Dream On!

“There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.”

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)

I just finished reading Adam Kamp’s essay in the April edition of Vanity Fair called Rethinking the American Dream. He starts with Moss Hart and moves us to Brian De Palma. We go from the Cramdons of the Honeymooners to the Carringtons of Dynasty as Kamp shows us how warped the American Dream has become. The characters, homes and lifestyles become more and more elaborate to the point of the ridiculously unattainable. I think the United States of America is experiencing a hangover from the sexy version of resource allocation.

I am not the only one thinking about the American Dream these days. Back in November of 2008 John Quelch, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, basically gave us the cliff notes to Kamp’s article in his blog. Liz Hamburg of Huffington Post reminds us that the American Dream is alive and well for some. Mortimer Zuckerman of USNews & World Report spoke about globalization and taxing “stratospheric” income while Bradley Kuhn, almost two years ago, open source community based software as an expression of the American Dream.

There seem to be two versions of the American Dream. We have the version of how it is lived vs. the version of what is written. When James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “The American Dream” for The Epic of America in 1931 he meant it as shorthand for the Bill of Rights. The authors of the Bill of Rights did not live them well in actuality; they held slaves and would not allow their wives and daughters to vote. Griel Marcus reminds us in his opinion feature for Salon.com in July of 2006 that “when the Declaration of Independence was presented, everyone understood that all men meant men, not women; whites, not blacks; Christians, not Jews or Hindi or heathen; decent people, not Sodomites. The idea that “all men are created equal” was not a “self-evident truth,” and when he goes on to say “people on both the left and the right tell the story of the country as if it were a story of power, not speech — a story of the movements of money and armies, not the acts of men and women, acting alone or together.” I’m reminded that this idea of money and armies is a hard one to give up. I was trying to find a way of answering the question: Why would anyone NOT want the dream that Mr. Adams so eloquently encapsulates; a society based on the notions presented in the Bill of Rights?

The American Dream Coalition advocates Homeownership, Mobility and Freedom. Sounds great, but when you read further you discover they only advocate certain aspects of these values. The idea that everyone should own a home is what tipped this economy off its pedestal. Barney Frank has long been the champion of rent and is eloquent about countering this argument.. The A.D.C. advocates for individual ownership of transportation via cars; as public transportation takes away from their perceived mobility goals. Yes cars. Advocating mobility in this fashion is threatening the future of the planet, though they consider it a threat to their version of the American Dream. And the freedom they’re talking about? No regulation of their business or land. No regulation is turning out to be also a precursor of our current status. This is not a coalition with which I or Mr. Adams has much in common.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation operate a website called DefendingTheDream.Org that has Ronald Regan looking off into the distance as their banner. This site advocates halting the “encroachment of government in the economic lives of citizens, removing unnecessary barriers to entrepreneurship, and stemming the tide toward ‘over-criminalization’ of economic activity”. I don’t think they’re interested in making anyone but themselves prosperous. After all, they’re defending something. They’re in a fight! Somebody is after their prosperity.

These two groups are somewhat representative of the one percent of Americans who hold the greatest amount of wealth in this country. According to these two groups, The American Dream is about having things, stuff, goods and control over those resources. How did they get them? How are they going to keep them? I think that all Americans have felt a shift in priorities lately; the above groups interpret that shift quite differently. Maybe the top one percent is watching their privilege drop away. Maybe the attraction of privilege just isn’t as sexy to Americans as it once was. Perhaps it never was. Is there a dream that places equality above privilege?

When we talk about a society without privilege what are talking about? The constitutional congress grappled with this in 1776. The founders knew what a society with a king and powerful state religion looked like. They did NOT want that. So they attempted to level the playing field with laws that everyone could agree on. The Bill of Rights was born and in shorthand is written “The American Dream”. Some folks will tell you that when everyone is treated equally we’ll have socialism or communism. But those would be people with something to lose and something to defend. Those that are not excited about tackling this problem before us are quite upset about losing their privilege.

Privilege is for sale in this country. In some others it is not. In most others you must be born into a certain class or have the correct skin color, etc. In this country, because privilege is for sale, we have the boom and bust cycles of the economy and much worse. Believe it or not, I think that this is much better than what the rest of world operates under; organized crime. But we need to move beyond even our successes if we are going to lead in the future; we must begin to live the rights and laws on which this country was founded. When the top 400 Richest Americans have a lower tax rate than working families we have a system of privilege. When the top one percent of this country controls forty percent of its wealth, we have a system of privilege. I don’t believe most of us would CARE who has the wealth if it was put to improving the world and those that live in it. But it’s NOT…that’s why I call it privilege. It does nothing but separate and it always fails. Ask Marie Antoinette.

When taxes are spent on tanks we call it capitalism. When taxes are spent on jobs we call it socialism.

The American Dream Project has a three part agenda. The first is to live your dream because we all need it. The second is to serve; do what you feel called to do. Lastly, they demand better leadership by citizens and politicians. They call the American Dream “the most noble human purpose any nation has yet seen conceived”. They state “Our vision is to ensure that each of us is striving to live our personal dreams and that America is a physically and psychologically healthy society for all of our children”

The New American Dream is an organization that is difficult to categorize. Their vision statement, in part says “New American Dream is dedicated to helping support and nurture an American dream that revives the spirit of the traditional dream—but with a new emphasis on non-material values like financial security, fairness, community, health, time, nature, and fun.” It has five key elements 1. A Higher Quality of Life, 2. A Healthy Environment, 3. More Fairness, 4. Strong Communities, 5. Healthy Economy and Marketplace.

Privilege is how some of us view the American Dream. How many people can engage in the American Dream? Some believe that this dream is limited. Others believe its essence is community. I agree with Kamp. I think that the American Dream is definitely returning to the notion that giving each citizen a ‘decent chance’ at living fully is a good thing.

Edward Albee predicted this drift in his play The American Dream. Of the characters Mommy, Daddy, Ms Barker, Young Man and Grandma, it is Grandma’s duty to hand off the American Dream to Young Man in Albee’s Absurdist play. I think that the Young Man is a great characterization of the Baby Boomer; he is young, sexy, brawn, and will “do almost anything for money.” Grandma skips her children and hands off the Dream to Young Man. She says: “Yup. Boy, you know what you are, don’t you? You’re the American Dream, that’s what you are. All those other people, they don’t know what they’re talking about. You . . . you are the American Dream” (p. 108). Most would agree that the Young Man character is the Hollywood version.It is the version that we’ve just bottomed out on. The Young Man is the sexy materialism that has pervaded our psyche since the sixties and is now dead. “On American Idol, Simon Cowell has done a great many youngsters a great service by telling them that they’re not going to Hollywood and that they should find some other line of work” Kamp reminds us.

Who would he be passing the American Dream to? The Young man would be around 70 today. I suspect that she looks more like the New Dream than Defending the Dream. I suspect that Albee’s Young Man would pass on the dream to a young, lithe, brown skinned woman who volunteers, eats locally and organic when possible, is spiritual without being evangelical, has a healthy excitement about technology and is likely self employed. I can see the scene now. Young Man is emphatically telling her how very important and unique this gift is, and attempting to pass on all those endless boxes. She recognizes it immediately of course as nothing more obvious than sunlight. It is the freedoms so eloquently represented in the Bill of Rights, over two hundred years old. The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” I believe that most power is with the people. Therefore people will define the American Dream, and not just Americans, all the people of the earth. We are currently deciding who to hand the American Dream to, of course.

In the opening quote: Archibald MacLeish’s “liberation of humanity,” I think is about the loss of privilege. What happens in liberation? The inequity of power is removed. Today we have the ability to remove the inequity of power and privilege, which is so evident and distasteful in our financial and social arenas. These are not people, ideas, or things. I think they are the beliefs we hold in our hearts about what is possible. For the second part: “the freedom of man and mind” to me is the essence and the movement of the American Dream. What is the future like? What is the mind FOR? Are we going to be honest about we want? It is only the desire to deceive that has cost us so much. Can we imagine what peace is available for the freedom of man and mind? In our present newness and joy the threat is gone. Peace is here.

A NEW WORLD WAITS.

DREAM ON!