American Life

He's done this before. Every few years or so, Bruce Springsteen, one of rock's pre-eminent singer-songwriters, takes us to bleak places in his music, introduces us to a cast of desperate, downtrodden characters while capturing a sense of the times. He did this on the 1982 Nebraska album, a brilliant, acidic appraisal of Ronald Reagan's America. In 1995, he unleashed the particularly bitter The Ghost of Tom Joad, which chronicled those who fell through the cracks during the boom years of the Clinton administration.

There's a little bit of devil in Andrei Codrescu. On second thought, make that a helluva lot. First of all, take a look at that impish grin, as though the man is ready to entice you into committing four or five of the Seven Deadly Sins. Next, just tune in to your local National Public Radio station. That ghoulishly accented commentator -- Transylvanian? Lower Slobovian? That's Codrescu. He sounds like an emissary from Lucifer himself. Fundamentalist Christians certainly thought so a few years ago, when he gently poked fun at their belief in the Rapture.

Liberty Road, which stretches nearly 50 miles from Frederick, past the Colonial-era homes of Libertytown to the rowhouses of West Baltimore (where it becomes Liberty Heights Avenue), has seen the passage of a distinctly American journey over the years. Eighteenth-century farmers brought their bounty to city markets aboard wagons when it was still a dirt road. Before the Civil War, Libertytown was the largest slave-owning area of Frederick County. During the war, troops marched toward battle in Gettysburg along it. In the early 1920s, "trackless trolleys" along the road began moving city dwellers out to new suburbs in Randallstown.

Her relevance may be fading now, but it is still hard to imagine pop (the music and the culture) without Madonna. The ultimate chameleonic performer, she has dazzled and shocked us for two decades. Every two years or so, Miss Blond Ambition has emerged anew, the images morphing into something different: a Marilyn Monroe-inspired material girl became a gamine-like sex freak, which melted into a centered club queen, which changed into a doting mother of two, a seemingly loving wife and children's book author.

Award-winning Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker, A Gesture Life) writes about the complications of American life with a nuanced attention that is awesome. His third novel, Aloft (Riverhead, 352 pages, $24.95), unfolds like a little origami box, each fold revealing yet another aspect of the complexities of aspirations, avocations and ethnicities as they coalesce in the life of one Long Island family. At 59, Italian-American Jerry Battle enjoys early retirement until his live-in girlfriend of 20-odd years, the Puerto Rican Rita, dumps him. Then his son Jack runs the family landscaping business into the ground, his daughter Theresa and her fiance come to visit for the summer and his father, Hank, rankles in a retirement home.

Ira Glass is sitting in Lenny's Deli on Reisterstown Road in Owings Mills, chatting with two of his father's City College buddies, when a woman he's never met interrupts to ask him his age. When Glass tells her he's 44, the woman looks disappointed. "I have a daughter, but she's a bit younger than you. She's 39," the woman explains. As the woman appears to ponder how a match could be arranged, Glass politely excuses himself and heads for the counter to order eggs and home fries. Glass, who has a girlfriend, is pretty sure the woman only knows him as Barry the accountant's son, a nice Jewish boy from the Baltimore suburbs who still has all his hair.

DOVER, N.H. - In the early in-fighting between Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Howard Dean over the war in Iraq, the Massachusetts senator has found himself on the defensive over his support before it started and his criticism of its implementation afterward. Former Vermont Governor Dean has argued that Mr. Kerry's position imposes a special responsibility to explain how he backed President Bush before the shooting began and how he can now be so critical of the way the president turned his back on the United Nations and plunged ahead.

Now she has a conscience. After 20 years of in-your-face-and-down-your-throat attitude, lyrics and images, Madonna's concerned about disturbing the public. It was a surprise (dare I say a shock?) when the pop star -- known for, among other things, her pointless pornographic coffee table book and bad movies -- pulled the "controversial" video for her single "American Life." And the veteran pop tart knows exactly what she's doing as she draws attention to her latest project. She'll appear on MTV on April 22 in an "exclusive" interview to "explain" all the hype now circling the video that the American public has yet to see. The clip, ironically available in Europe, reportedly bombards viewers with wartime images and awkward references to American-style decadence and self-absorption.

Sixteen-year-old Kevin Broderick is a history buff. On a family vacation to Montana last summer, he attended a lecture at Glacier National Park. The speaker, Blackfoot Indian Curly Bear Wagner, told Native American legends. Wagner also mentioned that he was developing a CD-ROM that explores the Lewis and Clark expedition from an Indian point of view. "I found that to be really interesting, since I knew that this year ... we would be studying the Lewis and Clark expedition," said Kevin, a junior at Glenelg Country School.

RARE IS THE schoolchild whose heart still swells with pride at the 400th or 500th recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. It's a morning ritual. It means it's time to stop clowning around. It means the whole school day still lies ahead. That's not to say the pledge doesn't have a place in American life, beyond helping small children learn how to say "indivisible." The Pledge of Allegiance is like a civic prayer, so familiar from constant repetition that the words themselves hardly carry any specific weight anymore.