We didn’t even have an American Dream until 1931 when some guy made it up to put in a history book along with a lot of other stuff that was pretty borderline. But what the heck – it has provided politicians and motivational speakers with a rallying cry for 80 years. The charm of it is that it can be kneaded into pretty much any shape and flavored with whatever you are trying to sell, and your eager audience will throw their hats in the air and cheer.
Politicians were probably the first to realize its potential. You’ve got your Republican standing up there among all the flags and bunting promising the dream of a tax-free Shangri La where all those welfare mothers have been starved out, and all the brown parasites have been sent back to wherever, and all the true, hard-working Americans are busy building pick-up trucks and automatic rifles to sell to each other. The speech doesn’t touch on the knotty problem of paying for the military necessary to backdrop all this, not to mention the police, the prisons, and the cost of relocating all the undesirables. And the proud Americans who would prefer to spend their days kicked back on the La-Z-Boy burping Bud Light. Not to mention the fact that a great number of the brown folk slated for removal have been here a good deal longer than the crackers who want them removed.
Not that Democrats are innocent of flamboyant excess. Imagine The Great Man standing in front of the murmuring crowd in the school gym, self-consciously clad in a red flannel shirt to demonstrate that he is Just Like Us. His American Dream involves free schooling, right up through the PhD level, free health care for all, social security to include an annual holiday in Florida, subsidized housing for the poor, public transportation, cheap gas, a chicken in every pot, and free beer. The cost to be absorbed by the rich. There is no mention of what the rich might think of all this, nor of who the rich are considered to be. No limits placed on medical conditions or procedures covered, or who are considered poor. This is the democrats’ dream and they’re sticking to it.
All of this is loosely based on a very broad interpretation of The Constitution of the United States which, like the bible, can be called upon to support any position a clever orator can call to mind. Thus it is hardly surprising that revival tent preachers and suchlike have their own view of the American Dream. I deduce from the tracts I find tucked in my door or the trumpeting of some of our southern congressthings that their received wisdom is that this perfect world involves pretty little Christian white girls in freshly pressed dresses playing wholesome schoolyard games with happy little freckle-faced boys with parts in their hair. There are lambs in the background, and trees, and a clean red barn, or perhaps smiling brown people all set to give them oranges or towels. What this happy fantasy lacks is the housing projects and the flies and the massage parlors and all the countless features of the reality of the majority of American, not to mention the world’s, children.
For the most part, though, to people living ordinary lives, spending their days in a cube farm and their evenings driving their children to sports events, people with mortgages and 5-year-old cars, the American Dream is that any day now one of their children will demonstrate a unique and bankable skill that will lead them out of their tedious lives and unattractive subdivision and into a McMansion with an in-ground pool. This hope has led to the pernicious notion that anybody can do anything, that no matter how dull-witted the child, it can be badgered into the Harvard School of Business and from there to CEO of whatever bank survived the depredations of previous waves from the Harvard School of Business. This hope leads many of these people to oppose medical, educational, and tax reform, and various financial, commercial, and environmental regulations, since they know in their bones that one of their own is sure to make it big in one of these arenas and lift them up to the life of ease and excess that is their American Dream.
And then there’s the American Dream in all those distant fly-blown places we have bombed back to the stone age. They have seen postcards showing tall buildings with no bullet holes, rolling green hills, handsome people in expensive cars. They have seen the movies of people living in enormous houses, supermarkets bulging with food, running water, paved streets. They sell everything they have, borrow the entire net worth of their extended families, promising to pay it back as soon as they get to the promised land and earn their first million by year’s end. What must they think when they actually arrive and move into a tiny apartment in a poorly maintained building along with two other families from the old sod. Soon the parents find work in a sweat shop, the daughters ply the oldest trade in very short skirts and wobbly heels, and the sons go off to war and wind up bombing somebody else’s country back to the stone age in the name of peacelibertyandfreedom, which means no more to them than the lie of The American Dream.
