We could argue all night long about what the American Dream is, but I like the definition forwarded by its originator, James Adams: the gradual accumulation of modest wealth through work and ability, facilitated through a social structure where each person has the same opportunity as the next.
Today, we've jettisoned that archaic, ridiculous 1930s notion. No! The American Dream of today is of instant wealth/reward, derived in a twinkling both through heedlessness and, occasionally, through dumb luck:
- The bodies of those 29 Whiskey Victor coal miners who died last week hadn't yet even cooled to room temperature before a widow filed a lawsuit on behalf of her dead husband. Could it perhaps just have been an accident? Don't accidents happen, or is there always someone else to blame?
- Shrimp boaters are just as beholden to their diesel powered engines as the rest of Americans but wasted no time in suing BP over lost revenues due to that wellhead blowout. Suing for future money, for money that hasn't even been lost yet.
- Everyone who bought a housal unit in the last decade. Didn't they just assume unit values could only go up? 20% per annum, ad infinitum, without having to lay out any down payment. Leverage other people's money to gain instant wealth.
- Lawyers on contingency -- if the plaintiff wins, so does the lawyer; if she loses, the lawyer only loses time and effort. It comes as no surprise, then, that we live in the most litigious nation on earth as lawsuits represent the most extreme form of wealth without work. Spilled coffee, medical malpractice, improper labeling on a hammer or on a ladder...
- Indian Gaming -- sprouting up here in Northern California faster than marijuana dispensaries. Triple sevens and that beautiful Mercedes is yours.
- How many of your co-workers also became hot-shit day-traders in the stock market in 1999, running Ameritrade on Netscape? How many of them are still doing trades today, huh? How many?
- There's no shortage of advertisements on conservative talk radio on how to screw everyone who ever lent you money through bankruptcy or other means of debt elimination. That's the Republican mantra: Free-markets, damn-it!...until chapter seven of title eleven becomes your stop gap when you've gone overboard on hookers and blow.
- Social security disability for legions who have no problems negotiation their housal unit staircases yet can't seem to climb into their cars for a day's work at the office.
- Something for nothing -- EBT; free emergency room care for your Oxycontin/vodka binges; the bank of mom & pop.
- Huddling around the radio atop the three-legged-dinette each Saturday evening, listening to the weekly powerball drawing...hoping...dreaming...wishing...
- No interest until 2013! Wa-hey! Bring forward your material wants before you've even worked for them, and bring forward your 2013 wants to 2017. Always looking a few years out, but never where you are.
- American Idol hopefuls, looking for instant fame, who've never even considered that trudging from cocktail lounges to open-mics is another option, because that is a form of work...and Americans, apparently, don't have to work anymore with all our outsourcing of real labor to Asia and domestic labor to Salvadorean migrants. We only have to manage, finance, and insure all those laborers to make our living...the dream in action.
- Back-dated stock options. Choose the date, disclose it through poorly-worded and vague language to your shareholders, and wa-hey! Instant wealth!
- Go ahead: ask Charles VanDoren what became of his pursuit of unearned riches.
- Flip tranches of collateralized debts expected to fail, flip them to even bigger suckers, then take out insurance on the short positions -- sit back, and watch the money just roll in. Money for nothin'.
Look to the Kiwi Dream, New Zealand's version with a home on a quarter acre, at least one motorized vehicle, and a second vacation flat -- and see how this mirrors our American dream: the public display of wealth, a total disregard for your natural surroundings, and a total disregard for your fellow human beings.
You may believe that this might be the perfect little housal unit, perhaps somewhere on the North Island -- yet this also demonstrates how New Zealand's dream is utterly dependent on the consumption of ~160,000 barrels of oil per day against a national production of ~ 24,000, all needed to shuttle these housalunitowners to jobs in the city.
Look around your own housal unit, your own neighborhood, your own city. Do you see all of that being powered in the near future by batteries? Do you see your future roads being built from wind-generated synthetic asphalt? Your groceries delivered to your centralized warehoused consumption depot by batterized tractor trailers? Commuting a 90-mile daily round trip on car batteries? Do you have any idea of the social and real costs of generating all that electric power to "fuel" your batteries?
I think you really have to be asleep to live the American dream; a dream world where the service economy provides everything for everyone at all times; where cheap imported Asian manufactured items fill our housal units to the rafters with all sorts of time saving gadgets while bitching that we're always out of time; where energy is too cheap to meter, too cheap to concern ourselves with conserving; where incessant vehicularized motoring is required for every function of daily living, from buying a pack of gum to visiting grandma.
Your American Dream is for sale. Goldman Sachs has been fucking you out of a percentage of your sweat equity via higher borrowing costs and lowered interest on your savings and we just go along and accept it as an unavoidable cost of living the dream. Your dream; wealth without risk, riches without effort, fruits without labor, money for nothin'; these are going to continue for a very long time, yes. Your dream is now dependent on the efforts of foreigners, and on the dependency of energy from elsewheres. Yes, many of you will thrive, and you will thrive well...at least for the moment.
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