STILL FUCKED AT BIRTH

How America hasn’t changed in 35 years

In October 1995, the American writer Dale Maharidge — the co-author with the photo-journalist Michael Williamson of the 1985 book A Journey To Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass — got a call out of the blue from one of Bruce Springsteen’s people. It turned out that Springsteen had been so moved by A Journey to Nowhere that he had written two songs for his new album, The Ghost of Tom Joad about it: “Youngstown” and “New Timer”.

Appropriately enough, then, Bruce Springsteen’s 1995 working class hymn mourning the…