Get happy! On the Edge of the World

What with the latest kerfuffle over Republican campaign music—Donald Trump somehow imagining he could have permission to use a song by Bernie Sanders supporter Neil Young—Scott Eric Kaufman at Salon has produced an elegant video history of conservative misappropriation of nonconservative musicians going back to the Reagan campaign's strange belief that Bruce Springsteen's 1984 anthem of despair "Born in the USA" could be used to articulate Reagan's message of sunny, childlike millionaire's greed, and wonders by the way if there's any popular music at all that's safe for Republicans to use.

Here's a suggestion for JEB!, anyhow, with a bright and optimistic message, traditional country club sound values, unifyingly bipartisan reference, and performers who might put up with it because of the high irony quotient:

Speaking of irony, Daniel Scotto at The Federalist (or as we call it here, with reference to its Patrick Henry–Jeff Davis ideology, The Confederalist) offers a remarkable piece of retroactionary music criticism demonstrating that "Born in the USA" is really an attack on the Obama presidency:

...it’s easy to reject the Vietnam War on conservative terms: it was a war without a clear aim managed by individuals who were intensely arrogant and full of hubris about their own intelligence and capabilities. (That larger critique, incidentally, can be brought back against elements of President Obama’s foreign policy: Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya come to mind....)

What's with all the arrogant hubris that inspired you to invade Afghanistan, Barack? Though weren't we supposed to be mad at him for not invading enough, Syria in particular?

Perhaps on some level, criticizing the VA is a bit of a cheap shot; the department is facing an incredibly difficult job, and getting things done in the federal bureaucracy is essentially a nightmare. But President Obama promised to make the VA more efficient, and the department still has failed to meet the needs of veterans, to put it mildly. Federal incompetence and ineptitude should be a major issue for the Right.

Why did Barack break the VA?*

If the narrator takes his “first kick” when he “hits the ground,” he is lamenting more than unequal outcomes. He’s not seeing equal opportunities. Certainly, both Democrats and Republicans talk about inequality of opportunity, but the Right very forcefully makes the distinction between inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcome.

If only the narrator hadn't been born in a time of such heavy taxation he wouldn't have had to face the choice between getting drafted and enlisting; he could have been an entrepreneur, like Dick Cheney (three-time college dropout, two-time DWI convict) except without all the government jobs, although I guess Cheney (father employed by the U.S. Agriculture Department) was born around the same time. Whatever, it's the Republican way!

There is a certain neatness for Republicans that Springsteen chose “refinery” as the place of work that can’t hire his protagonist. Republicans really have no issue with people working in fossil-fuel extraction, and while we’ve seen an oil boom under President Obama, it has very much been in spite of his policy preferences. (Note that this is an area where the federal government is explicitly limiting opportunities to work.)

Because Springsteen's always wanted to work at a refinery himself, in that attractive Edge of the World:

New Jersey in the morning like a lunar landscape
Got a counter girl at the Exit 24 HoJo
Down past the refinery towers where the great black river flows
I'm living on the edge of the world

Opportunity rocks! Photo by Carrie Robertson, thirdcoastphoto, via "Life on Refinery Row: Residents of Corpus Christi, Texas are afraid of the chemicals around them – and scared to leave home" by Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

*From Jordain Carney's and Stacy Kaper's history of the mismanagement of the Veterans' Administration finding blame for every president from Kennedy through Obama, except Jimmy Carter:

Early on, the department was publicly counting only about a third of the casualties stemming from the War on Terror. That was because the Department was only counting servicemen and women immediately targeted in the department's wounded-in-action statistics. That accounting method left out those who were not targeted but were wounded nonetheless, such as troops injured when they were riding two trucks back from one that was hit by a roadside bomb, or those hurt in training or transportation. The underreporting made it more difficult for the VA to prepare for the coming influx of requests for help....

Additionally, the VA's claims-processing time skyrocketed early in the Bush years. In 2002, it took the VA an average of 224 days to complete claims, as compared with 166 days in 1999....

Even by the mid-2000s, several years after 9/11, the VA was using out-of-date claims projections it had based on injury estimates that used assumptions from older wars. Due to medical advances, many service members who would have died from their injuries in past wars are now being saved. That means fewer deaths, but it also means more wounded veterans, a development the department failed to anticipate and was slow to adapt to.

And VA leaders at times failed to request the funding needed to do their duty.

In 2005, under VA Secretary Jim Nicholson, after originally denying its fiscal predicament, it came out that the VA faced a $3 billion shortfall in funding for veterans health care. The situation required emergency supplemental funding from Congress....

In many ways, the Obama administration is paying for the negligence of past administrations, dating all the way back to President John F. Kennedy, who authorized the decade-long use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.