Obama Boomers vs. Springsteen Boomers
Talkin’ ‘bout my g-g-g-generation — and why we need to redraw the boundary lines
Has every American been getting promoted tweets in their feed every day, day after day, for the podcast conversations between Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen? Or do those ads just go to the 15 million or so of us Twitter users born in the mid-1950s, give or take a decade? I feel targeted.
The title put me off — Renegades: Born in the USA is such a total artifact of self-flattering, self-parodying boomerism. However, I like Springsteen and I really like Obama, so I listened to the first episode, and then the second, and just now the third. They’re… okay. But when I discovered that those are the first three of eight, I sighed.
Spotify describes the subject of the second episode as “the uncomfortable conversations we need to have” about race and racism, but my problem so far has been that their conversations about everything seem way too comfortable. It may be that the nature of their relationship is exactly wrong to enrapture the rest of us for hour after hour: too much friendship for interesting pushback and impertinence but not an intimate enough friendship for interesting pushback and impertinence.
