The ghost of Tom Joad: while Washington tries to deny reality, Bruce Springsteen faces it.

• Author: Shenk, Joshua Wolf
• Position: Rock singer

Walking past the White House on my way to a Bruce Springsteen performance a year ago, I passed a stream of tuxedoed congressmen headed for the Clintons' Christmas party. As I think back on it, I wish some of those tuxedoes would have followed me to Constitution Hall. We all had something to learn. Still do.

When Springsteen burst forth in 1971 with "Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey," his lyrics were exuberant, poetic, even mildly hallucinogenic. "Political" was not a word that came to mind. But over the next decade, Springsteen's stories grew considerably more complicated. His epic album "Born to Run" captured the fierce yearning of young lives trapped in dying towns. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" had an explosive anger. And in 1982, Springsteen produced a fierce, soulful work called "Nebraska." It is an album of distressing, piercing stories - of criminals and state troopers, of men with grease under their fingers that never washes out, of people living with darkness, disadvantage, and disappointment.

Suddenly, "political" no longer seemed such a strange fit. Springsteen's stories were of people that many Americans would rather simply ignore. With songs about Mexican immigrants and migrant workers and men riding the railroad tracks, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," Springsteen's latest album, has been called a western complement to "Nebraska." But the border he explores is not just a geographical one; it is also about the emotional and economic divisions that separate Americans from one another. Springsteen's concern is for the men stuck on the wrong side. In "Youngstown," a man eulogizes the steel yards of that Ohio town. "Seven hundred tons of metal a day, now sir you tell me the world's changed. Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name."

Though he is the exact opposite of an ideologue, the stories of Springsteen's music do coalesce into a vision. And, in a time for liberals of fracture and defeat, it may offer the simplest and best and most beautiful response to the armies of the right. Springsteen's music is about the struggle to engage - ourselves, our families, and the larger community with which we are inextricably bound. "Economic injustice," he said in a 1987 interview, "falls on everybody's head and steals everyone's freedom. Your wife can't walk down the street at night. People keep guns in their homes. They live with a greater sense of apprehension, anxiety, and fear than they would in a more just and open...