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Tag American Dream
“Things I No Longer Believe In”
Blogger and magazine guru Rex Hammock had a very good post over the weekend entitled “Things I No Longer Believe In”. It’s mostly aimed at the destruction of the credibility of the institutions and individuals who have played a role in the economic disaster we’re going through. He singles out Congress for its inability to see beyond the short-term political strategies of its membership, the notion of any institution being “too big to fail”, and the absurdity of “real-tine market analysis” on CNBC, among others.
I thought it was a very thoughtful exercise, and I agreed with all of his choices and rationales for them. Still, I think I can add a few of my own:
“The American Dream” — okay, so this one needs a little more definition, because I think there are actually several different “American Dreams” to choose from, so the one I am specifically referring to is the one that posits that every American can and should be a middle-class homeowner living in a suburb. This idea really didn’t manifest itself as “The American Dream” until after WWII; previously, the “American Dream” was more about rising up from lowly serf to captain of industry in the Horatio Alger style, but the Great Depression pretty much proved what a pipe dream that really was to most Americans, and so sights were set on the less-lofty goal of home ownership as the pinnacle of achievement for the majority of Americans. Of all the ideas that went to hell in a handbasket with the boom and bust of the last decade, it is this one that was oversold by greedy and unscrupulous banks and mortgage companies, then twisted into unrecognizable permutations that would have otherwise been dismissed as outright fraud years earlier. On closer historical examination, there’s a lot to suggest this wasn’t a particularly sustainable idea in the first place, but I’m usually willing to give the decision-makers of the past the benefit of the doubt for not being able to imagine THIS as the future.
Economists — Who did these people fellate to convince the world that they deserved doctoral degrees? They’ve proven to be very good at rationalizing things after the fact, but anybody can do that. What they obviously can’t do is explain how to keep the economy from falling into a bottomless pit. Pet theories, cherry-picked examples and evidence, full-blown quackery, and an appalling determination to promote their own ideas over anybody elses make them the least-reputable “scientists” one can possibly imagine. Lately there’s been some complaint that the media are relying on their own bloviating gasbag pundits for insightful commentary than “real economists”, but that’s probably a wise move on the part of the media outlets.
“Saving For Your Future” — Yeah, right. An entire generation of people has just watched whatever retirement savings they had disappear into billions of scattered electrons. The older half of the Baby Boom will be the last generation of Americans to engage in the cultural fantasy of “Retirement”, and the rest of us will work until we drop dead in our cubicles. As my half of the Baby Boom skids headfirst into our “golden Years”, we’re going to have to reinvent collective housing, develop entirely new models of labor that accommodate older employees, and probably stage a “Million Grannies March” on Washington to undo the half-assed systems that our older Boomer siblings didn’t have to worry about because they didn’t need it.
“Planned Obsolescence” — The “everything’s a widget” model of capitalism is going to have to go the way of the dodo tout suite. Making everything from phones to TVs to dishwashers to cars so freakin’ flimsy that they break just to look at them will not be sustainable from the standpoint of consumers without money to spend, from businesses that can’t constantly sell “more more more more”, and from the rapidly encroaching realities of our depleted natural resources and shifting climate. This means that everything the businesspeople think about running their corporations is now and forevermore obsolete, and they might as well all give up and start over again.
I’ll keep adding to this list as I come up with others. You can, too.
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Mama Dollar And Papa Dollar
Noted British historian Niall Ferguson has an article in the December issue of Vanity Fair that tries to explain the current economic crisis by putting it into historical context. It’s a good way to get some perspective on the whole thing and doesn’t bog down in trying to explain all the financial technobabble*. If you read the “phony economy” piece from Harper’s that I linked to yesterday, this is a good expansion on that idea, as Ferguson looks at the historical origins of the finance sector as the driving force of American capitalism. I don’t know that I agree that the “American Dream” of single-family home ownership only dates back to the 1930s; I would argue that every pioneer who hitched up a wagon team and headed west across North America was looking for his own land and a home, and that the central notion of the land not belonging to the nobility but to whomever could make that land productive is as old as America itself. Nevertheless, the institutionalization of home ownership is indeed a unique American idea, and the impact it has had on our current economic state of affairs is undeniable.
*If you’d like a comprehensible explanation of the technobabble, I recommend these two “This American Life” programs: “Giant Pool Of Money” from May of this year, and “Another Frightening Show About The Economy” from October.
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Imagine No Possessions, I Wonder If You Can
Writing at 3QuarksDaily, Michael Blim explores the deeply dysfunctional and misguided relationship most Americans have with “The Rich”.
The rich are a significant drain on the society as a whole and are the root of significant damage to our political institutions, he argues:
Second, the rich corrupt the major institutions of American society. It bears repeating that the rich don’t get rich or stay rich simply by making better widgets and saving the profits from their corporate endeavors. They make legislatures dysfunctional, regulatory authorities their watchdogs, and professions their poodles. They corrupt presidents. They even corrupt each other, as corporate heads are bribed with board positions and in turn protect the interests of the company that bribed them.
And while they are systematically robbing us blind, they simultaneously foster a culture that worships them and dangles the enticing but eternally elusive idea that “anyone can become a millionaire”. Here he invokes Thorstein Veblen in The Theory Of The Leisure Class:
“The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon social development far in excess of that which the simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes against any innovation….” (Penguin Books, 1994, 200)
Amazingly, most Americans will come to the defense of the rich the moment you dare suggest to them that they are parasites, because we are so attached to the fiction of “The American Dream” and the impossible hope that someday we might be rich ourselves that we enter into severe cognitive dissonance when asked to consider the reality of the situation. We even buy into the idea that it’s not the rich siphoning off all the money to waste on diamond-encrusted brassieres, personal LearJets, fleets of limousines, and whatever other decadence they desire, but that’s it’s the poor who dare to need adequate shelter, basic medical care, nutritious food, and (that most dangerous thing of all) quality eduction (perhaps the ONLY economic leveller that exists in our society).