleasure they have in each other’s friendship is very evident. It certainly made me long for a better politics, and a better social conversation, and made me feel how oh so very tired I am sometimes of the corrosive politics of the day.
The book has great photos, as well as Springsteen lyrics and Obama speeches, sometimes presented as marked-up edits of the original texts, as in Obama’s speech in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the Selma-Montgomery March. Lots of other nostalgic ephemera as well, such as the playlists of In Performance At the White House series in 2009, with performances by Stevie Wonder, India Arie, Gloria Estefan, Lin Manuel Miranda, Los Lobos, and more.
Oh, what a time it was. A time of hope, of belief in the possibilities of a better future. The backlash to those times, so frustrating during the Obama presidency, and so perilously toxic in its aftermath, is a burden of grief I carry around every day. But also a source of strength and continuing hope. Yes, We Still Can, if only we do the work.
I highly recommend giving yourself the tonic of this book, and/or of the podcasts that it draws on.
Book News
As I've mentioned, I am one of the judges in the Nonfiction category of the 2022 Reading the West Awards, given to books either covering Mountains and Plains states or by authors who live in those states. The longlist of nominees was announced last week. Here is the link to the nonfiction books I’ll be pondering, and from that link, just scroll up and down the page to see the books in other categories.
This Week’s New Hardcover Releases
I also post a comment of the week’s new releases of interest to the BIPOC community, usually in the Tuesday Black Kos diary. Here is today’s list.
- Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West, by Anne F. Hyde. A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries. Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin.
- Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, by John Avlon. How Lincoln’s character informed his commitment to unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. Even during the Civil War, surrounded by reactionaries and radicals, he refused to back down from his belief that there is more that unites us than divides us. But he also understood that peace needs to be waged with as much intensity as war. Lincoln’s plan to win the peace is his unfinished symphony, but in its existing notes, we can find an anthem that can begin to bridge our divisions today.
- Extreme North: A Cultural History, by Bernd Brunner. An entertaining and informative voyage through cultural fantasies of the North, from sea monsters and a mountain-sized magnet to racist mythmaking.
- Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan. Charting the development of the index from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today.
- Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, by Peter Neumann. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a steady stream of young German poets and thinkers coursed to the town of Jena to make history. With wit and elegance, Peter Neumann brings this remarkable circle of friends and rivals to life in Jena 1800, a work of intellectual history that is colorful and passionate, informative and intimate—as fresh and full of surprises as its subjects.
- The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel. Who should decide how to engineer living organisms? Should engineered organisms be planted, farmed, and released into the wild? Should there be limits to human enhancements? What cyber-biological risks are looming? Could a future biological war, using engineered organisms, cause a mass extinction event? And other fun stuff.
- The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, by Karen Cheung. A boldly rendered—and deeply intimate—account of Hong Kong today, from a resilient young woman whose stories explore what it means to survive in a city teeming with broken promises.
- Watergate: A New History, by Garrett M. Graff. The first definitive narrative history of Watergate, exploring the full scope of the scandal through the politicians, investigators, journalists, and informants who made it the most influential political event of our modern era. It almost seems quaint now...
- The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees, by Matthieu Aikins. In this extraordinary book, an acclaimed young war reporter chronicles a dangerous journey on the smuggler’s road to Europe, accompanying his friend, an Afghan refugee, in search of a better future.
- The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, by Ben Rawlence. For the last fifty years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. Ben Rawlence's The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, Canada to Sweden to meet the scientists, residents and trees confronting huge geological changes.
- Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life, by James Curtis. A major biography, the first in more than two decades, of the legendary comedian and filmmaker who elevated physical comedy to the highest of arts and whose ingenious films remain as startling, innovative, modern—and irresistible—today as they were when they beguiled audiences almost a century ago.
- Two books I’ve reviewed in this series are coming out in paperback this week: Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa (reviewed HERE), and We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy (reviewed HERE.)
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE