John Bruce Stump Speech #3: Born to Run

In '70's New Jersey, the car was still a powerful image. All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood with a chance to make it. That somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more peaceful place. He was hoping we'd turn away. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.

I walked into a Tenth Avenue freeze without Saddam Hussein. At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I'd seen on a car spinning around the Circuit, but I couldn't be certain. And the world is busting at its seams and you're just a prisoner of your American dream. And if we did that, we'd have more consumption ability in America, which is what we need right now in order to kick our economy into gear. I liked the phrase because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head. At night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying. Blame it on the lies that were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

And here's what she wrote to you, "That gave me an opportunity to feel out the arrangement. Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, a suicide." Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care. Born to Run was released in a post-Vietnam America. And tonight you'll try just one more time to leave it all behind and break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using.

Were we fighting in the European theater? People were contemplating a country that was finite, where resources and life had limits. And the word's been passed this would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack. Slowly, the dread that I had managed to keep out of Rosalita squeezed its way into the lives of the people. Outside, the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. And the poets down here don't write nothing at all. They just stand back and let it all be. And in the quick of a knife they reach for their moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. When the screen door slams on Thunder Road you're not necessarily on the Jersey shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America.

John Bruce Stump Speech #1: Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ

There wasn't a lot of interest in hearing original music, which is what I mainly played. Madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer with teenage diplomatic efforts under way. They just decided the time for diplomacy is over and rushed to war without planning for what happens afterwards. I was sitting on the front steps. He shouted through the car window that he was going up to New York City.

I'd been going through some hard times in New Jersey for a while, and I planned, once again to leave the state. The hit-and-run plead sanctuary, 'neath a holy stone they hide around the world. We don't need mass armies anymore. One of the things we've done is we've taken the – we're beginning to transform our military."Mary, my queen, your soft hulk is reviving the economy." I had heard plenty of promises before – Broadway, Joan Fontaine, advertiser downtown training money – $1 billion was cut. They only added a little bit back this year because it's an election year. So I left that day telling Mike I was interested, but without making a commitment.

That Christmas, Tinker and I drove cross country to California in Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors of this country, and we're going to free ourselves from this dependency. So it was, back home, for me. You wouldn't even give me time to cover my tracks and make this system operate effectively. I know that the idea of working within the system has been used so much, and many people have lost confidence that it can be done. They wish to destroy the system, to start all over, but I don't think in the history of human experience that those destructions of systems work. They usually destroy everything good as well as bad, and you have an awful lot of doing to recreate the good part and to get started again. The songs required too much attention for a crowded bar on a Saturday night. Oh you don't know what they can do to the younger generation- and I am certainly getting at the end of my generation because I have been here an awfully long time- but that you younger people can find it possible to accept the system and try to make it work because I can't at the moment think of a better one given the conditions that we have in this country and the great complexity and diversity.

I really believe if we can stop this war- I certainly expect to do everything I can. I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigades of students and people, young and old, who took time to travel, time off from work, their own vacation time, to work in states far and wide. They braved the hot days of summer and the cold days of the fall and the winter to knock on doors because they were determined to open the doors of opportunity to all Americans. I have done all I can with all my limitations. I worked to find something that was indelibly mine. Them gasoline boys downtown sure talk "integrity, integrity, integrity." Those are the three words that she left me with. I never wrote in that style again.