Keeping up with the unlikely double theme of Springsteen-Trump, I noticed something interesting--Springsteen first!--about the live "Thunder Road" performance I pasted into yesterday's post. If you are a fan, you will know that toward the end the lyric goes like this:
There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets.
Springsteen, however, originally wrote:
There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in skeletons found by exhumed shallow graves.
According to Wikipedia, this was deemed too dark and weird by drummer Max Weinberg, and Springsteen agreed to swap in a line that seemed more consistent with the blue-collar theme of the album--"Thunder Road" opens the breakthrough record Born to Run--as well as with Springsteen's developing "brand." But listen closely to what he sings in the 1978 concert. It's at about the 4:10 mark (if you don't want to play the whole thing over and over again like yours truly). I can't make it out real well but feel reasonably sure that "graves" is in the place occupied by "Chevrolets" in the album version. Thoughts? If I'm right, it suggests that Springsteen always held close the "dark weird" version that he originally wrote--this concert was in 1978, and Born to Run (the album) had been released in 1975. In another four years, Springsteen would release an album, Nebraska, that's unrelievedly bleak in outlook--"dark and weird," one might say, or possibly just "dark." It's all Springsteen, too: he recorded it by himself on a 4-track cassette recorder, so there is no E Street Band between the listener and Springsteen's conception of these songs. I've pasted in above the official music video made for "Atlantic City," the only thing close to a "hit single" on Nebraska. In this case it seems even the marketing emphasized darkness and desolation.
I want to try and inoculate myself against the possible objection that the largest and smallest "charitable" outlays of the Trump Foundation--one (the largest) to repair a fountain outside one of his hotels, another (the smallest) to pay his son's Boy Scouts dues--aren't representative and that highlighting the high and low items, as I did yesterday, is just a way of disguising the cherry-picked unfairness. According to New York's attorney general, the investigation of Trump's foundation uncovered "a shocking pattern of illegality" that included "unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign" and "repeated and willful self-dealing." Here's an example of the self-dealing that, on account of the twin themes of golf and chicanery, seems to me perfectly Trumpean. And it's in the middle, between the fountain repair and Junior's Scout dues.
In 2010, one of Trump's golf clubs hosted a charity tournament that included a hole-in-one contest on a par-3 hole--a million dollars for an ace. Sure enough, one of the players makes an ace. After a celebration, however, he's told that the charity's insurer had stipulated that the shot had to be at least 150 yards, and that the golf club that day had set the tee markers so that the hole was playing at less than the minimum distance for a payout. So the guy sues everyone in sight, including Trump's golf club, which, he says, either by incompetence or collusion with the insurer, made a fraud of the advertised contest. His lawyers negotiate with Trump's lawyers and they reach a settlement--the club will donate $158,000 to the golfer's favorite charity. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Trump's foundation auctions off a lifetime membership to one of his golf clubs, the proceeds of which are to benefit The Donald J. Trump Foundation. The auction raises $157,250. Yes, your guess is correct: that lump of money was transferred to the golfer's charity in satisfaction of the terms of the agreement.
Not super surprisingly, it's against the law to use the money of your charitable foundation to settle your personal obligations and those of your various businesses. New York's attorney general concluded that "the Trump foundation function[s] as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump's business and political interests." Trump and his people dispute this, but they've agreed to dissolve the foundation. No actual charity is sounding alarms about the effect on its revenue flow. Jeffrey Toobin has pointed out that the man who controls America's nuclear arsenal is unfit to run a charity in the State of New York.
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