America is a land of black and white, or as Leonard Cohen once accurately wrote, “the cradle of the best and the worst”. A discordant melting pot of extreme ignorance (source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE, electing George Bush as president, and subsequently re-electing him) and pioneering intelligence (Microsoft, Apple and the advent of the internet), of infinite wealth and shocking poverty, whose landscape encompasses beaches, dusty deserts, rocky mountains and snow tipped glaciers. This is a land where Seinfeld and My Sweet Sixteen co-exist, a land that cultivated Woody Allen, Brian Wilson and conversely, the Backstreet Boys. A supreme power with a finger in every pie; it is often said that America rules the world. But is that all about to change? This is a brief tale of the rise and fall of the American Dream.
Free from the royalty and the class hierarchy that ruled over the ancient civilizations of its European colonisers, America was a nation built on ideals that sounded sweet; ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!’ declared the founding fathers. What was initially a revolutionary democratic concept that had the individual’s best interests at heart has been subject to severe corruption over the centuries, leading to a tragic love affair with liberalism that spawned the century of the self and introduced free market capitalism that caused the downfall of America. It’s little wonder the self became sacrosanct in the U.S given the discourse of individualism that was touted endlessly at the public after the Great Depression and the World Wars. “Rugged individualism” was President Hoover’s favourite expression during his time in office, and boy, oh boy did he use it like it was going out of fashion. Then along came Ayn Rand; whose extreme pro-capitalism, anti-altruism philosophies heavily influenced post-war politics. But the most effective method of cementing individualism and liberalism came in the 1950’s when the corporate machine spied the perfect opportunity to cash in on mans quest for happiness; the American Dream. The American Dream in its original essence was honest; it promoted the idea that man was born free and that with hard work, success and opportunity would come to him regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. The latter-day, degenerate version has an ethos along the lines of ‘man is born to buy’. Founded on seductive consumer capitalism and a whole lotta debt, it promised every man material plenty and allowed him to live like a king. Millions across the USA were able to lay their claim on a slice of this bourgeois dream.
I’ve often thought that the American Dream is summed up perfectly in the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet: the sun shines over a safe, sleepy, middle-class neighbourhood, where white picket fences line neat lawns, the roses are damn well-pruned and the only sound to be heard is the gentle buzz of garden sprinklers. Everything is idealistic and idyllic, until Jeffrey’s father has a stroke; this is where the dream ends and America wakes up. This is what is happening right across those 50-states, right now. Waking up from the American Dream was never going to be easy; as George Carlin once put it, "it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." The dream was an illusion, as all dreams are. Never in anyway viable; it was an abstract concept built on borrowing and debt and fuelled by greed and exploitation that ended in economic collapse. As millions lose their jobs and standards of living decline, people want answers and scapegoats. The answers lie closer to home than most Americans would think.
It’s no secret that the USA is living in an all-consuming age of avarice; vanity and materialism are rife and greed can be visually measured by the obesity epidemic that affects two-thirds of its population. The average U.S citizen has interpreted the American Dream as a god-given right, has absolutely no sense of responsibility, and spends his life in a self-righteous, ignorant, idealized bubble, waking up to a bowl of diabetes-inducing Captain Crunch and falling asleep to Fox. Meanwhile, moral tensions grow greater every day over how just 4.5% of the world's population can annually consume 20% of its energy, clock up 251 million tons of trash and recycle a meagre 28%.
Egotism is a strong word, it implies placing oneself at the centre of one’s universe, it implies no concern for others, and it is rather well-suited to the majority of American citizens, and to America as a collective. The nation’s desire for hegemony is well known, as are the countless pretexts they have given for it; war in the name of ‘benevolent imperialism’, in the name of spreading their democracy, in the name of human rights… says the country that still enforces capital punishment. We all know this faux-philanthropy has its real origins in OIL, authority and the interests of the nation. The statistics show that the outlook for America is bleak; with a debt size unprecedented in its history, ($9,988,826,849,315 as I write), an unemployment rate of 9.1% and no plan in place for getting its public finances under control, you do the math[s]. Even if the American economy stabilises and begins to grow once more, without a change of ethics there is no bright future; America NEEDS to forgo its ego.
That’s all folks.
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