A Red-Letter Year

The 1987-88 pop culture season was definitely a red-letter year. And the letter was Hawthorne's scarlet "A." That's for adultery, in case your high school lit is rusty.

A season that began with continued reverberations from the PTL scandal burst wide open with Gary Hart's flagrant philanderings and Jimmy Swaggart's pathetic procurings. As this is written, the election marathon is rumbling to an end amid hushed and ungentlemanly rumors about George Bush's alleged mistress.

I must confess that I've been among that vast cross-section of the American public that has viewed this parade of dirty laundry with more bemusement than outrage. That Gary Hart took his sexual ethic from John F. Kennedy along with his hairstyle was no great surprise. And wasn't it inevitable that some of our TV preachers would turn out to be electronic Elmer Gantrys?

Adultery has always been especially widespread among men in positions of power. It seems to be one of the things they do just to prove that they can. Adultery is located in a continuum of male leader power trips that runs from keeping people waiting at meetings at one end to invading small countries on the other.

Of course, such sexual misbehavior is wrong by any worthwhile moral standard. And you have to feel woefully sorry for the publicly betrayed and powerless wives. But, all that said, it's still hard to act shocked.

But then Bruce Springsteen left his wife. Now that I take personally. And here's why.

I'm not a product of the "turbulent, idealistic" '60s. My formative politico-cultural years were the entropic, disintegrating '70s. By the time I got out of the house and had my shot at the world, everything was falling apart. There was no gas in the car, Nixon was still president, "The Movement" had self-destructed, and even rock and roll had gone flabby and weak. It was around that time that ads started to appear calling Bruce Springsteen "The Future of Rock and Roll." And I, like so many others, heard and believed.

At a time when the music mostly mirrored the isolation and decay around it, Springsteen resurrected the notion that rock and roll could be the source of life-affirming community. Early on he began articulating that notion in terms of promises made and kept, of good faith. For himself it was a matter of keeping faith with the musical tradition that had reached down and given meaning, joy, and dignity to a life apparently destined for futility.

In turn that meant he was responsible for keeping the promises that music implicitly made to his audience. That, he said, was why he did three-hour shows night after night and spent hours talking to his fans. When those promises were broken--anyhow, anywhere--life was cheapened.

As his career developed, Springsteen extended his core idea of "the promise" to the promises made, and often broken, between workers and employers, government and citizens, companies and communities. Along the way he sometimes sounded less like "the future of rock and roll" than "rock and roll as the future of America."

The careful reader will note in the paragraphs above the absence of references to the covenant between a woman and a man. Springsteen always seemed notably uneasy around that one, in his work and in what little news leaked out from his private life. Marriage, in his songs, seemed to represent either-or choices between freedom and community. The Boss, claiming to prefer both-and formulations, seemed stumped.

IN LIFE, THE BOSS got married three years ago. In art, he released in September, 1987 the album Tunnel of Love, which put front-and-center the question of the covenant between a man and a woman. The album, and the interviews Springsteen gave around its release, seemed to say that ultimately there are no easy answers, or perhaps any answers at all, to the struggle between freedom and community. There's just the simple fact that life without community and commitment at its center is untenable.

The album takes you through all the torments that poverty, restless perfectionism, and hidden self-doubt can inflict on a relationship. But it places those pains alongside a simultaneous, and ultimately stronger, celebration of the redemption to be found in married love. On the record's inner sleeve there's a "Thanks Juli" dedication to his wife Julianne.

Then he went on the road and dumped his wife for a singer in his band. I'm sure there are at least two sides to this story, and that all concerned would prefer that none of them be told in public. I would, too.

But the fact remains that, on Tunnel of Love, Springsteen made the marriage covenant a part of his work and thus affirmed it as a part of the fragile network of promises that hold life together. And he's been right all along to hold that when one of those promises is broken, life is cheapened for everyone.

That doesn't mean that the whole of Springsteen's, work, or even the stuff on Tunnel of Love, should now be written off as a shuck and a sham. It does mean that, like Jimmy Swaggart, The Boss is only human. And he's got some soul-searching and some explaining to do.

It also means that I've been reminded why private adulteries are public matters. It has to do with power relations in sexual politics. But it also has to do with promises, and how broken promises can poison the well of life and foster a pervasive cynicism and mistrust. That means public mistrust of the powerful and famous, yes, and a good dose of that is healthy.

But at another level a culture of cynicism can finally translate into a street-level and face-to-face mistrust of each other. And that's the stuff that strangles a community and turns the promise of shared life, at whatever level, into an ugly dogfight.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.