There is a specific kind of theater we’ve all grown accustomed to in the twilight of the American experiment. It’s the ritual where a man who hasn’t seen the inside of a grocery store without a security detail since the Carter administration tells us how ‘angry’ he is about the state of the world. This week, it was Bruce Springsteen’s turn to play the role of the nation’s grizzled, denim-clad conscience in New Jersey.

Springsteen took a break from the grueling schedule of charging fans the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment to dedicate ‘The Promised Land’ to Renee Good, the woman recently killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. It’s a touching gesture, if you consider a stadium-sized sing-along to be a viable substitute for systemic accountability. Nothing says ‘resistance’ quite like 20,000 people in $150 tour shirts nodding in unison while a billionaire wails on a harmonica.

The absurdity isn’t that Springsteen cares—I’m sure he does, in that vague, wealthy-boomer way that involves a lot of sighing in a recording studio. The absurdity is the performance itself. We’ve outsourced our moral outrage to rock stars because it’s easier than actually looking at the machinery that killed Ms. Good. Bruce sings about the 'Promised Land' while the actual land in question continues to be a place where federal agents can end a life with the same bureaucratic indifference they use to file a T-3 expense report.

It’s the ultimate PR win. The fans get to feel like they’re part of a movement without having to leave their assigned seating. The artist gets to burnish his 'man of the people' credentials while the E Street Band provides the soundtrack to our collective impotence. We live in a country where a woman is killed by the state, and our primary cultural response is to hope a celebrity mentions it during the encore. Meanwhile, the ICE deployments continue, the agents remain shielded by qualified immunity, and the only thing that actually changes is the setlist. But hey, the acoustics in the arena were great, and for three and a half minutes, everyone felt really, really bad about it. Mission accomplished.