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What a very strange experience is a fireworks display.

 

For starters, the local Conservative MP took it upon herself to say a few well-chosen words. Brave, I thought, considering the proximity of a bonfire. How the assembled refrained from chucking her upon it was a tribute to English politeness in the face of adversity.

Then there was the presence of the local commercial radio station, playing, on Beelzebub’s Repeat Button of Doom, the 47 songs to which all commercial radio stations have bought a licence, looping and looping like a sort of anti-sample, as if the world could cope with more and more Bon Jovi and truck driver’s gear changes until it implodes in a whimper of abused melody.

 

Brave, I thought, considering the proximity of a bonfire. How the assembled refrained from chucking the DJ upon it was a tribute to English politeness in the face of adversity.

 

Then, after many long hours of waiting, there was the glorious spectacle of the fireworks. In tribute to the sparing of parliament from a grand revolutionary explosion, the sky lit up with sparkles and blooms, bursts and streams, curtains and shoots of brilliant colour.

 

Standing close in the chilly night, thousands of people without a brass farthing with which to scratch their fundaments oohed and aahed in child-like delight as thousands and thousands of pounds exploded in front of their eyes.

 

Remarkable.

 

But don’t get the wrong impression. I have no problem with using light to ward off the darkness: it’s what I think we all should do.

 

And talking of which, let us cross the wide Atlantic.

 

I could harp on at great length about the choice America will make, between a cretin and the hope and decency symbolised by President Barack Obama, but that would be a waste of time. The Land of the Freely Wobbling Butts has chosen both cretins and hope before, and neither has done them much good in recent times.

 

As brighter minds have rushed up on the economic ropes, the dullards of middle America have piled on the pounds and shed the dollars.

 

None of it would matter if this nation of crazed religious fundamentalists and greedy consumers didn’t have such a powerful effect on the rest of the world.

 

That won’t last for much longer. But for now, we are asked to buy the idea that the most important part of America’s multi-faceted democracy is this choice between a cretin and hope.

 

It isn’t. There are many more layers of democracy, from town to county to sheriff to state to house of representatives to judiciary to senate; in many ways the President is the least powerful and least important of the lot. But the media would have us believe otherwise.

 

Well, struggling to sum it all up, I put a CD on. It was Bruce Springsteen and the very mighty E Street Band, my own mix of live recordings.

 

Now I know there are lots of people who can do without the self-righteous bombast of Springsteen, and indeed when he went all stadium Born in the USA I was among the first to desert him.

 

But in these later years I have come home, and I am proud to have done so.

 

Brothers and Sisters, today’s lesson is two-fold and a conclusive demonstration that whether the Americans go for a cretin or for decency, their country will always have hope.

 

First up on my Boss mix: from about four years ago, The Ghost of Tom Joad. This is Springsteen drawing on the very great John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath:

 

Now Tom said ‘Mom, wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy

‘Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries

‘Where there’s a fight ’gainst the blood and hatred in the air

‘Look for me Mom I’ll be there…

‘Wherever there’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand

‘Or a decent job or a helpin’ hand

‘Wherever somebody’s strugglin’ to be free

‘Look in their eyes Mom you’ll see me’.”

This is great songwriting, drawing on a deep well of American belief, drawing on the essential faiths that Steinbeck chronicled with such profundity.

 

“Well the highway is alive tonight

But nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes

I’m sittin’ down here in the campfire light

With the ghost of old Tom Joad.”

 

This particular live recording has a guest appearance from another American red in the tooth and claw of fairness and justice, Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine and The Nightwatchmen. Morello’s spitting, savage, merciless, righteous guitar in this recording has become very, and justly, famous. I wholeheartedly commend it to you. What’s perhaps more important is the roar of the crowd: this is about more than a guitar solo.

 

Our second text from the book of the Boss is Land of Hope and Dreams, from the turn of the millennium: this may be the song of which we all dreamed in our teenage imaginings, an anthem for the America we all wish for, a vision of decency:

 

“Well this train
Carries saints and sinners
This train
Carries losers and winners
This train
Carries whores and gamblers
This train
Carries lost souls
This train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train
Faith will be rewarded
This train
Hear the steel wheels singing
This train
Bells of freedom ringing.”

Great songwriting again: the protest song in purest essence and more, in that it doesn’t just argue against, it pleads for.

 

Yes, I know, Bruce is getting in touch with his inner social worker again. And there’s no harm in sneering at a multi-millionaire preaching to us all about fairness.

 

But that’s the point: Bruce Springsteen is still doing what he always did: playing rock’n’roll and singing about decency and fairness, about equality of opportunity, about the working man’s place in the scheme of things, about the never-to-be-dimmed beacon of truth that all men should be treated with respect regardless of colour or creed or class.

 

He doesn’t have to do that. But he does. And weary though he may be of all the broken promises, he’s taken the campaign trail again this year to canvas for Obama and stand up for decency against the tax-avoiding, woman-hating, rich-protecting, lying cretin that is Mitt Romney.

 

Maybe if Obama survives the assault of the drooling idiots of the Republican right, Springsteen may stand on the steps of the White House as he did four years ago and sing along with Pete Seeger.

 

Seeger is another very great man: he said he’d dreamed all his life that one day an African American would become President, and even though so many things had gone wrong this great right had come to pass. Seeger, having spent a lifetime fighting for what is right, spoke wonders for another essential truth: we can dream, can’t we? And sometimes dreams do come true.

 

Springsteen will not give up. And, whatever this week’s result, neither should we. America may be the land that produced George W Bush and Mitt Romney, but it is also the land of John Steinbeck and Pete Seeger and Martin Luther King and Bruce Springsteen.

 

Big wheels rolling through fields where sunlight streams: I’ll be on that train.