A reader submits another song of complicated patriotism:
I think Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” fits into this form (if not obviously). It would seem to be one Springsteen’s most significant influences. Perhaps my elementary school’s music teacher of the early 1970s was tactically subversive (which he may have been), but this song was taught to us as a patriotic anthem.
Earlier submissions include “Rockin’ in the Free World,” “Born in the U.S.A” and “America.”
In my earlier note featuring “Born in the U.S.A.” and “America,” I asked readers if they knew of other songs that convey the kind of complicated patriotism their refrains might betray. One reader who delivers via hello@:
Next in line has surely got to be “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young. The chorus itself is a great cheer of ambiguity and willful ignorance.
Another reader notes:
You don’t need to read far to get what Neil Young’s saying, but don’t miss the second verse, featuring a hopeless crack addict throwing her infant in a trash can. Uplifting!
Full lyrics below. Here’s some context for the song:
The lyrics criticize the George H. W. Bush administration, then in its first month, and the social problems of contemporary American life, directly referencing Bush’s famous “thousand points of light” remark from his 1989 inaugural address and his 1988 presidential campaign promise for America to become a “kinder, gentler nation.” Despite this, the song became the de facto anthem of the collapse of communism, because of its repeated chorus of ‘Keep on rockin’ in the free world’.
The song was used in Donald Trump’s announcement that he will run as a Republican candidate for the 2016 presidency. Young, a longtime supporter of Bernie Sanders, said that Trump's use of “Rockin’ in the Free World” was not authorized.
David Graham covered that controversy back in September. Here are the full lyrics:
There's colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes
But there's a warnin' sign
on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin'
we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan,
but I am to them
So I try to forget it,
any way I can.Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away,
and she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life,
and what she's done to it
There's one more kid
that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love,
never get to be cool.Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores
and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes
for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people,
says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn,
got roads to drive.Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
A reader remarks on a video flagged by a previous reader showing old images of U.S. immigrants juxtaposed with David Bowie’s rendition of Paul Simon’s “America”:
The reader claims that the line “they’ve all come to look for America” reflects a “pro-immigrant, anti-nativist.” But the line didn’t refer to immigrants coming to America; it was about disillusionment. See this great response by Ross Barkan in The Observer.
Here’s Barkan:
The irony, though, is that “America” is probably not the song Mr. Sanders’ operatives think it is. Like Ronald Reagan, the Republican president who mistook Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A” for a cheerful patriotic anthem when it was really an indictment of the Vietnam War [illustrated by the haunting mashup seen above, juxtaposing Springsteen’s song with scenes from Full Metal Jacket], the ambience of this spot doesn’t match the meaning of the lyrics in full.
Mr. Sanders, who has an interest in folk music, may know this himself. The crescendo of “America” is not about crowds of ecstatic people coming together in the name of American glory and community. Written by Paul Simon, who like Mr. Sanders is a 74-year-old native New Yorker, the protest song is at best bittersweet, describing the journey of a man leaving Saginaw, Mich. to find his fortunes elsewhere.
The Sanders camp was probably smart to omit the second to last verse of “America” from the ad. In the verse, the true meaning of the song emerges, that of an illusory nation failing to deliver on its lofty promise.
“So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine; and the moon rose over an open field,” the duo sings. ” ‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I know she was sleeping. ‘I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.’ ”
The song climaxes with the verse most prominently featured in the ad: “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America.” But the listener is not left with the sense of hope fulfilled in the new America. Rather, the image lingers of the young couple riding a bus toward an uncertain destination, anxious and disillusioned. The traffic streams by on a loveless turnpike. They are still looking for America.
Can you think of any other examples of songs that are misinterpreted as patriotic—in a surface-level way at least, ignoring a more complicated patriotism? Please drop me an email. And here are the full lyrics to “Born in the U.S.A” FYI:
Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Got in a little hometown jam so they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "son don't you understand now"
Had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there he's all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A.
Update from a reader who was an Air Force veteran in Vietnam:
The charge against Reagan people at the time was that they deliberately ignored the very obvious meaning in the lyrics, believing, no doubt correctly, that most people would just hum the tune. That’s rock for you, in the wrong hands. Your template, your actual lived life, regardless of any minimal element of the sacred, even in a rock song, can be appropriated.
Forgetting is a wonderful thing, except for those who can’t.
The reader who sparked our series on parenthood songs follows up:
If you can slip in a non-parenting related song, a friend sent me this video of an amazing tribute to David Bowie. More than 500 non-professional singers came together in Ontario where, in the space of a few hours, they were taught a three-part harmony arrangement of “Space Oddity,” which they then performed.
Seeing all the varied faces and ages, it hits you anew the many lives David Bowie touched. I’ll admit that I got misty eyed watching this.
A reader recommends a parenthood song by Leslie Odom Jr. and Lin-Manuel Miranda from the Hamilton soundtrack:
I love the way this song tenderly expresses the humbling experience of parenthood shared by two men—both quite roughened to the ways of the world and otherwise vehemently opposed. The common ground of our humanity. Ahh ...
After a brief hiatus this week, a reader brings us back to our series on parenthood songs (featuring thus far James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, and Paul Simon):
A few years back, I was reveling in my first listen to Yusuf’s Cafe Session, a DVD of one of the first concerts by the former Cat Stevens after he resumed making music. His gentle, soulful songs were as resonant as ever.
But when he was a couple of verses into “Father and Son,” the tears welled up as I realized I was now on the other side of that story, my kids now the 20-somethings forging their own ways, as distinct from my world as it was once from my parents’ path. That tune always had a lot of empathy for both of its voices, which might be the hallmark of a powerful parenting song.
A reader writes:
David Graham’s point on the whiteness of the Sanders ad is well-taken, except that the “They’ve all come to look for America” line is clearly a pro-immigrant, anti-nativist (and therefore anti-Trump) sentiment. See David Bowie’s version post-9/11.
Last week, I noted the passing of Red Simpson, country singer of “truck songs.” Rick Jones, a reader, wrote me a note recounting a passing encounter with Simpson not long ago. (For context, the great Don Rich was Buck Owens’ lead guitarist.) Here’s Rick:
About 18 months back, I stopped in Bakersfield for a day on my way to LA. I stayed at the Padre Hotel, visited Don Rich’s grave, drove up to Delano to see 40 Acres (the home of the UFW) and to pray in Cesar Chavez’s church. The Kern County Museum had an exhibit about the attempt to ban The Grapes of Wrath when it was first published, complete with pictures of young school kids dutifully burning copies in empty oil drums under the approving eyes of the town’s big shots. In the back of the museum, there was an exhibit on “The Bakersfield Sound” and I snapped a pic of Red’s satin jacket.
Later that night, I noticed that Red still performed one night a week at Trout’s in Oildale, just across the Kern River. Lucky for me, tonight was the night.
Red was on the bandstand with a partner who played keyboards. There were maybe 15 people in the place, with a small dance floor. I was two months short of my 60th birthday and younger by a good 15 years than anyone else in the place, save the bartender Becky, who turned out to be the cousin of a grape grower I knew.
Red stoically performed my requests of “Roll, Truck, Roll” and “Highway Patrol” and then ducked outside for a smoke break, where he and his crew lit up their Camel straights.
Rick added that he’s got a special love for the San Joaquin Valley—Jim quoted him in an American Futures post on the topic in October. But I couldn’t resist passing along Rick’s ode to the region, its music, and its residents:
Places such as Bakersfield, like truck songs, are often just a punch line for many, but they embody the same impulse for created beauty and freedom that is in all of us. As I watched the octogenarians two step carefully yet confidently around the dance floor, I realized I had the honor to glimpse the last signs of one form of that impulse.
Red Simpson was still playing at 80. Maybe he needed the money, maybe he didn't. Maybe he performed out of an adamant allegiance to his art or maybe he just didn’t know what else to do with himself on a Monday night. Roll, truck, roll, indeed.
A reader contributes to the popular new thread of songs about parenthood:
After listening to Paul Simon’s “St. Judy’s Comet” for your Track of the Day, my thought was not about a song about parenthood, but rather, in my own experience, that moment when music comes to the rescue in the midst of parenting. Like the talented Mr. Simon, my struggle was to get my young daughter to sleep. Having neither the singing skills nor even the ability to remember lyrics, the only thing that came to mind while trying to sooth the crying was James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James.” It had all the makings of a great lullaby and made me smile at the line “...thinking about women and glasses of beer...” It became my go-to song for each of my children.
How about for your kids? Tell us about it and your favorite memory playing the song.
From a list of songs inspired by Martin Luther King:
“Look what they've done to my dream,” sings Freddie Mercury over a Stones-esque guitar lick in this 1985 single off "A Kind of Magic." Mercury sounds altogether vibrant, singing positive verses of a hope for unity against vivacious instrumentation. Oh, and those masked vocals at the beginning of the tune? "God works in mysterious ways... mysterious ways..." Indeed, Queen, indeed.
(See all Tracks of the Day here and listen to the Spotify playlist here)
A reader on Friday got a new thread going on by recommending a bunch of songs inspired by parenthood, namely “St. Judy’s Comet” by Paul Simon, prompting a reader yesterday to plug David Bowie’s “Kooks.” From a reader in Cincinnati:
I guess I shouldn’t submit a song your reader already listed, but you also asked for a memory, so:
“Isn’t She Lovely” was released on September 28, 1976, the very day I became a parent. I was and still am a radio DJ, and back then we used to get new albums mailed to our homes. When I left the hospital that evening with wife and baby asleep and returned to my empty house, Stevie Wonder’s new LP was waiting for me. And that was when I sat there, astonished, listening to “Isn’t She Lovely” for the first time. I can’t remember how many times I played it before I finally went to bed.
Have a favorite song and a memory associated with it? Drop us an email.
From a young mother of two:
Thanks for posting that list of songs from your reader. I’ll use it to create a little playlist; I love songs about singers’ kids. My favorite is “Kooks” by Bowie.
Miranda July is also moved by the song and wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal last year:
Bowie wrote “Kooks” just after Angie, his wife at the time, gave birth to their son Duncan in ’71. The music is bouncy and catchy, but the lyrics are what get me. They’re written as a playful letter, advising Duncan to give his kooky parents a chance: “Will you stay in our lovers’ story? / If you stay you won’t be sorry / ’cause we believe in you.” What an impossible thing to ask of your child! But maybe all parents do this. I don’t think my parents will ever forgive me for leaving their lovers’ story.
She briefly discusses her childhood and ends with:
Now when I hear him sing the line, “We believe in you,” it makes me want to cry. They’re begging him to stay and believe in them, too. From the moment your kids are born, you’re always losing them.
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.
The age of the fare-gate society is here.
Vandals have done some senseless stuff on Bay Area Rapid Transit. They have removed the fire extinguishers from the station walls and sprayed them all over the place, for example. But what particularly vexed Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the train system that connects San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, was their destruction of map display cases at stations across the system: “You could not see the maps for years.”
Now you can. In August, BART completed the installation of new fare gates at station entrances and exits: Six-foot-tall saloon-style doors, made of plexiglass with metal frames, have replaced the waist-high barriers of the 1970s that were easy to duck or jump. The new gates have compelled more riders to pay their fare—revenue is projected to rise by $10 million a year. They have also led to an enormous drop in vandalism. Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year. Most fare beaters may be just trying to get a free ride, but most vandalism was apparently committed by fare beaters.
Donald Trump’s advisers are treating him like he can’t handle the reality of the war in Iran. They might be right—but that fact is a danger to the constitutional order.
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Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down. Commanders were scrambling to create and execute an operation to rescue both. The second was the president’s temperament. As plans developed and went into effect, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, “aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.”
Monogamy is one of the last bipartisan ideals—even if people struggle to live up to it.
People like to say that American culture has a puritanical streak: one that entails, among other things, a certain haughty piousness, instilled by the killjoys who reached New England’s shores in the 17th century. Yet the Pew Research Center, in a pair of reports released last month, asked participants in various countries about a host of moral issues—and found few in the United States that were widely condemned. Spanking children? Doctor-assisted euthanasia? Clear majorities said they weren’t morally wrong. Gambling? Marijuana use? Compared with respondents in many nations, Americans were notably permissive. The poll also revealed clear political divides: Republicans were much more likely to oppose homosexuality and divorce, for instance, and Democrats were more likely to reject the death penalty and extreme wealth.
Zelensky has written off the United States.
For more than a year after Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ukraine held out hope—at least publicly—of winning him over. Trump, who revealed his affection for Russia’s Vladimir Putin again and again, largely halted American military aid to Kyiv. He insulted Ukrainian leaders regularly, personally berating President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025. Nevertheless, Ukraine diligently took part in Trump’s peace negotiations, which were tilted to reward Putin’s invasion and turned out to be fruitless. Zelensky agreed to mineral deals that supposedly promised to enrich Americans. He even lavishly praised Trump himself. Despite Ukrainian leaders’ growing doubts, they calculated that speaking sweetly of the American president would do no harm and just might gain his favor.
Years before Mel Robbins published her best-selling self-help book, a struggling writer posted a poem with a similar message.
The year 2020 was a bad one for Cassie Phillips. Her husband had recently returned from an overseas deployment, and while he was away, she told me, she’d rarely heard from him. The pandemic began, and the family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where they didn’t know many people. Phillips felt isolated in her new home, and her marriage was falling apart.
Late at night, on her computer, she started writing out some lines—“If they want to go weeks without talking to you, LET THEM”; “If they want to follow the crowd, LET THEM”—to remind herself that she couldn’t control her husband’s behavior. The writing was an attempt to “get through the day knowing I didn’t have anybody but myself,” Phillips said; she was “learning not to give up on other people, but understanding I had to trust myself.”
America is more resilient than the pessimists think.
A reasonable rule is that once you begin making an argument ad Hitlerum—comparing some malevolent politician to Hitler or some malignant movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but non-eliminationist) war a genocide comparable to the Holocaust—you have lost the plot. The facile but extreme analogy is the first resort of the unimaginative alarmist.
To this we should now add the argument ad Orbánum, namely, the view that the Trump administration is just like that of the creeping, well-nigh unstoppable, and irreversible corrupt authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán. In this view, the Hungarian prime minister’s version of illiberal democracy was coming for America, and would probably win—indeed, might have already won. In the wake of Orbán’s smashing electoral defeat on April 12, in a country whose experience of electoral democracy is recent and whose authoritarian past is dark indeed, the argument ad Orbánum looks pretty flimsy.
I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows.
On the day I was laid off from the Kennedy Center, I felt a little like Dolley Madison saving the Stuart portrait of Washington before the British sacked the capital. I was the staffer in charge of the artworks in the building. A crucial difference is that my institution, unlike the White House in 1814, had been on fire for months.
About a year elapsed between the moment President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in early 2025 and his declaration this past February that he’d decided to shut down the nation’s cultural center for two years. In between, we had seen artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, firings of old staffers and influxes of new ones—a lot of drama, just not onstage. The date Trump announced for the closure was July 4, the country’s 250th birthday, an event that I had been hired to help commemorate as the institution’s first curator of visual arts and special programming.
People scrutinizing influencers for their views should also hold them to account for their facts.
Last week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas. Others were upset that the influencer said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” even as he reiterated his reticence to back a progressive politician such as Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance.
But a very different part of the podcast caught my attention, because it illustrates the problem with the wrangling over Piker: It revolves around his contentious opinions about a narrow subject—Jews and Israel—while giving short shrift to his broader worldview and his tendency to be wrong on the facts. The issue is not whether to engage with figures like Piker; it’s how to do so in a way that’s genuinely informative.
