studio recording also originally ended with a lengthy jam session, which was later edited for the song's commercial release. Themes "Born in the U.S.A." has been called one of the most misunderstood songs in history, citing NPR, the BBC and others. It has been treated as a flag-waving paean to America by politicians like Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan, reacting to the dominant tone of the song's chorus, without seeming to acknowledge the bitter critique of American policy and society present in the lyrics as a whole. The song presents a Vietnam veteran as a tragic figure alienated upon his return from the war. Two scholars writing in the journal American Quarterly explored the song as a lament for embattled American working-class identity. They wrote that "the anthemic chorus contrasted with the verses' desperate narrative," a tension which informs an understanding of the song's overall meaning: the nationalist chorus continuously overwhelms the desperation and sacrifice relayed in the verses. They offer the interpretation that the imagery of the Vietnam War could be read as metaphor for "the social and economic siege of American blue-collar communities" at large, and that lyrics discussing economic devastation are symbolic for the effect of blind nationalism upon the working class. The song as a whole, they write, laments the destabilization of the economics and politics protecting the "industrial working class" in the 1970s and early 1980s, leaving only "a deafening but hollow national pride." The article quotes Springsteen saying that the working-class man was facing "a spiritual crisis, in which man is left lost. It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society anymore. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family ... to the point where nothing makes sense." Political reactions In late August 1984, the Born in the U.S.A. album was selling very well, its songs were frequently aired on radio stations, and the associated tour was drawing considerable press. Springsteen shows at the Capital Centre outside of Washington, D.C. thus attracted even more media attention, in particular from CBS Evening News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, who saw Springsteen as a modern-day Horatio Alger story. Conservative columnist George Will, after attending a show, published a piece on September 13, 1984, titled "A Yankee Doodle Springsteen", in which he praised Springsteen as an exemplar of classic American values. He wrote: "I have not got a clue about Springsteen's