American Dreamers

I. We Americans take it as a given that we are engaged in the process of pursuing happiness. We define the daylight hours as the time available for that pursuit. For most of us, this means we're after stuff in the form of better goods and access to more services. It's what we call the American Dream.

Now, this pursuit thing works pretty well so long as you are a person who neither owns your own... nor has enough... to retire with enough..., meaning you'll likely have no choice but to .... until you can... no longer. Your accrual of stuff, though less and less rewarding as the pile of stuff grows, nevertheless yields a sense of security, of a buffer against calamity. You'll notice that this is a very different feeling from "happiness", but one finds a way to ignore the gap.

Now, people who have attained the dream -- those with the house in the magazine and the travel and the kids in the right schools and the friends in high places -- they're the ones in the fun house, but like all fun houses, it's mostly mirrors and not so fun.

For happiness is not derived from any of these things, and the possessors of these things -- faced with the demoralizing realization that more -- more expensive, more convenient and more exclusive -- doesn't increase happiness, and that friends in high places aren't really your friends, and flummoxed by their own kids who, fucked up from having too many options, choose rather to cut, smoke and have indiscriminate sex in order to escape into something real -- are among the most unhappy people you'll meet. Much more unhappy, just for instance, than those who live on a dollar a day in villages of mud-floored huts to whom it would not occur to think of happiness as something that one pursues.

The point is not that poverty makes one happy. Nor does it make any sense to idealize the poor. 

My focus here is on decoupling happiness and pursuit on the one hand, and, on the other, ascendance to the “top” of American society (a trip that actually takes one down and down in moral, philosophical and psychological terms) and an increase in joy, delight, satisfaction or well-being. The ivy league is replete with neurotics, with the anxious offspring of the arriviste, with the depressed superachievers. The BFD corporations are dog-eat-dog people shredders. The bottom line, the short term profit, the competition, the elimination of one’s rival, of deadwood, of those unwilling to put winning over everything, all prioritized above human connection and the simple pleasures of being or gratitude. 

II. There is a form of political and commercial discourse, based on the following principles. First, make the target audience feel like you’re on their side and they on yours. The use of “we” effectively implies this team spirit. Now, make a bold statement of a principle that “we” hold dear. A principle with which no one but a scoundrel could possibly disagree. Choose a principle which you yourself do not follow, a principle were you not to declare it yours might leave you open to attack. To ensure that your fake statement of principle persuades, elaborate by dividing the generality into its component parts thereby making your declaration appear to constitute a specific, substantial commitment. Make no actual commitments that might lead others to expect action. This is not a statement of intention, it’s an ad with which you lead the target audience to imagine you and they themselves positively. Here’s a good example:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

III. The ubiquity of American self-deception is such that the prospect of deconstructing our national character with an eye to straightening out the culture is inconceivably daunting. Where would you start?

With "the home of the free and the brave"? Free? Please. Is a woman who can't walk the streets of her prosperous town at night free? If the white male were similarly limited in his movement, freedom of walking would become a plank in the Republican party platform! Are children forced to live among armed camps of drug dealers free? American Freedom: the economic wherewithal to live behind the walls of a gated community. And the brave? If you've been to the graves of the American dead in Normandy, France and read the tombstones of the brave, you will have noticed that there is a preponderance of seventeen year olds from the most economically depressed areas of the American South. These were not the brave. These were the desperate, the uneducated, the manipulated. The throwaways. Some things never change.

Or should we start at the end instead? Let's look at our current efforts to solve the global warming crisis. Self-deception. Talk. "Not if it negatively impacts my (extravagant, wasteful, addicted and unhappy) lifestyle." We don't have lives, here in the U.S. We have lifestyles. Same thing, only bathing in the self-deception of an unhappy people pursuing happiness through materialist self-distraction. Harder and harder to talk to your children -- have you noticed yet -- because children see your truth, the truth you're madly paddling to escape.

Slave owners declaring that all men are created equal, manifest destiny as a rationale for genocide, elected officials spending nearly all their time raising money from wealthy interests who thereby purchase access and influence, corporations spewing public relations and advertising which is nothing more and nothing less than an officially sanctioned form of lying, war against those who possess natural resources, a judicial system that puts poor, barely defended blacks to death despite overwhelming evidence that mistakes are made all the time.

Why do attorneys accept a justice system devoid of justice? Why do businesses agree to lie to their customers for profit? Why do politicians allow lobbyists to monopolize their time? Why are the media used for sales rather than enlightenment?

The answer is that the United States is a society founded, developed and maintaining on self-deception. Hard to see for those who have grown up in it. Easy from abroad.

Seen from abroad, the U.S. is the nuclear superpower attempting to prevent others from having nuclear weapons. We're the profligate producers of carbon emissions telling the world to produce less carbon. We're the lovers of freedom who support dictators. We're the enemies of AIDS who deny support to condom distribution in third world countries resulting in hundreds of thousands of women contracting AIDS from their sexual partners.

Sports? Our heroes are uneducated millionaire drug abusers while the average person can't afford to take his family to a game.

Art? Removed from the schools, but we cherish our children (and believe in the power of art).

Cinema? We are proud of our Hollywood which is synonymous with mindless entertainment.

T.V, movies, food... American products are known as the lowest common denominator crap in the marketplace.

Education? How long will the U.S. be the leader in innovation when the average citizen can no longer afford to go to college?

Immigration? We treat our desperate Mexican immigrant workers so arrogantly while we enjoy the fruits of their labor...