sound bite with the adjective “shining.” The man was host of TV’s General Electric Theater for eight years, so it stands to reason he knew from luminosity. (He never shook off his old show-business sparkle, once referring to military uniforms as “wardrobe.”)
In his reelection acceptance speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention, Reagan talked up his accomplishments of the preceding four years this way: “We raised a banner of bold colors—no pale pastels.” (He is clearly ignoring all the pink slips flapping in the wind in his first term, what with 11.5 million Americans unemployed.)
He pressed on, “We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a shining city on a hill.” (As for real-life American cities, he told Good Morning America that year that homeless people who slept on grates were “homeless, you might say, by choice.” He couldn’t be more right—I have this fantasy that someday I’ll throw off the shackles of my clean sheets and pillow-top mattress and curl up on a subway vent in the rain.)
Once, radio interviewer Terry Gross asked Bruce Springsteen about his hit song “Born in the U.S.A.” and the ’84 campaign, when President Reagan, during a stop in the singer’s home state, said that America’s future “rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen.”
Since “Born in the U.S.A.” is about a Vietnam veteran who’s been home from the war for ten years, remembering his dead comrades and complaining about not being able to get a job, Gross asked Springsteen if he thought his songs have “a message of hope.”
“My songs are filled with hope,” he answered. And in “Born in the U.S.A.,” he explained, “The pride was in the chorus. . . . In my songs . . . the hope part is in the choruses. The blues . . . your daily realities . . . are in the verses.” Even the famously forgetful Reagan could remember the chorus; it consists of the line “Born in the U.S.A.” repeated four times. The verses have lines that speak to what actually living in the U.S.A. can be like, such as “You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much,” or “Down in the shadow of the penitentiary.”
Born in the U.S.A. was the number one album on the Billboard chart on July 16, 1984, when Mario Cuomo gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco titled “A Tale of Two Cities.” Cuomo, then governor of New York, scrutinized President Reagan’s favorite metaphor.
“A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well,” Cuomo supposed. “But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city.” He spoke directly to Reagan:
Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia, where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lacka wanna, where thousands of unemployed steelworkers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe—Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.
Cuomo, obviously, sings the blues. He points out that the country is in “the worst recession since 1932,” and that the two-hundred-billion-dollar federal budget deficit is the “largest in the history of the universe.” He blurts, “We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and then we lie about it.” He channels Winthrop and defines a proper government as “the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings.”
Then, addressing his fellow Democrats before him, he proclaims:
We must
In his reelection acceptance speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention, Reagan talked up his accomplishments of the preceding four years this way: “We raised a banner of bold colors—no pale pastels.” (He is clearly ignoring all the pink slips flapping in the wind in his first term, what with 11.5 million Americans unemployed.)
He pressed on, “We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a shining city on a hill.” (As for real-life American cities, he told Good Morning America that year that homeless people who slept on grates were “homeless, you might say, by choice.” He couldn’t be more right—I have this fantasy that someday I’ll throw off the shackles of my clean sheets and pillow-top mattress and curl up on a subway vent in the rain.)
Once, radio interviewer Terry Gross asked Bruce Springsteen about his hit song “Born in the U.S.A.” and the ’84 campaign, when President Reagan, during a stop in the singer’s home state, said that America’s future “rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen.”
Since “Born in the U.S.A.” is about a Vietnam veteran who’s been home from the war for ten years, remembering his dead comrades and complaining about not being able to get a job, Gross asked Springsteen if he thought his songs have “a message of hope.”
“My songs are filled with hope,” he answered. And in “Born in the U.S.A.,” he explained, “The pride was in the chorus. . . . In my songs . . . the hope part is in the choruses. The blues . . . your daily realities . . . are in the verses.” Even the famously forgetful Reagan could remember the chorus; it consists of the line “Born in the U.S.A.” repeated four times. The verses have lines that speak to what actually living in the U.S.A. can be like, such as “You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much,” or “Down in the shadow of the penitentiary.”
Born in the U.S.A. was the number one album on the Billboard chart on July 16, 1984, when Mario Cuomo gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco titled “A Tale of Two Cities.” Cuomo, then governor of New York, scrutinized President Reagan’s favorite metaphor.
“A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well,” Cuomo supposed. “But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city.” He spoke directly to Reagan:
Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia, where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lacka wanna, where thousands of unemployed steelworkers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe—Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.
Cuomo, obviously, sings the blues. He points out that the country is in “the worst recession since 1932,” and that the two-hundred-billion-dollar federal budget deficit is the “largest in the history of the universe.” He blurts, “We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and then we lie about it.” He channels Winthrop and defines a proper government as “the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings.”
Then, addressing his fellow Democrats before him, he proclaims:
We must
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