Bruce Springsteen Is a Hypocrite’s Hypocrite
In a richly imagined Super Bowl ad, the Boss makes a ridiculous call for unity.
Bruce Springsteen must think we’re idiots — that we’ve forgotten who he is and how much disdain he has for us. And by “us” we mean conservatives — the folks who he campaigns against every four years while he throws a concert for John Kerry or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
And now the 71-year-old Botox Boss is doing Joe Biden’s bidding, cutting a Super Bowl commercial for Jeep with a deeply phony religious undercurrent and a laughable call for unity.
The commercial is called “The Middle,” and the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser, among millions of others, saw right through it. “The most nausea-inducing moment of Sunday night’s Super Bowl,” she writes, “came … during a tone-deaf, two-minute TV commercial starring New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen, in which the mega-wealthy musician and leftist sage revealed that his longtime working-class grift is as phony as his cowboy hat.”
As Peyser notes, Springsteen drives a 1980 Jeep CJ-5 to a humble old chapel in Lebanon, Kansas, which he describes as “standing on the exact center of the lower 48.”
Does Springsteen not realize that Kansas went for Donald Trump by 15 points, or that all but five of its 105 counties are red? Or is he intentionally setting the stage in Middle America, in Flyover Country, and thereby putting it on all of us to move toward the Left’s middle?
And just where might that middle be, when even God has fallen out of favor with the Left? And why would we want to meet leftists anywhere near there now, when for the past four years they practiced none of what they’re now preaching to us?
One wonders what the Jeep folks were thinking when they commissioned this ad. Did they really think Bruce Springsteen was credible? That he was the guy with the centrist street cred who could bring us all together? That we’d fall for the phony messenger and the phony religiosity and the phony hat and boots, and ascribe that borrowed equity to one of their all-American vehicles, which are made by a multinational manufacturing firm whose headquarters are in Amsterdam?
Moreover, as Peyser mordantly puts it, “[Springsteen] sifts soil with hands that have never performed manual labor. (Or labor of any kind.)”
As for Springsteen himself, who’d he think he was fooling? Did he not imagine we might hold him accountable for a career’s worth of derisive words? Did he not think we’d search out that Atlantic interview he did in June? Back then the turf he was staking out wasn’t anywhere near Lebanon, Kansas. “I believe that our current president is a threat to our democracy,” he said. “He simply makes any kind of reform that much harder. I don’t know if our democracy could stand another four years of his custodianship. These are all existential threats to our democracy and our American way of life.”
Springsteen actually said he’d quit the U.S. and just might move to Australia if Trump won reelection. So much for the middle.
Not content to simply bash our 45th president, though, Springsteen then cast his condescending gaze upon the 74 million of us who would ultimately go to the polls to support Donald Trump: “Of course, there’s a constant pushback to whatever progress gets made,” he says, “by a reactionary element. But I feel that that’s smaller now … and it’s diminishing. It’s folks who see themselves being left behind by history and losing status, and it’s forces within the Republican Party and in society that are intent on keeping the power balance of the nation in one place.”
Right on, Bruce. Why, it’s almost as if they get bitter and they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them as a way to explain their frustrations.
Meet you in the middle, eh? We’ll be right there, Boss man.