THE CLOUD OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

Americans grow up under the cloud of the American Dream, a way of life and a set of beliefs that lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction.

It is commonly thought in the United States that ‘anyone’ can be President. This is untrue. There are millions of people and only one president every 4 or 8 years. Of course, belief in the system is more powerful than reality of how it works.

The American Dream has a steel tight grip and good PR: you can win the race, get the job, marry the model or the rich man, have breakfast at Tiffany’s and see your name in lights on Broadway. Boys are taught from a young age that they are gifted players of baseball, football, at running, catching the fish, reaching the peaks. Girls are told ad infinitum that they are princesses as pretty as a prom queen, that they have the je ne sais quoi – a certain something only the French can explain – to be anything they want to be.

Best not to mention that Taylor Swift and Brad Pitt were lucky in the looks lottery and still had to work day and night, day after day, year after year to become Taylor Swift and Brad Pitt. Success is not a gift. It is a long hard climb up a barbed wire fence.

For the 99.9 percent, suddenly, unexpectedly, it strikes Americans like a knife in the back that the promise made by parents and the culture that you have the world at your feet and everything to play for is a cliché. Waking from this bed of lies is brutal, demoralising, and it gets worse as you look into the mirror and see with your own eyes that you are not that pretty, clever, fast, good at baseball, or particularly good at anything at all.  

The cloud of the American Dream is omnipresent. Disillusion leads to the bitter pill of depression. Resentment with its twin sister distress are the iceberg tip concealing the mass of bile and bitterness below the surface, down in the pit of the stomach where the serpents of cancer lay their foul eggs. 

The American Dream, Dream On

In Britain, there is no need to shelter from the cloud of the American Dream. The class system teaches that you are no one, that you cannot achieve all life’s goals, that no matter for how long or how hard you work, society’s portcullis is built in such a way that you know with your mother’s milk that there are others who are better, more qualified and more capable of whatever it is than you are. No matter how high you rise, you will never be King – a role, in English mythology, chosen by God, not the people.

Pensioners in Britain receive less than their counterparts in Europe. The hospitals are broken, the schools are broken – literally – the legal system is broken … but people when their get out of bed or the gutter each morning do so with the solace that at least they are not European. Or American.

The American Dream can be compared with Sisyphus from Greek mythology being condemned to repeat through eternity the same meaningless task pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again just as it nears the top – failing on the point of success, as Lao-tsu predicted the common man usually does.

Albert Camus in his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ takes this fatuous task to present the philosophy of the absurd in which he dissects the juxtaposition between the human need to attribute meaning to life and the ‘unreasonable silence’ of the universe – and God – in response. Camus explains that the appreciation of the absurd does not justify or suggest suicide but, instead, requires ‘revolt.’ He believed, finally, that ‘the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus is happy’ living below the cloud of the American Dream.

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