Yes, Governor Christie, I’m sure this will impress him.
By You have to feel for Chris Christie. The biggest political speech of his life and he backdrops himself thus:
If that looks familiar, that’s because if you have anything resembling taste it damn well should:
Christie loves him some Springsteen. Grew up listening to and idolizing the Bard of the Badlands. The feeling’s mutual:
Despite heroic efforts by Christie, Springsteen, who is still a New Jersey resident, will not talk to him. They’ve met twice—once on an airplane in 1999, and then at the 2010 ceremony inducting Danny DeVito into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, where they exchanged only formal pleasantries. (Christie does say that Springsteen was very kind to his children.) At concerts, even concerts in club-size venues—the Stone Pony, in Asbury Park, most recently—Springsteen won’t acknowledge the governor. When Christie leaves a Springsteen concert in a large arena, his state troopers move him to his motorcade through loading docks. He walks within feet of the stage, and of the dressing rooms. He’s never been invited to say hello. On occasion, he’ll make a public plea to Springsteen, as he did earlier this spring, when Christie asked him to play at a new casino in Atlantic City. “He says he’s for the revitalization of the Jersey Shore, so this seems obvious,” Christie told me. I asked him if he’s received a response to his request. “No, we got nothing back from them,” he said unhappily, “not even a ‘Fuck you.’”
Did I write “mutual”? I meant the opposite of mutual. You have to wonder about someone who embraces a musician this deeply without listening to a damn thing he sings. The disconnect between lyric and listener is borderline sociopathic: if you spend your nights ears-deep in working-class tales of toil and despair and your days enacting policies that guarantee a future full of working-class tales of toil and despair, people may begin to suspect that you’ve embraced some strange form of patronage-by-poverty. They may begin to think that you’re trying to manufacture the social conditions necessary to create a newer, “better” Springsteen whose “convictions” won’t interfere with yours because you’ll have whispered the Gospel of the Free Market in his ear from the moment you turned him into a foundling. Not that you murdered his parents, mind you, they’re just not in his life anymore. And then years later, when you successfully run for President, you and your pet Springsteen will tour the country and your rallies will begin with your pet’s new hit, “Burn Down the U.S.A.,” a rousing tune about the virtues of small government.
People may begin to consider that you indulge in this pathetic fantasy because you’re as small of mind as you are large of body, and the man whose approval you so desperately seek won’t even begrudge you a “Fuck you.”
JUST IN CASE SOMETHING OR OTHER (WITH PRETTY DAMNING LYRICS):