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Come fly with me, you said. This is gonna be our dream vacation .
Dreams (not the ones that come in sleep, but the ones we hold close day after day) come in various sizes and intensities. From the biggest to the least of them, they beckon us into an uncertain future, giving flickering illumination to features of the landscape right at the horizon of the knowable, letting us know there’s a reason we struggle, a place worth getting to. In America today, dreams are an endangered species.
To start with the biggest and broadest, the American Dream — that if you work hard and play by the rules you can become anything you want to be — is dead. In today’s America, if you work hard and play by the rules you might keep your job flipping burgers, but you’ll need at least one and maybe two other jobs just to afford a place to live. Forget retiring to Florida. As a matter of fact, forget retiring. The good news is, with the pandemic you might not live that long anyway. In America today, it is still true that any young person can grow up to be president — as long as that person was born a billionaire.
The American Dream’s lifelong companion — the Dream of American Exceptionalism — is also gone with the wind. The notion that we are citizens of a special kind of country, special for its high moral standards, compassion, and commitment to excellence in all things, has been drowned in a black tide of corruption, brutality at home and abroad, greed and arrogance. America is no longer number one in anything but our prison population and the size of our war budget. (Please don’t call it the defense department — it’s the war department.)
Corporations know the power of dreams to motivate us, and so they have been kind enough to manufacture any number of them for us. Driverless cars, drone deliveries, robots at our service, longer, better lives through pharmaceuticals, endless supplies of cheap energy — just keep buying our products, stocks and bonds, they smile, and as soon as we have spent a few billion more dollars on advertising and executive pay we’ll be almost there.
But we’re not. Life expectancy and birth rates are down, bankruptcies and deaths of despair are up, and it is becoming clear to everyone that the glitzy future of ease, convenience and boundless consumption held up on our screens to urge us to continue Business As Usual — it was just an expensive comic-book fantasy, for our distraction and amusement. Corporate efforts to keep us spending are getting more and more frantic: zero down, zero interest, eight years to pay for a car; how about a smart phone with three, count’em three, cameras? No? Then how about one with a big screen that folds? No?
Small, self-generated dreams are the most powerful of all. But they are hard to hold onto today. The dream of a comfortable life turns into years of student-loan payments and medical bills. The idea of living in a nice house recedes like the horizon no matter how fast you walk toward it. The dream of a dignified retirement evaporates like the money you thought was in your pension fund.
Two and a half centuries ago we rebelled against a system that said you could never rise above your station, that wealth and power went only to the people who already had both. Our founders said America was going to be different, that here anyone could own land as a right, not at the pleasure of some faroff king; that here, no rich or powerful or highborn person was above the law; and that no one, no matter how poor and insignificant, was beneath being treated fairly by the law.
We won the revolution. How is it that we have lost all the dreams?
“The dream is over. The dawn is chilly — But the dawn HAS come.”
Leonard Bernstein ‘Kaddish’ – 3rd Symphony, 1960
PS: I recommend the 1964 white cover edition with the NY Phil and Felicia Montealegre narrating
I just listened to ‘Kaddish’ again (takes about 45 minutes) and wish to fill out the quote a bit.
“The dream is over,
we must wake up now,
and the dawn is chilly.
The dawn is chilly
but the dawn HAS come.”
How did we lose the dreams? Slavery ended, genocide on the continent had nowhere else to go. The surplus energy was flowing in the 20th century, but it’s fading away now. Infinite endless consumption was a silly dream. Better find some surplus energy, Americans.
I guess the one salvation is that the people ultimately have the power. At some point, that power will be used. And hopefully in service of fairness, equity and some communal interests. It will be lead by young people. In fact, that is already happening. We are in the midst of that change now. As Malcolm X said, the chicken’s have come home to roost… and only the blind can’t see that we can’t go backward.
Ok, I think I know why the comment cupboard is nearly bare; the topic is too painful, strikes to close to home. Even I tried to subcontract my usual droning polemic to Leonard Bernstein. Yes, too painful; for after all, what have we if not our dreams?
Four years prior to Bernstein’s monumental 3rd Symphony Carl Perkins dealt with the same topic most succinctly:
“You can knock me down, steal my car,
drink my licker from an ol’ fruit jar,
do anything that you want to do,
but uh-uh honey lay offa’ my shoes.
No, don’t you – step on my Blue Suede Shoes,
you can do anything, but lay offa’ my Blue Suede Shoes.”
At the time blue suede shoes were a hot item among the emerging generation of rockers. They were, after all, just shoes. But somehow they represented a sense of hip independence, and the glorious good times on the horizon – the Dream. Perkins is saying, ‘steal anything but my dreams!’
But the Dream depends on the maintenance of a complex context of material realities. And those realities are disintegrating before our eyes. The symphony hall, opera house, jazz club and rock venue remain boarded with ugly plywood, while armed goon squads in police uniforms goad restless mobs of ignorant young people into tearing down a cultural infrastructure that neither force can possibly understand…the Dream depends on the reality, and the reality is fading – what then the Dream?
Interestingly, Bernstein’s 2nd symphony bears the title ‘The Age of Anxiety’…early 50s’ I believe. The artists know stuff long before everyone else. Look up Poe’s famous quote on ‘Those who dream…’.
No comment from north of the 49th because this is all yours. Feels as if interferring in another family’s business. And we would be.
However, this axiom as applied to the macro case may be applicable here: A man may try to change the whole world before he changes himself. Explains a lot.
Don’t misjudge this outside observation. Canada is trying to deal with its sins of the past – and marginally successful at that. The difference is we have are trying to change ourselves and not the world.
GK is right, too painful a topic. For those of us raised during the flux of these expectations we can see it well. Like seeing a grocery store full of items through the window as you are growing up and by the time you get to enter as an adult the shelves are nearly bare.
“know thyself”
“nothing to excess”
“surety brings ruin”
Faith, Hope, Love
We have the tools, do we have the will?
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all. Tennyson
“We won the revolution.” Thanks to France, for whom it was a proxy war. And let’s not forget the property ‘rights’ dream meant as soon as we slaughter or deport to reservations the remaining 10% (disease got 90%) of current inhabitants who’ve been here 15,000 years.
Those who believe in Karma say, ‘Bob’s your uncle’. The circle comes around.
‘This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free’ – George Carlin
‘We the people’ – meant all the people. Except they happened to be black. Or poor. Or Women. Because all those weren’t people.
You know what I love most about Mars? They still dream. We gave up. They’re an entire culture dedicated to a common goal, working together as one to turn a lifeless rock into a garden. We had a garden and we paved it. ^^
The future is here…..
This even distribution is not going well.
Mr. Lewis it is becoming more difficult to determine whether you are using irony, being facetious or shooting rubber bullets.
Thank you!
I never cared for history in school, but I have met several folks who majored in history. All said that a benevolent dictator was the BEST form of government over the long haul. Interesting as I am not sure that the people who lived it might have thought it was. Of course they had nothing to compare it with most of the time. In the future when they look back at our times when a civilization usually lasted less than 2000 years I think they will agree. Living in this mess I am not looking forward to death! But I am surely looking for life in a better world than this one!!! I live OK, power just came back on. I have no debt. I will never sell a put option. I have given up on organized religion except to support the Salvation Army.
Arnie A
“The United States is the biggest purveyor of violence on this Planet” – Martin Luther King (perhaps slightly paraphrased).
There goes “American Exceptionalism”.