Here’s a guy who went from making love in the dirt with Crazy Janey out behind the dynamo off of the backstreets near Thunder Road during the freaking Ford and Carter years to bitching and moaning about unemployment and factory shutdowns during the booming 1990s, when his entire musical universe was populated by hobos walking along highways with hats in hand and mumbling about unions, Pinkertons, and the WPA. Like most self-absorbed rock stars, the turning point came early, the moment he started writing songs about how hard it was to be…a rock star. 

So why Springsteen? Is Gary Glitter still stuck in Thailand? Is Buddy Holly not returning the NFL’s phone calls? For Bruce, it’s all about the benjamins: “We have a new album coming out…We have our mercenary reasons, of course.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but did Janet Jackson’s nipple really condemn us to a lifetime of Super Sunday misery? I’m starting to think that conservative commentator Michael Novak’s insane notion of putting on “a ten-year sequence of halftime shows that tell the great story of the Founding of our nation” would be an improvement over the past few year’s worth of spectacles. Novak looked upon Janet Jackson’s breasticle and despaired:

Why can’t the NFL support the Herculean struggles of besieged families, and overworked schools, against the horrid drudge of a sick popular culture, and help parents and teachers to fire the imaginations of our children with ennobling images of greatness and achievement? Why does the NFL put our families through the sludge of an exhausted, desperate pagan culture that is going nowhere, and celebrates losers and freaks? Our families have enough enemies to fight through. Must they also fight the NFL?

I don’t agree with Novak’s take on Nipplegate (which was, like Jesus to the Doobie Brothers, just alright with me), but I will say this much in anticipation of the composer of “Mary, Queen of Arkansas” performing this weekend: I grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which contains both Springsteen’s hometown (Freehold) and his early haunt (Asbury Park), so I can’t stand him in the same way that only a New Yorker can really, really hate the Yankees. I think that even his biggest fans will admit that his output over the past 25 years or so would make even Beethoven nostalgic for the first few albums. Springsteen is in that elite group of rock stars who have objectively sucked two, three, or even four times longer than they were ever any good (are you listening Sting, David Bowie, R.E.M., Patti Smith?). That, and in the video for “Glory Days,” he had the worst fake baseball throwing arm since Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees. Which is saying something.

Watching Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl—and before him, rock mummies like Tom Petty and Rolling Stones—let’s just say I’d rather go straight to the Bodies exhibition, where at least no one is pretending that the corpses on display aren’t actually dead.

Once rock stars start dancing in the dark, it’s a short step to singing about Tom Joad. And like the past Super Bowl halftime-show performer Paul McCartney (who unveiled a neutron bomb of a tune called “Freedom” during his post-9/11 star turn and furthered the argument that Ringo was the most-talented Beatle) and Elton John, Springsteen went from writing catchy, hook-filled songs to penning turgid, monotonous monstrosities lacking musical or lyrical depth and nuance.

Barack Obama promised to bring change to DC. How’s he doing so far?

At Reason Goes Hollywood, Reason magazine’s 40th anniversary bash held November 14-15, 2008 in Los Angeles, Reason magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch led a discussion with Reason Foundation Vice President of Research Adrian Moore and Big Hollywood’s Andrew Breitbart about what’s next in politics and culture in Obama’s America. Approximately 60 minutes.

The show, which follows the (mis)adventures of a high schooler Amy who hooked up with a classmate at band camp and got preggers as a result, was a mini-hit last year and a mini-scandal. It’s most horrifying depredation to contemporary mores? The memento mori that is a puffy and still-largely talentless Molly “Sixteen Candles” Ringwald, who plays the lead character’s divorced mom. Like a boob-tube Ozymandias, look upon her visage and despair.

Last season revolved around Amy realizing she was in the family way and then having to tell her folks, friends, etc. The father of the still-unborn child was a cad, scamming on several gals, and Amy ended up falling in with Ben, a loveable nerd who promises to raise the bastard as his own. Although abortion was raised as a possibility, it was dispatched more quickly than the theme song from Maude, which may well have been the last prime-time show to feature a lead character who actually went the Planned Parenthood route. What was stressed again and again throughout The Secret Life to the point of tedium was that Amy did not have sex on a regular basis. Or even more than that one unfortunate moment in band camp. Nor did virtually any of the other kids (and apparently, Molly Ringwald’s character either).

In Season Two’s opener, Ben and Amy plan a secret wedding and they actually get hitched. During the course of the show, the bride and groom and their best man and bridesmaid need to get fake I.D.s so the ceremony can take place absent any parental input. Various classmates also get fake I.D.s so they can attend the reception, which was as dry as a Methodist’s liquor cabinet. Indeed, a running theme throughout the episode is how no one will drink alcohol at all, but especially if they have to drive anywhere. By the time the credits ran, I was looking to see if Carrie A. Nation was the script consultant.

Which is to say that apart from the vaguely titallating premise and promise of the show’s title, the thing is safe as milk. Skim milk. Soy milk. Possibly powdered milk. The Secret Life, arguably Hollywood’s most naked bid at the jailbait market since Saved By The Bell went into permanent summer recess sometime before Dustin Diamond entered a long-delayed puberty, thus exemplifies the worst tradition of after-school special.

It’s preachy beyond belief and, for all the bad stuff that’s supposed to happen to the characters, it plays out in a world that is about as menacing and gritty as the dancing gangs in West Side Story. Give me Rock and Roll High School any day, the 1979 flick that ends with the blowing up of Vince Lombardi High, as great a Sophoclean catharsis as has been recorded in a movie featuring Clint Howard.

The Secret Life also represents a ubiquitous Hollywood tendency that all libertarians and even conservatives should reject out of hand: That television and other forms need to be instructive to youth and other idiot members of society who apparently take their moral cues from the small and large screens.

In a telling and all-too-common moment of Hollywood hubris, director Rob Reiner (who has made some good movies, I think) said, “Hollywood should not be making exploitive violent and exploitive sex films. I think we have a responsibility [to viewers] not to poison their souls.” Thanks, Meathead, but you don’t have access to my soul in the first place. Or those of my kids.

We may be what we eat (which explains the puddles of foie gras that form whenever I stand up), but we’re not what we watch, and creative expression needn’t be the ethical equivalent of a Cross Your Heart Bra, designed to uplift and separate us from our base instincts. And certainly the viewer, whether 15 years old or 45 (alas!), doesn’t need to watch The Secret Life of the American Teenager to know to use condoms or not drink and drive.

One of the great disconnects in American life over the past 30 years is that even as popular culture has been getting more graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, sexual behavior and violent crime among youth have been declining. Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works. Which is actually cause for relief.