Time to Wake Up From (or Should It Be to?) the American Dream

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His “Sacred Democracy” columns appear monthly in readthedirt.org.

There can hardly be a more famous phrase in our national vocabulary, or a more increasingly infamous one, than those words about which George Carlin notoriously said: “It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” And while a rich history has surrounded the phrase as an ideal — for a few decades in our previous century it sent a truly honorable message to a majority of Americans — by the time the acerbic comedian uttered his abject opinion, a good many of us were in sorry agreement.

For several years in the early '70s, a cherubic satirist named Marshall Efron had a weekly show on PBS called “The Great American Dream Machine,” in which he lampooned corporate pandering to consumer appetites as a perversion of the hallowed notion. If you were of a certain social persuasion (we called it “consciousness” then), you grokked Efron’s message. But if you weren’t, you bought into their myth of the dream — hook, line and sinker. And at the end of that decade, you were voting for Ronald Reagan.

The term per se hadn’t entered universal coinage until 1931, when James Truslow Adams published “The Epic of America.” In his book, the highly respected historian hailed the “American dream … of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement … unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations … for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.” Yet it could be said that, by the Depression, America had already caught up with those older civilizations.

Many have observed over the years (especially when I was in graduate school in the sixties) that the tradition of the American novel is replete with deconstructions of the dream, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” to Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” to Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” to Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” — and that list only covers the most notable examples between 1884 and 1925. Indeed, it makes one wonder what J. T. Adams was reading, besides the hallowed history of New England, about which his own three-volume study had won a Pulitzer Prize. Whatever it was, he clearly chose to de-emphasize the hardscrabble reality of life in the U.S. of A.

But the dream nonetheless deserves its due. It owes its birth, at least in spirit, to the “self-evident” truths enumerated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: “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.” No argument there, I don’t expect, perhaps other than there being a “Creator” to whom we owe our democratic endowments. But he immediately adds: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And then: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” So then, if Jefferson’s American dream lies in all citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and (at least the pursuit of) happiness, it has also to do with their responsibilities to government — in their instituting of it, and in their consent to its powers. Indeed, those powers are extensions of their own, being representative, through the ballot, of their will.

At least in theory. The Framers of our Constitution were leery of that will, as they secretly scuttled the Articles of Confederation in favor of the embattled document now in effect. In their wary eyes, a one-house legislature with no executive or judicial branch of government gave too much to the whim of ordinary Americans. There had to be a Senate as well, mirroring Britain’s House of Lords, to further prevent a “leveling of power,” as Jerry Fresia puts it in “Toward an American Revolution” (1988): “The kind of system the Framers generally had in mind was a particular kind of representative system or republic; it was one in which elites or ‘better people’ decide what is best for ‘common people.’”

This insight is echoed in Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes’ “The Genius of America” (2007). Despite their friendlier take on the Framers’ motives, as indicated by their sub-title, … “How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again,” they quote James Madison, the Constitution’s principal author, thusly: “’There is no maxim … more liable to be misapplied … than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.’” Their dream, as Madison viewed it, was “‘the immediate augmentation of property and wealth.’” To Lane and Oreskes, the Constitution was a means of protecting us all from our own worst impulses. And that’s even with the Bill of Rights, which was grudgingly agreed upon to win the ratification of the northern states.

Yet is an American dream of owning the rewards of our own labors — or of freely choosing for ourselves the very nature of those labors — such an unworthy ambition? Or is it only so when our dream is to own rewards and opportunities for employment that are far in excess of what is fair, in a reasonable estimation of what constitutes a just society?

History shows the Puritans’ desire for religious freedom exceeded any well-wishes for the Quakers, whom they persecuted freely, just as the oligarchs of today want precious few benefits of government largesse for the poor, next to those they lobby for themselves. The dream, it’s fair to say, has fallen pitifully short of “liberty and justice for all.” And whether government, the rich or we ourselves are to blame, only the dream holds the answer.

It’s hard to disagree with Carlin’s assessment. Yet the spirit of the dream breathes deeply beneath the surface of the slogan. So then what do we wish for, and for whom?

Just thinking….