Thursday, November 24, 2016

President Obama White House Remarks Honoring Bruce Springsteen with Medal of Freedom





He was sprung from a cage out on Highway 9. Quiet kid from Jersey. Just trying to make sense of the temples of dreams and the mystery that dotted his hometown. Pool halls. Bars. Girls and cars. Altars and assembly lines. And for decades Bruce Springsteen has brought us all along on a journey consumed with the bargains between ambition and injustice and pleasure and pain. The simple glories and scattered heartbreak of everyday life in America. To create one of his biggest hits, he once said “I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth - the last one you’d ever need to hear - one glorious noise -  then the Apocalypse.  Every restless kid in America was given a story - Born to Run.  He didn’t stop there. Once he told us about himself, he told us about everybody else. Steelworker in Youngstown. The Vietnam vet in Born in the USA. The sick and marginalized on the Streets of Philadelphia. The firefighter carrying the weight of a reeling, but resilient nation on The Rising. The young soldier reckoning with Devils and Dust in Iraq.  The communities knocked down by recklessness and greed in The Wrecking Ball. All of us with our faults and our failings - every color and class and creed - bound together by one defiant restless train rolling toward the Land of Hope and Dreams.  These are all anthems of our America - the reality of who we are and the reverie of who we want to be. The hallmark of a rock and roll band, Bruce Springsteen once said, is that the narrative you tell together is bigger than anyone could have told on your own and, for decades, alongside the Big Man, Little Steven, a Jersey girl named Patti and all the men and women of The E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen has been carrying the rest of us on his journey asking us all what is the work for us to do in our short time here. I am the President - he is the Boss. And pushing 70, he’s still laying down 4 hour live sets - if you have not been at them, he is working. Fire breathing rock and roll. So I thought twice about giving him a medal named for freedom because we hope he remains in his words a prisoner of rock and roll for years to come.


BRUCE


BILL


BOB


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