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It’s in the very fabric of the American myth and culture. It has permeated it from the beginning. Our art and entertainment. From the early novels to the show girls. This fantasy land vision that that anyone can make it here.
It has drawn people from cultures far and near. People who left their countries behind to see a fresh start. All believing that they could make a much better life over here. Reflected in film and radio and television and on the stage.
With heroes and heroines too numerous to name. Played by John Wayne and Randolf Scott and Irene Dunn and James Stewart and Ginger Rogers and Linda Darnell. The beautiful people and the flappers of the 1920s. That all it takes is hard work and imagination and you too can live the Horatio Alger story. All the heroes wore white hats and were white christian protestant males. That if you were poor and could not make it, it was your choice. Your fault. After all this is the land of opportunity. Blacks and Latinos and Chinese and Native Americans should be grateful for what they have and being allowed to live here. And they obviously preferred to live with their own kind. Slums ? American does not have slums and ghettos, those that live there – live like that because they want to. If you were rich, well you obviously worked hard to get that way.
One did not speak of homosexuals and abortions. Girls and women who got pregnant were obviously of low moral character and at worst sluts. And to be married and not have a family was unheard of and the couple were inadequate in some way, to be pitied or suspect. All wars were right and just and all veterans were war heroes. After all this was America and we stood for freedom and justice and mom and apple pie.
All families were pure and well off. That’s what Hollywood says. Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons and Make Room For Daddy and Dick Van Dyke and The Brady Bunch. Romance was boy meets girl in a Broadway Musical way like Micky Rooney and Judy Garland and nearly every popular song that made the Top 40. Anyone who could not find romance with a member of the opposite gender had to either ugly, uncouth or mentally disturbed in some way. Just not normal.
MGM and Warner Brothers musicals. Busby Berkley. Where even during the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, people would flock to the movie houses to see this dream-scape life they still believed in, even in their darkest misery.
Bigger than life myths surrounded some of the cities as well. Chicago – Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler, Detroit – The Motor City, NYC – Where The Boulevard of Broken Dreams Meets The Great White Way and Hollywood – where any boy or girl could make it big and become a star.
America – the land of innovation where everything from the combine harvester to television was invented.
But the facade is being slowly ripped away. Reality is intruding and causing people to see the truth. Like 1984 meets Brave New World. Disneyland with a dystopian underbelly provided by Fritz Lang. The Broadway Musical is no longer like 42 Street but now Urinetown. A Rod Serling version of Andy Hardy set in the dust bowl and Judge Hardy is on the take. Where the Horatio Alger character turns out to be no more than a two bit grifter and the presidential election like some black comedy written by Kurt Vonnegut.
All this…the unraveling of the American myth is making people crazy. Even those on the political left. And the world appears to be one gigantic study in cognitive dissonance.
But like the banker who kills himself when his money returns to being paper, these people refuse to accept that their whole view – their entire belief system was noting but a giant fantasy, a fairy tale. A lie perpetrated upon them that they swallowed hook, line and sinker. That it is not the fault of the kid who told them there is no Santa Claus, it was theirs entirely for refusing to accept the truth.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
37 Comments
You must have had an easier childhood. I’m not in despair because I’ve known for a long, long time that life can be hard and that it looks nothing like TV. The world is filled with diversity and dysfunction. It’s much easier once you get rid of the expectation that anything is black or white let alone like some black and white TV sitcom from the 50s.
Oh I am not in despair. But there are a lot of people who firmly believe in the fantasy and will not let it go.
Shedding the myth and fantasy is the first step in creating a new and better world. Sadly, some stubbornly cling to the myth despite reality out of fear, some out of ignorance and some out of malice.
Having grown up in Germany during WWII – it seems to me that all societies tell their subjects fables and in plain language: brain washes them to be compliant.
The difference between this country and many others is that this country has never been defeated. A defeat causes most folks to rethink some basic questions. Looks now that the empire will shoot itself in various places and bring itself to a major crash – then, for those left over, new ideas can get a foot hold. Unfortunately with the huge population numbers nowadays, the chances are very good that it will soon turn into a total dictatorship with new ideas only in the underground. Or are we already there?
It’s nice to see you being frontpaged here cmaukonen. This is a great essay.
I stopped believing in the fantasy when I was radicalized at UCSC in the early 1980s. My whole puzzle since then was one of learning how to fit in with a world that obviously did believe in this fantasy which I didn’t want in my brain.
Would you be willing to crosspost this essay at Voices on the Square?
http://www.voicesonthesquare.com/
I’m sure you’ll find the regulars there an entertaining bunch!
Sure.
Realistic view of where we are and how to best survive these circumstances will serve us well. I like cwaltz have experienced how it is without the dream fantasy. But still useful to know how to communicate with the dreamers.I did get cuaght up in the Hippie hopes of the seventies and progressive politics of McGoverm with no regrets. In fact my lifestyle improved markedly once I started to implement many concepts…healthy lifestyle, environment and more.
Good job, good survey. Nothing untoward about casting the lowest-common-denominator group as the keepers of the mythos, especially since that ‘demographic’ has grown to exasperating numbers, and as you imply, overwhelmingly so.
Yet in popular culture there have always been stunning and significant reproaches to the mythos, such as Broadway’s ground-breaking musical West Side Story (1957); Broadway’s Camelot (1960), a wonderful commentary on the mythos, especially as myth, and the inevitability of coming to terms with the eternal sadness of experience; and on teevee during the 1960′s the award-winning and popular series The Defenders, which portrayed issues no one else would touch.
Also, there’s Norman Rockwell’s ubiquitous magazine covers and calendars, which had a great knack for portraying the mythos in all its splendor and glory, while nearly always suggesting an anti-myth if you knew how to look for it.
And yet not so much as the JFK presidency was referred to as Camelot. And his assassination being even more demoralizing than the end of the musical.
Before this diary disappears down the line, the whole point is that this what you are fighting when you want to change or replace the system.
To a lot of people this IS the system that they see.
Great post.
Speaking of disappearing, that white and green bottle in the foreground of the photo: is it a 5-year supply of White-Out or Liquid Paper?
Well, that sells novels and tickets to Broadway shows. And it depends on who “you” were as to whether you could make it here. And we live on the other side of a period in which the writers, artists, and musicians intentionally set on creating a distinctive American culture–starting with Emerson and running up through Sandburg and Norman Rockwell and Aaron Copeland. But that was the high-brow stuff. And it was bursting at the buttons with optimism. And then there were the muckrakers. For every Busby Berkeley movie, there was a film noir one, counterbalanced by a Frank Capra movie….And those sold books and movie tickets too.
It is all too easy to ignore how people’s expectations have indeed changed and how different they are between individual people. And to presuppose that our ancestors should have been concerned about the great moral issues that we today are concerned about. Until the Civil War, wars were seen as the weather is today, and opposing war would have seemed as silly as opposing hurricanes.
And of course America was destined to be an empire, having been formed as a colony of empires and having adopted a form of government that synthesized the best of Greece and Rome, the two greatest classical empires.
And through a little espionage into the British industrial revolution, some enterprising souls (aren’t there always those?) created a textile and railroad industry in the US and each small town thought it was the greatest place on earth or soon would be (if you read the post-Civil War local histories and reminiscences of prominent men).
But most folks got overlooked, so we don’t know at all what they thought. Maybe the “American Dream” is just a mythology of the elites. Or maybe it was and got transferred to the middle classes over the course of the 20th century.
What did happen was the US government discovered propaganda during World War II and framed the war in terms of the existential survival of “American values”. And the economic elite leveraged that government investment for its own ends after World War II.
And the invention of radio and television magnified the importance (and reality) of the folks whose voices and images magically sounded and appeared in multiple living rooms all at once. In the early days, entertainers thanked their audiences for inviting them into their living rooms. Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s and 1960s reversed it by having the entertainers invited the audiences into the sounds and images of their living rooms.
And then there was the nostalgia industry. The invention of historic Christmases that never existed. (A Christmas treat for my dad growing up on a South Carolina cotton farm in the 1920s was an orange and a few walnuts.) The Hallmark sanctification of the American greeting card and gift holidays.
As wages and salaries stagnated, the imagery became more hyped and frantic–Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Disneyland’s (Disney World’s) Main Street, Disney’s EPCOT, country nostalgia (for those good ole farmin’ and coalmininin’ and ranchin’ Depression years). And where the nostalgia marketers went, so followed the radio and TV preachers. And then the talk show defenders of American values.
It is not delusion. It is marketing.
But Disney let loose Bambi, which made environmentalists out of most toddlers and children who watch it–until that is rooted out of them. The hyperpatriotism of the 1950s created a 1960s in which the 1950s children wanted to see the promises fulfilled.
Take your current understanding and go look at the musical “Hair”. The social criticism is all there and not heroic, but tragic.
Even Scarlett O’Hara found not the dream but the realization “Tomorrow is another day.” Delivered with enough ambiguity in war-skittish 1939 to sound heroic while being resigned.
We create our own narratives, our own stories, our own deeply held mythologies. Even a mythology of disappointment, even perpetual disappoint, is no more than that–a narrative to make sense of the world and to give us some kind of nerve to keep on.
Uninetown is in a sense no different from Titus Andronicus. What does that say about our times?
You can thank Time-Life’s Henry Luce for the Camelot framing. Sold magazines.
You’re writing about important stuff here, cmaukonen.
Important because you’re touching on big forces that move under the surface gloss of life – that can change things fast once they really take hold, but can be hard to see if you don’t know where to look.
cwaltz @1 is right to point out that people who’ve been pushed into really struggling know all about it. One of the reasons that we’re so polarized right now is that there are still a sizable number of people are have yet to be really affected.
They still have jobs that allow a comfortable life – maybe the pace of that job has picked up more than they would like, and they worry in their more reflective moments about what would happen if they lost that job. But mostly they watch the news and hear stories about plant closings and foreclosures and think “That wouldn’t happen to me because it I’m not lazy or dumb about money.”
Everything is pointing towards a tipping point where that changes in a big way.
I learned in school that revolutions happen when there are high expectations and low realizations. That’s on the horizon, the near horizon.
This is not a happy thought. But i think it can be opportunity for those of us who yearn for a life that is guided by principles of social justice.
Alan Kay, the computer pioneer, said that the best way to predict the future was to invent it. I think we as progressives have the chance to paint a new picture of a better “American Dream.” In fact I think it’s what we must do. Not just point out the problems that are so glaring to us, but articulate and present a vision of a future that confronts and solves those problems.
I confess to being an optimist – I think that the arc of history bends toward justice. I say this with the full knowledge of how much this can annoy the hell out of people – but I can’t help it, it’s who I am.
Anyway, sorry to ramble. I carried on at such length because this is a really good diary, cmaukonen. The kind that makes you think and carry on.
Love the comment, THD.
Great narrative…thanks for the memories, as they also say.
I think they actually stole it from the Germans.
I am not sure but I am sure it’s not good. How ironic that you should bring those two up in the same comment. When I did theatre at the university many, many years ago – Titus Andronicus was one of the first plays I worked on. Now friend of mine who was a theatre major at the same university as I was, is now directing Urinetown at a community college.
Yeah, Mauk, I have to say I’m mostly in agreement with Waltz here.
This critique of the phony whitebread nuclear 1960s family and the phony promise of the American dream has been very well established at least since, uhmm, the 1960s. Many of us lived the reality. The nuclear family post-flashpoint, so to speak. But then, I grew up in a working class barrio on the grimy eastside of LA.
If many people today are unaware of this it’s likely because of the nouveau Leave it to to Beaverism engendered by the nostalgia-ism and phony affluence of the 1980s Reagan that informs the outlook of many gen-x pseudo lefties today.
Most of these have no clue about the working class or the coping skills required raised as so many were were in relative comfort by yuppie mommy if not yuppie daddy who was working too hard so he could pay his child support.
Now that the bottom has fallen out of the Reagan prosperity and they have fallen on hard times, maybe this is new to them.
Dream is over. What can I say?
–John Lennon
Oh I do believe a lot of people do get it but for most it’s still a head thing.
Until it becomes a feeling thing, like the sinking feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you really to see there is no Santa Claus or you learn that the girl/boy you though really liked you was just playing you for a fool. Then things will change for them.
Oh, and recc’d. Xclnt narrative, as usual.
I remember very well (almost PTSD well) a production of Titus by the Center Stage in Baltimore in 1966 costumed as Nazis and Italian fascists. It was so powerful that my date and I stood dumbstruck during the intermission and debated whether to sit through the second act (we did).
My family struggled a lot, and when I learned there was no Santa Clause it made me regret being so extravagant in what I wanted for Christmas. Knowing it was my hard-working mother who paid for the gifts and not a fictional guy in a red suit put it all in a completely different light.
To over-extend the metaphor, maybe people will re-evaluate things when they learn that there really is no magic free-market fairy that makes everything perfect.
Great footnote, ThD. I’ll add to it that the Constitution provided for copyright and patents so the new nation could drain brains from England, where the inventions and King’s English were flourishing.
You misspelled “heroine.”
I think it’s somewhat ironic because as a third party supporter I often hear that I am the dreamer, and not a realist.
The truth of the matter is when times become desperate the best option is sometimes not the “safest one” so to speak. Sometimes you have to take chances to have things change.
I say that as a pragmatist that watched someone stay in an abusive relationship for 13 years because she thought that was the better or safer option for her and her 2 children.
Generally it is the most familiar and comfortable option.
I just got back from shopping at the 99 cent store for groceries. Currently living on about a quarter of what I used to earn; still I’m happier than cmaukonen who appears to be bothered that some people have more and some people have less. So what?
Actually often it is not.
Change is hard. It isn’t familiar(that’s why it’s called change) and rarely are the people who seek it comfortable at first(who would be when charting new territory is scary and it’s really scary when things are precarious.)
As I said I grew up in a household where my father beat my mother. He dragged her around by her hair down stairs. He kicked her. He beat her. She never left him (he was jailed when I was 13 for shooting someone) because she was afraid. She was afraid she couldn’t support herself and us. She was afraid she would fail. So she stayed until the beatings became familiar, not only to her, but to the two children who got to witness them. It was a huge mistake.
Sorry. I meant that maintaining the status quo. IE staying in the relationship, was the most familiar and comfortable option.
Wow, C – what a most excellent and hard-hitting diary entry, once again! You’ve sure been hitting ‘em out of the ballpark lately!
Highly rec’d, of course!
Thanks.
I think this subject is primary. What has driven the economy (and thereby, politics) in this country is consumerism. Well, empire and consumerism… but now the myth of a perfect world through consumerism is being used to expand markets in China and India.
Seems to me that in America we are being herded toward lower living standards in the expectation that in a world of limited resources the bulk of humanity can be exploited (as they pursue our dream!) for profits.
There are many paths to follow here- suffice it to say that myths ARE powerful ways to motivate people, that they WILL be used to that end, and that it’s up to us to propose and promote better myths, because for damn sure the capitalists aren’t interested in promoting world peace, equality, etc.
Myths corrupt the myth-keeper.
I’ll accept that. Considering we all live our lives within myths (such as the myth of the incorruptible human), I’d prefer to promote a myth that gives more power to ordinary people.
In my myth, South African platinum miners would be among the highest-paid people in the world.
RUN BOY! RUUUUNNN!
The ultimate betrayal, the anarchy of love destroys the hierarchy of righteousness.
Damn. Kicked out of Eden again.
Despicable.
I am so sorry…As you surely learned, it’s more frequent than we realize.
And in the past, even now, women have lived with so much fear. I hope you are doing well.