Springsteen's — and Trump's — America

Last month found me in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on business. Late one Friday night, a smartly dressed young woman in the lounge of my hotel approached me and a friend at the bar. She walked a bit unsteadily. It was 11:00 p.m. The piece of urban jargon that best described her state could be "overserved." She slurringly accosted me without introducing herself, asking if I was American. Her tone suggested that strengthening the amity between our two nations was not on her mind. I told her I was American and asked her to not hold it against me. She held it against me. She sneered, "Youse and Donald Trump just want to run the whole world." She did not await a reply. She turned and walked off, to rejoin her boyfriend in a distant corner of the lounge. I sipped my pint. Then I told my Irish friend it was the first time someone had ever mocked me to my face for being an American. How fitting, I thought, that my mocker had included Donald Trump's name in the same breath as the insult.

In 1987, I was a newly minted young lawyer. Then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger had recently resigned his position in order to mark the upcoming bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. To mark the occasion, Time magazine had published a special issue calling our Constitution "a gift to all nations," used as a model by 160 out of the 170 countries then in existence for their own constitutions. Ninth Circuit Judge J. Clifford Wallace was using his vacation days to do judicial outreach work and promote the rule of law in faraway developing nations.

For American lawyers, it is nice to think of our Constitution as the inspiration and model for many others around the world. But it is less nice to see that this trend is waning lately. In their empirical study in the New York University Law Review in 2012, David Law and Mila Versteeg wrote that the U.S. is "losing constitutional influence because it is increasingly out of sync with an evolving global consensus on issues of human rights." D. Law and M. Versteeg, "The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution," 87 New York University Law Review 762 (June 2012). "Possible explanations," explain Law and Versteeg, are the "sheer brevity" of our constitution; its imperviousness to formal amendment (no rights have been added to it at all over the last century); and its omission of some of the world's generic constitutional rights increasingly found in foreign constitutions. These include guaranteed rights to education, food, housing, water, and health, as well as guaranteed equality for women.

I read Law's and Versteeg's article for the first time last weekend. I thought, "Who knew?" Our Constitution departs in many ways from the global mainstream, and the trend is against its emulation abroad.

This trend coincides with another jarring reality: Donald Trump's campaign for president, a crass and wanton affront to everything that the world thinks is decent about America. If someone asked me to sum up our fellow citizen in 25 words or less, it might be hard. But here goes: jingoist, plutocrat, blowhard, narcissist, circus freak, buffoon, serial litigant, weasel, nativist asshat, WASP douchebag, clown, gasbag, pompous ass, fake Republican, a real piece of work.

Trump's disdain for American law (except the provisions of Chapter 11, which he had cheerfully embraced four times) has been prominent in the news. The barrage of derision for Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who dared make some rulings which displeased Trump in one the slew of lawsuits dogging him. The proposal that all Muslims be barred from travel to the U.S. The threat to rewrite libel laws so as to enable Trump to sue The Washington Post for publishing negative articles about him and "win lots of money," the First Amendment be damned. Any hope I had of escaping the daily depressing drumbeat of news about his daily inanities evaporated one morning over breakfast in Belfast. The Belfast Telegraph had run on page one a story about a near-riot in San Diego at one of Trump's campaign appearances on page one.

My work there finished, I had had enough of Belfast after five days. I was ready to head south and take three days off before coming home. My friend in Dublin had bought tickets to the Bruce Springsteen concert in Croke Park for us and some other friends.

Springsteen took the stage just after 8 p.m. on a Sunday night. The setting was Croke Park, a massive football stadium whose 82,000 seats were filled to capacity. Above the stage, Irish tricolor and the Stars and Stripes stirred gently in the evening breeze, together.

Out came the Boss, alone. The E Street Band was nowhere to be seen. He greeted the audience, then walked to the piano and sat down. Then he began playing the opening bar of "The Incident on 57th Street" - one of his oldest and prettiest songs, recorded in 1973. He had the crowd immediately. He didn't let go for the next three hours. Impromptu, he brought a young boy onstage to share the microphone on a song. He performed "Independence Day" and "The Rising," songs which seemed to have special significance for the Irish audience. My Irish friends sang along with "Born in The U.S.A." and group-hugged me. By the time Springsteen delivered a rousing version of the Isley Brothers party classic "Shout" during the encore, we had heard nearly three hours of nonstop music.

When Springsteen finally played his last number, it was as he had started the show: alone. With a guitar and harmonica, he played "Thunder Road" - not as a rocker, but as a slow, sad ballad. The next night, someone spied him eating fish and chips, alone, in a small restaurant outside Dublin. The photo quickly went viral. I felt prouder of the 66-year-old rocker from Long Branch, New Jersey, than of the jerk from Queens.

Later, I thought of Springsteen's "Long Walk Home," and how its lines seemed to sum up an American ideal:

My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town, it's a beautiful place to be born / It just wraps its arms around you, nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone / You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone / Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."

Who we are as a country can't be personified in a single person, whether he's a presidential candidate or rock star. But as I left Croke Park that night, an American amid thousands of Irish, I felt something like joy. To me, Bruce Springsteen was a gift to the world - a musical prophet, raising the roof with his messages of redemption, goodwill amongst all people, and love. To me, there was healing power in terrific music played for a foreign audience by a great American thousands of miles from home. It helped make Donald J. Trump and the drunk woman in the bar in Belfast disappear, if only for a little while.

Dan Lawton is the principal of Lawton Law Firm in San Diego. His office specializes in intellectual property litigation and civil appeals.