#but are they noble if you start a social and economic revolution as a gap year project? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

vitalmindandbody · 7 years ago

Text

Two American Dreamings: how a dumbed-down society failed view of a great theme

As Clinton and Trump prepare to debate next week , noble principles are overwhelmed in a culture where most Americans do not know what is real anymore and the dream of equal rights is just a fantasy

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old person got

But something happened on the way to that place

They hurled an American pennant in our face.

Billy Joel, Allentown

Its one of the greatest inventions of all time, and just like it says on the dollar bill novus ordo seclorum it generated an entirely new prescribe in human occasions. After millennia of pharaohs, lords, monarches, kings, sultans, caesars and czars, with all their attendant aristocracies and locked-down social structures, a country was founded where birth and lineage didnt trouble so much better, where by application of your expertises, power, labor and willingness to play by the rules, you could improve your material slew in living and achieve a measure of financial security for yourself and their own families. Boors and proles could aspire to more than mere existence. Progressive!

We know it today as the American Dream. The now-obscure historian James Truslow Adams coined the period in his volume The Epic of America, defining the American daydream as TAGEND

a dream of a social order in which each man and each girl shall be able to attain to the fullest prominence of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of delivery or position.

Adams was writing in 1931, but the fantasy was there from the start, in Jeffersons pursuit of happiness formulation in the Declaration of Independence, pleasure residing in its 18 th-century gumption of prosperity, thrive, wellbeing.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for starvation compensations. Plenty of that offered in the old country, and thats accurately why we left, escaping serfdom, peonage, tenancy, indenture all different iterations of what was essentially a rigged plan, to put it in current political verbiage that channeled the profits of our proletariat upstream to the Man. We came to America to do better, to self-assured for ourselves the liberation that financial defence makes, and for millions chiefly white males at first, and then slowly, sputteringly, women and people of color thats the practice it used to work , no less than a revolution in the human condition.

Upward mobility is indispensable to the American Dream, the notion that people can rise from implemented in order to middle class, and middle to upper and even higher on the example of a( imaginary) Horatio Alger or an( actual) Andrew Carnegie. Upward mobility across classifies peaked in the US in the late 19 th century. Most of the benefits of the 20 th century were achieved en masse; it wasnt so much better a phenomenon of great numbers of people emerge from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all castes. You didnt have to be exceptional to rise. Opportunity was sufficiently broad that hard work and steadiness would do, along with implicit buy-in to the social contract, faithfulnes to the system continuing on the assumption that the system was basically fair.

The biggest increases happened in the post-second world war era of the GI Bill, inexpensive higher education, strong labor unions, and a progressive tariff system. Between the late 1940 s and early 1970 s, median household income in the US redoubled. Income inequality contacted historic lows. The median CEO salary was nearly 30 hours that of the lowest-paid hire, compared with todays gold-plated multiple of 370. The top excise bracket ranged in the neighborhood of 70% to 90%. Conceded, there used to be far fewer billionaires in those dates. Somehow the society survived.

America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average “mens and”, if we can not find it, all our other achievements amount to good-for-nothing. So wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated line of 6 January 1941, an apt lead-in to her husbands State of the Union address later that day in which he listed the four democracies essential to American republic, among other issues freedom from want. In his Country of the Union address 3 years later, FDR expanded on this notion of freedom from want with its own proposal for a Second Bill of Rights, an economic greenback of rights to offset what he viewed as the growing oppression of the modern financial tell TAGEND

This Republic had at its inaugurating, and changed to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political claims among other issues the right of free speech, free press, free hero-worship As our commonwealth has grown in size and stature, nonetheless as our industrial economy has expanded these political rights have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clear realization given the fact that true personal freedoms cannot subsist without economic its safety and independence.

Political claims notwithstanding, discretion sounds excessively hollow when youre getting nickel-and-dimed to fatality in your everyday life. The Roosevelts recognized that payment peonage, or any organisation that inclines toward subsistence level, is plainly inconsistent with self-determination. Survival is, by definition, a restricted, frantic district; ones horizon is necessarily limited to the present day, to getting enough of what the body needs to make it to the next. These dates a minimum wage work in New York City clocking 40 hours per week( at$ 9 per hour) pays $18,720 a year, well for the purposes of the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. Thats a scrambling, uneasy existence, narrowly bounded. Close to impossible to decently feed, robe, and shelter yourself on a wage like that, much less a family; much less buy health insurance, or save for your teenagers college, or participate in any of those other good American circumstances. Down at peon rank, the endeavours of merriment is just like a bad gag. Its called the American fantasy, George Carlin cracked, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Necessitous mortals are not free men, said FDR in that 1944 State of the Union speech. Beings who are thirsty and out of a occupation are the stuff of which totalitarianisms are see. A grim statement, demonstrably true-blue, and especially unsettling in 2016, a point in time when the American Dream seems more viable as nostalgia than a lived phenomenon. Income inequality, abundance dissemination, mortality rates: by all the necessary measures, the average individual that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is dropping. Extraordinary parties continue to rise, but overall mobility is sluggish at best. If youre born poverty-stricken in Ferguson or Appalachia, risks are youre going to stay that channel. Ditto if your early remembers include the swimming bath at the Houston Country Club or ski lessons at Deer Valley, youre likely going to keep your roost at the upper part of the heap.

Income inequality, gross the gaps in abundance: were to say daily, incessantly, that these are the necessary the effects of a free market, as if world markets was a army of quality on the order of weather or tides, and not the alone manmade fabricate that it is. In light of recent history, blind credence of this sort of financials would seem to require a firm commitment to stupidity, but gives premise for the moment that its genuine, that the free market exists as a universe unto itself, as immutable in its workings as the laws of physics. Does that universe include some ironclad convention who are in need of inequality of opportunity? Ive hitherto to discover the lawsuit for that, though doubtless some enterprising thinktanker could manufacture one out of this same free-market economics, together with gusts of genetic determinism as it pertains to qualities of penalize and character. And “it wouldve been” bogus, all such cases. And more than that, vile. That we should allow for wildly conflicting openings due to accidents of birth “ve just got to” strike us as international crimes equal in brutality to child abuse or molestation.

Franklin Roosevelt:[ F] reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the ordinary citizen is insure equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal rights in the market place. The hypothesi croaks deeper than sentimentality, deeper than programme, deeper even than adherence to equality and the endeavours of joy as set forth in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of democracy, and to the prospects for its continued existence in America. We may have democracy in its own country, wrote supreme court of the united states right Louis Brandeis, or we may have enormous money concentrated in the mitts of a few, but we cant have both. Those few, in Brandeiss judgment, would inevitably use their influence to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class plainly couldnt be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis thats being starkly behaved out in the current period of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money.

But the client for financial equality goes beyond even equations of dominance politics. Democracys premise remains on the idea that the collective wisdom of the majority will prove right more often than its incorrect. That given sufficient opportunity in the pursuit of pleasure, your population will develop its knacks, its ability, its better judgment; that over duration the national capacity for discernment and self-correction is likely to be increased. Life will improve. The way of your solidarity will be more perfect, to acquire a word. But if a critical mass of your population maintained in peonage? All its vigor spent in the excavations of day-to-day existence, with scant opportunity to develop the full range of its modules? Then how much poorer future prospects for your republic will be.

Economic equality can no more be divorced from the functioning of republic than the ballot. Jefferson, Brandeis, the Roosevelts all remembered this home truth. The American Dream has to be the lived world of the two countries, not just a reasonably legend we tell ourselves.

I have always gotten much more advertising than anybody else.

Donald Trump

Then theres that other American fantasy, the numbed-out, dumbed-down, make-believe world-wide where much of the national consciousness resides, the sum concoction of our mighty Fantasy Industrial Complex: movies, TV, internet, text, tweets, ad saturation, celebrity obsession, boasts infatuation, Amazonian sewers of porn and political bullshit, the entire foray of media and messaging that strives to separate us from our brains. September 11, 2001 bombed us out of that reverie for about two minutes, but the reverie is so elastic, so all-encompassing, that 9/11 was rapidly absorbed into the the matrix of FIC. This exceedingly complex event horribly direct in the result, but a swamp when it comes to causes was stripped down and binaried into a reliable fantasy narration of us against them, good versus villainy, Christian against Muslim. The week after 9/11, Susan Sontag was practically executed for pointing out that a few smidgens of historical awareness might help us understand how we came to this phase. For this modest recommendation , no small number of her fellow Americans bid her dead. But if united followed her conduct if united done the hard work of delving down to the roots of the whole horrid thing perhaps we wouldnt still be fighting al-Qaida and its offspring 15 years later.

An 11 -year-old girl wears Trump socks at awareness-raising campaigns occurrence for the Republican campaigner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Image: Mike Segar/ Reuters

Heres a hypothesis, ugly, uncharitable, but yielded our recent biography it begs research: most of the time most Americans dont just knowing that real any more. How else to clarify Trump, a billionaire on an ego trip capturing a major partys nomination for chairman? Another blunt-speaking billionaire tried twice for the conference of presidents in the 1990 s and used to go in flames, but he made the mistake of extending as himself, a recognizably flesh-and-blood human being, whereas Trump comes to us as the eventual beast, and indisputable maestro, of the Fantasy Industrial Complex. For much of his job until 2004, to be exact he harboured status in our lives as a more or less normal celebrity. Large than life, to be sure, cartoonishly lofty, shamelessly self-promoting, and reliably hateful, but Trump didnt become Trump until The Apprentice debuted in January 2004. The first episode depicted 20.7 million viewers. By similarity, Ross Perot received 19,742, 000 votes in the 1992 general elections yes, Im likening election totals with Nielsen ratings but Trump stopped sucking that robust 20 million week after week. The season finale that time reached 28 million viewers, and over the coming decade, for 13 more seasons, this was how America came to know him, in that weirdly intimate lane Tv has of delivering celebrity into the extremely middle of our lives.

It was this same Trump that 24 million viewers a record, of course tuned in to watch at the first Republican debate last year, the glowering, blustering, swaggering boardroom activity person who made every hope of shredding the pols. One thinks if Trump would have ever been Trump if there hadnt been a JR Ewing to pave the way, to show just how dear and real a dealmaking TV crook could be to our centers. Trumps performance on that night did not disappoint , nor through all the debates in the long progress that followed, and if his reference for the truth has proved more erratic even than that of professional legislators, we should expect as much. In the realm of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, reality happens on a slithering magnitude. The reality is just another possibility.

I is talking about password primeval.

I would give the sign of republic ;P TAGEND

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In nine days Trump and Hillary will take the stage for their first face-to-face debate. There is likely to be blood. The spears are going to be out, and the ratings are bound to be, need it be said, yuge. The American Dream will no doubt be invoked from both platforms, for what true-blue patriot was ever against the American Dream? And yet for the past 30 times the Democratic candidate has worked comfortably within a party organisation thats battered the working and middle classes down to the bone. The brand-new Democrats of the Clinton era are always strong for political claims, as long as they dont disturbed corporate Americas bottom line. Strong for ethnic and gender equality, strong for LGBT privileges( though that took experience ). Meanwhile this same Democratic establishment assembled with the GOP to push a market- and finance-driven financial guild that fertilizes the already rich and leaves the rest of us sucking wind.

Thats the very real feeling Trump is speaking to , no imagination there. Bernie as well; small-time amazement their constituencies overlapped, though Trumps declared devotion to the common man stumbles over even the simplest proofs. On whether to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Trumps moral compass has revolved from an connoted no( wages are already too high ), to imply yes( wages are too low ), to weasel word( left open up to the states ), to yes and no in the same breath( I would leave it and raise it reasonably ), and, eventually, when pressed by Bill OReilly in July, to yes-but( parent it to $10, but its still best left to the states ). All this from presidential candidates whos securely in favor of abolishing the estate tax, to the great benefit of heirs of multimillionaires and none at all to the vast majority of us.

Meanwhile, the Fantasy Industrial Complex is doing just fine such elections season, thank you. Pronouncing at a Morgan Stanley investors meeting in March, one of the leaders of the FIC, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS and a man whose 2015 compensation totaled $56.8 m, had this to say about the Trump campaign. It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS. The coin rolling in and this is fun this[ is] about to become a very good year for us. Sorry. Its a cruel situation to say. But bringing it on, Donald. Keep going.