A meaning uncovered.
Funny how every once in a while an old song can take on a new shade of meaning thanks to recent events. While this is more often true in relating a song to the personal circumstances in one's life, sometimes it's true of national, even international events.
Case in point: I just realized yesterday (Sunday, 12 October) that Bruce Springsteen's "Cover Me" -- which, while I didn't dislike it, I previously regarded as something of a place-holder on his seventh album, Born in the U.S.A. -- had a little something to say about our present economic travails:
"This whole world is out there just trying to score
I've seen enough I don't want to see any more,
Cover me, come on and cover me"
The phrase "cover me" in this instance perhaps has more meaning if it is taken in the gambling sense -- i.e., all the big banks, insurance companies and institutional investors wanting various federal governments to cover their lousy bets on mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and credit default swaps.
When one of the world's most prominent financiers, George Soros, avoids derivatives "'because we don't really understand how they work'" (as reported in Peter S. Goodman's article "Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy," part of the New York Times's series "The Reckoning," on the current financial malaise; the article appeared in the Wednesday, 8 October edition of the paper), most reasonable people would conclude that derivatives are the financial equivalent of plutonium, not Lay's potato chips (whose slogan is: "Betcha can't eat just one").
But "reason" and "high finance" so rarely go together.
Case in point: I just realized yesterday (Sunday, 12 October) that Bruce Springsteen's "Cover Me" -- which, while I didn't dislike it, I previously regarded as something of a place-holder on his seventh album, Born in the U.S.A. -- had a little something to say about our present economic travails:
"This whole world is out there just trying to score
I've seen enough I don't want to see any more,
Cover me, come on and cover me"
The phrase "cover me" in this instance perhaps has more meaning if it is taken in the gambling sense -- i.e., all the big banks, insurance companies and institutional investors wanting various federal governments to cover their lousy bets on mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and credit default swaps.
When one of the world's most prominent financiers, George Soros, avoids derivatives "'because we don't really understand how they work'" (as reported in Peter S. Goodman's article "Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy," part of the New York Times's series "The Reckoning," on the current financial malaise; the article appeared in the Wednesday, 8 October edition of the paper), most reasonable people would conclude that derivatives are the financial equivalent of plutonium, not Lay's potato chips (whose slogan is: "Betcha can't eat just one").
But "reason" and "high finance" so rarely go together.