You had to listen hard, and look twice, at least, to make sure it was him. He looked far from home on the snow-covered plain and streets, in a small mid-western town, driving past a forlorn chapel, in his white jeep. We see a horse, barbed wire, a coal train. He’s swapped his Jersey shore kicks and black leather for a cowboy hat and boots. Like he’d taken a wrong turn in Bayonne and just kept going. Or he wanted to find out just what was the matter with Kansas. Or maybe he was thinking about buying the whole damn state and fixing whatever the hell was wrong with it.
The Boss. Cowboy Bruce. Emerged from a commercial-free lifetime to do just one ad.
The ad appeared once during Super Bowl XV, the Second Half. Two minutes. The snow, the plains, the car, and Bruce.
The voice over, sounding like Springsteen crossed with Sam Elliot, has been described as sounding like a prayer. A prayer for America. A prayer for hope. Heartwarming. Affirming. We can come together. We can get through this. We can reunite. The ReUnited States of America. Clever.
Clever too was the image and metaphor of the tiny chapel, lying, we are told, at the middle; the geographic center of the “lower 48” in Lebanon, Kansas. (The actual center is about two miles northwest of Lebanon, but close enough, and either way, that was the least of the ad’s deceptions.) We’re told it’s open 24 hours a day, and “all are truly welcome.”
81% of Lebanon’s fewer than 300 residents voted for Donald Trump in 2016. All are truly welcome.
The message was simple and clear: if only Americans, both sides of the political and social divide, would meet in the middle, unity and peace would bloom like daffodils in the Spring:
The middle has been a hard place to get to lately.
Between red and blue.
Between servant and citizen.
Between our freedom and our fear.
Now, fear has never been the best of who we are.
And as for freedom, it’s not the property of just the fortunate few; it belongs to us all.
Whoever you are,
wherever you’re from.
It’s what connects us.
And we need that connection. We need the middle.
We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.
So we can get there.
We can make it to the mountaintop, through the desert …
and we will cross this divide.
Our light has always found its way through the darkness.
And there’s hope on the road … up ahead.
Lovely. Beautiful, really. It does, indeed, sound like poetry. And its sheer pap. Crap. Guano. Deceptive. A lie. A fraud, really. And both dangerous and destructive.
It’s a lie because at least when it comes to the “red and blue,” one side has been trying to “meet in the middle” for years — decades, really — while the other has moved farther, and farther to the extreme; to the point that the “red” spent four years giving Donald Trump a giant bear hug while he ran roughshod over the constitution, the rule of law, decency, and democracy, and sold the country down the river at every turn, and while the pandemic ran rampant across the land while Trump lied, and evaded, and avoided, and denied responsibility, and, even now, half a million deaths and a violent and deadly attempted insurrection later, one side still embraces and protects him, while it welcomes into its circus tent of evil clowns those who spew anti-Semitic and other conspiracy theories, bile, and hatred, and urge the murder of the Speaker of the House; a member of the “other side.” One side now embraces those they would have shunned even a decade ago; those who can make us look back fondly, or at least with less venom, on the likes of John Boehner and even, God help me, Paul Ryan.
It is a lie because when it came to working together following Barack Obama’s election and his agenda, one side pledged to “do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can,” and that “[t]he single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
It is a lie because one side lived up to that pledge, and has not retreated one bit, not an inch, from its no compromise, no meeting in the middle, no cooperation agenda, and to go even further by breaking long-held traditions and agreements, to, just for example, deny the other side the chance to seat a Supreme Court justice: even one whose views fell smack in the middle and the other side said, ‘thank you but go fuck yourself.’
It is a lie because one side does not need to move to the middle, because it is already there.
And it is dangerous and damaging because the “it’s both sides” lie helped get us to the fine mess we’re in now. How many times did you have to listen to a friend, colleague or relative say “well, it’s both sides really” and if you didn’t, you want to respond with something like, “do you always have opinions about things you know absolutely nothing about or is there something unique about this issue?” We hear a lot less of this tripe now, and sure, the news outlets finally wizened up during the 2016 election. Mostly. But for years, the press helped sell the cynical lie told by one side that it’s the other side that won’t come to the table. Won’t compromise. They’re the problem. So if one side says 2+2=4 and the other side says 2+2=6, well, the correct answer just might be 5 or, ‘who is really to say, either side could be right.
No. Not at all. That’s the dangerous and destructive lie that the ad promotes. Just as the truth does not always lie in the middle, two sides may not be meeting in the middle because one keeps going there, and the other just keeps leaving it at the alter of compromise.
And what — just where in the hell — is the “middle” between the largely centrist views of President Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and an agenda focused primarily on the suppression of voter rights, the elimination of regulations that protect average Americans and the environment, perpetuating the lie that climate change is not the existential crisis of our time, that defends the cataclysmic failure to protect Americans from the pandemic, the weakening of the legitimate press, the packing of the courts, the denial of justice for major segments of our population, and the perversion of justice toward its own political ends?
Just where is that middle?
I can tell you one thing: it’s sure as hell not in a tiny clapboard chapel that welcomes all, 24 hours a day; or in the middle of a snowy field, or a lush valley, or out over the shining seas, the waves of grain or the fruited plain, or high atop the purple mountains.
You want to know where it is? I’ll tell you. It’s in a wretched, muddy, garbage strewn, fetid ditch off the side of the road toward democracy, and decency and freedom and progress, and liberty, and justice for all.
And no goddamn jeep is going to pull us out of there.
