Last night in the town of Buffalo, New York, a luminous chapter in American cultural history closed with the last performance by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. While there could well be a few more shows lined up here or there, it was nevertheless the end of the road not just for the band but for an era of American Rock and Roll music. Springsteen will, of course, go on and do new and different projects such as his Seegar Sessions outing, but it will never be the same again. Even though there really hasn’t been an “E Street Band” album since 1980’s The River, without his band, The Boss will be moving from playing day to day in the outfield into a designated hitter role.

Before you roll your eyes and think this is just Springsteen fanboy stuff, consider the role he and his band have played and what they have represented over the last thirty years- rock and roll music written to be both recorded and performed live on the stage. That is now, literally, a dead art form in our mainstream culture. Now music is recorded with endless devices and tricks to tune vocals and insert phantom instruments. Those who do go out on tour invariably do so with computers and pre-taped accompaniment. This is not to say that watching an artist simply dance along to their own pre-recorded music or that listening to U2’s wall of synthetic sound can’t be a good night’s entertainment. If watching Elton John sitting in adult diapers and a comical wig in a Vegas casino is what makes your night, then have at it.

But the E Street band was never a nostalgia act. Seeing them was never like watching the remnants of iconic 60’s bands serve up their board of fare in a festival of teary joint memory of youth lived in happier times. The E Street band always had an album out and that music was always relevant. Springsteen’s songs were always about what we were all living through together, from the murder of of Amadou Diallo in New York, to September 11th to the end of the George W. Bush era and the hope we all had for renewal. The shows were never polite spectator events but rather family reunions at which everyone sang along and danced on their chairs. The E Street band tours were never sponsored by a credit card company or a product and ticket prices were always kept low enough for working people.

Music doesn’t mean to us what it used to. It was the dominant cultural art form of the 60’s and 70’s but was superseded by video in the 80’s. Today, in the era of sex toy dolls and disposable American Idol human products, one would be hard pressed indeed to name even one musical artist who will still command our attention and fill stadiums in thirty minutes, let alone, years. Music, and musicians, will never mean the same thing to us as it once did.

Those days ended last night in Buffalo, New York.

It has been widely reported that before he opened fire on his fellow soldiers Maj Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “Allah Akbar,” or “God is great.” This, along with his Arabic name, naturally led to the conclusion that this was an act of “terrorism” and the work of what Rush and his ilk call “Islamofascists.” For whatever Maj Hasan is, and he is clearly a lot of things, an “Islamofascist” is not among them. He is, like so many Americans who have performed hideous acts of violence, simply someone who is mentally disturbed and who cracked up. He is no more connected to al Queda or the Taliban than the guy sitting next to him in the mess hall.

That is not to say that there was not a political component to Maj. Hasan’s act, because there certainly was, just as there was to Eric Rudolph’s Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics for the Glory of Christ or Sirhan Sirhan’s shooting of Bobby Kennedy or even Seung-Hui Cho’s warped vision that prompted the Virginia Tech shootings. But none of these connections were real outside of the skulls of these warped people, and perhaps in Rudolph’s case his little band of fellow travelers. The Manson family wrote lyrics from a Beatles song from which they somehow divined inspiration to commit murder but did that make them “Beatlefascists?” There is a huge difference between lone nuts doing these acts, and imagining connections to other people and movements, and organized terrorist actions, and real acts of terrorism.

It is a sad fact of life that a lot of people are not right in the head, and it is America’s particular burden to bear that we have so many guns lying around. The problem for us is that it is not always that easy to spot those folks who are on the verge of a Fort Hood or Virginia Tech episode ahead of time and those folks can arm themselves very, very easily. There is little, in fact nothing, that the police can do about these people. The police only get called after the fact in these cases. The challenge for all of us is to figure out what makes people like Hasan or Manson or Rudolph or Gonzales, who shot people in Florida on the same day as Hasan, go over the edge and to try to identify them ahead of time. This requires understanding social behavior and mental health issues and learning how to spot red flags when they go up, and they clearly did in the cases of Hasan and Cho.

But we also have to recognize that these incidents present a very, very different challenge to our society than guarding ourselves against real “terrorism,” which by definition means organized, premeditated acts of violence perpetrated for political purposes. Terrorism, unlike lone nuts, is indeed a police and law enforcement issue. Networks need to be penetrated, surveillance needs to be done and political policy needs to be considered. We now know that putting our troops into Saudi Arabia was a hugely contributing factor in motivating al Queda, as obviously was our lockstep alliance with the Israelis.

The essential point is that we must not confuse these two very different things- disturbed people, almost always lone nuts, who crack up and do heinous acts of violence and political terrorism and terrorist networks. They require very different skill sets and resources and the very worst thing we can do is lump them all together and blame the wrong people.

When asked why, after decades of opposition, German Chancellor Willy Brandt was suddenly ready to reverse himself politically and engage East Germany, his response was “I got smarter.” He did not, of course, get any smarter but what he got upon attaining his country’s most powerful office was access to more information and more informed viewpoints which influenced his position. This happens routinely to elected officials who saw the landscape one way as a candidate and upon election realized the equations were much more complicated than they thought. Campaigns are necessarily about simplifying issues for lowest common denominator voters, many with astonishingly low levels of information and understanding. Governing, however, is a whole different story and idealistic candidates find upon entering office that the crowds and cheers and adoring faces have been replaced by the steel teeth of the meat grinder of government. What does not happen often is a change in policy, at least not an admitted one if they can hide it under layers of bureaucracy, which they usually can (which is how Clinton went from being a populist to the Wall Street tool who so dutifully tended the garden of our current financial crisis).

Barack Obama does not have that luxury and he already erred terribly on day one by making a big show of closing down Guantanamo only to find that it was not politically feasible- or simple- to do and that he will have to do a U-turn on that one. Much hay will be made of it as the January deadline comes, no doubt. But the much bigger problem he has is Afghanistan and being one of the smarter guys to have been elected president he must have no doubt that, like Brandt, he has to “get smarter.”

The problem with what Obama loudly and publicly called “the war of necessity” during the campaign trail- no doubt partially to simply look tough enough to appeal to the American voters- is that it is exactly the opposite. There is no “war” in Afghanistan there is only occupation in the hopes of staving off a one-sided civil war to topple a corrupt and vilified government that is every bit as inevitable as it was in Vietnam a generation ago. Not all of the much ballyhooed comparisons with Vietnam apply, but the one that does in the most important one- the outcome is inevitable and American lives and treasure staked in holding it off are simply wasted.

Yes, there are certainly many arguments to be made for trying to tame that part of the world, from humanitarian to domino effects in Pakistan and elsewhere, but the essential problem- the facts that must now be staring the president in the face- is that there really is nothing we can do about. Yes, it’s unspeakable what the people in that part of the world do to each other, and to women in particular, but we have simply reached the limits of our power. We can’t change that region with our military anymore than we could drain a flooded basement holding a screen door.

The problem for Obama is that he didn’t start this occupation, and very likely would never have initiated it himself, but he not only inherited it, he opened is yap widely about it. He now fully owns it. He and his consultants have to know that “getting smarter” in public- and simply acknowledging the reality- would play right into the age-old political narrative of Democrats being soft on national defense pussies would only make his increasingly daunting re-election prospects very dim indeed. Even more compelling is the political reality that, were he to pull out of Afghanistan, any terrorist event to occur in this country would be eagerly traced back to the very Afghan mountains he abandoned, effectively ending his political career.

What remains to be seen by all of us is exactly what Barack Obama is made of. Is he really a patriotic, new politician who loves his country and will do what’s right- even if it means his own political demise- or will he do what virtually everyone who has held that office before him did, and cover his own ass even if it means so many others losing theirs.