An Innaugural Address

AMONG the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated. Besides the ordinary objects submitted to your care, it will remain with your judgment to decide how far an exercise of the occasional power is rendered expedient at the present juncture by the nature of objections which have been urged against the system, or by the degree of inquietude which has given birth to them. Instead of undertaking particular recommendations on this subject, in which I could be guided by no lights derived from official opportunities, I shall again give way to my entire confidence in your discernment and pursuit of the public good; for I assure myself that whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, or which ought to await the future lessons of experience, a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen and a regard for the public harmony will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted.

After The Opening of the Field

First there is the light emitted from the corner as if to control the shadow. Drawn lines multiply their imperfection until each blade moves as if caught in the current of breeze. Lately, money can buy love off the clearance rack, but why buy when you can steal for free. Outside the coffee shop the sun is done playing good cop. Time to brace for the severity of Fall. October is the cruelest month. We're shouting our criticisms because the last piece of the puzzle doesn't fit. "I'm not coming back until we get a cleaning service in here," she said. The grinder grumbles an answer, but we can't make it out over the steam. We drink iced coffee to practice coldness in waterless air, but we must be careful not to take the edges for granted, leap out of the fishbowl. Fall-back will arrive two weeks later so that we can grasp the energy a bit longer. Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow as if it were a scene made up by the mind. Hanging on the wall, but opening the stone. The Eye of the Needle is a trail cut between large rocks. I Miss the Rockies, their redwoods so tall they could extinguish the light of day. It seems I'm always looking for a forest in the least likely places. Crease the page until the paper takes shape, ever finding phylum: its lively limbs. If you blink you might miss the most amazing transformations. Leaves bending over your ear, "Look closer and see. See into the trees. Find the girl….if you can."

John Bruce Stump Speech #4: Darkness on the Edge of Town

You better get it straight, darlin'. By the end of Darkness, I'd found my adult voice. Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. Songs like the Animal's "It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were infused with class consciousness. You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.

I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I'd grown up alongside of. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. And I tore into the guts of something in the night. We're born with nothing and better off wiping away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

I was searching for a tone somewhere between spiritual hopefulness and 70's cynicism. She says, "Baby, if you wanna be wild, you've got a lot to learn." For ending such a war, I have personally advocated that this is the best procedure. It is a traditional rather classic procedure of how to end a war that could be called a stalemate, that neither side apparently has the capacity to end by military victory, and which apparently is going to go on for a long time. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by.

From the fire roads to the interstate, some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, pieces in the record, and someone who actually does something, so that they can recognize it in an election, if they are interested. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. 'Cause they understand if I could take one moment into my hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege. And you better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight. And will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up? Weeks, even months went by before I had something that felt right. 'Cause in the darkness I hear somebody call my name and when you realize how they tricked you this time. And it's all lies but I'm strung out on the taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals with turned up power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies.

Darkness on the Edge of Town dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end your rope. I've been working real hard trying to get my hands to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death. If you don't do that your characters ring hollow and you're left with rhetoric, words without meaning. Everybody's got a secret, sonny, something they just can't face with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations.I was twenty-seven and the product of Top 40 radio.

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.

Schnitzel

Oh god, it still embarrasses her, not because she was wearing a dirndl under her wool jacket, with her black tennis shoes, not even because he was the Libertarian candidate. The man was a fool, a complete fool, uneducated and ignorant. He ran for governor and the state gave him a solid 10% of the vote.

But it was a beautiful afternoon anyway, and the polling place was just down the block from her apartment. She brought her lease and she brought her driver’s license and, because she wasn’t sure, she brought her passport and her social security card (even though her middle name was misspelled on it). And afterwards, she wore the sticker, proud, and jumped on the 30 bus downtown, to the German restaurant she worked at.

Ultimate Frisbee

To be fair, she’d never found him that good looking, but he was popular, sort of, and an Ultimate Frisbee sensation. He had bad taste in movies and music and he played video games too often, his pants were always too short, he was pigeon-toed and he had a faint hairlip.

But all that was only clear twn years later, when she heard he married some petite Malasian girl. Back when she was 17, she was just so grateful that he paid her attention, that he liked her, and it hurt so much when he didn’t any longer that she thought she would never recover, so she joined an Ultimate Frisbee team, though she hated running fast, and found she actually had a pretty decent forehand, but the team was awful and it lost every single game it played that season, several months after he broke her heart.

She quit before long. She never liked sprinting.

John Bruce Stump Speech #2: The Wild, The Innocent, the E-Street Shuffle

The opening cut, "The E-Street Shuffle," is a reflection of a community that was partly imagined and partly real. Sparks fly on E-Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

I wanted to describe a neighborhood, a way of life, and I wanted to invent a dance with no exact steps. Forcin' a light into all those stoney faces left stranded on this warm July. More in September than in August. And now we see beheadings. And we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there. It was just the dance you did every day and every night to get by. And there hasn't been a talley since Sally left the alley, issued a memorandum from the Defense Department saying, "If you weren't with us in the war, don't bother applying for any construction." That's not a way to invite people. I watched the town suffer some pretty serious race rioting and slowly begin to close down. And circus town's on the short, waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

Just when you thought the song was over, you'd be surprised by another section, taking the music higher. But they sighed "Johnny it falls apart so easy and you know hearts these days are cheap" – none of which were true. It was, in spirit what I'd taken from the finales of the great soul revues. You don't need to call me Lieutenant, Rosie, and I don't want to be your person who could be a commander in chief who could get your kids home and get the job done and win the peace. When you left the stage after performing one of these, you'd worked to be remembered. Together they're gonna boogaloo down Broadway and come back home with the executive who looted it, who bailed out on a golden parachute. America can do better. And help is on the way. Not that it would all BE funny but that it would all SEEM funny. That would come later.