THE “AMERICAN DREAM” -- WHAT A SCREAM!

By Edwin Cooney

According to everything I have read from the observations of 2016 political analysts, Americans are furious.  Really furious!  The American Dream is not only gone -- it’s dead!  It has been the victim of Barack Obama, former Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, former House leader Barney Frank of Massachusetts as well as both Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

So, long live the American Dream! 

Bah, humbug!  I think it was the late Paul Harvey who once observed that Americans will swallow anything as long as it’s launched dramatically enough -- or did Mr. Harvey say “pompously” enough?  He ought to have known, as he launched some pretty pithy words and phrases such as “snooper-vision” for supervision, the significance of “the rest of the story,” and a few other emotion-grabbing sentimental sayings.

Thus, politicians do what we expect of them.  Politicians create phrases that illuminate our past so grandly that we, hungry for all the good things imaginable, thrash about looking for our past “dreams” to create and insure our future.  Thus, we insist that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Dr. Ben Carson, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders make “the American Dream” real once again.

Here’s the unvarnished truth.  I can suggest it because I haven’t announced my presidential candidacy yet.  The American Dream has never existed and, to the extent it has been imagined  (usually by some left or rightwing socio/political splinter group), the American dream is mostly a politician’s phraseological prop.  The question is: when was the American Dream really real?

Perhaps the American Dream was really real during the 1950s when the top tax rate was seventy or eighty percent? Or when Americans were panicked by the Rosenberg spies, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist hunt, or Khrushchev’s 1957 Sputnik? Maybe the American Dream was alive and kicking during the huge 1959 steel strike!

Moving on to the 1960s, perhaps the “American Dream” was throbbing during the civil rights struggle, the anti-Vietnam War turmoil, or just after the two Kennedy assassinations. Perhaps it was when Medicare, which was so derided by Republicans, was passed, or it could have been during the 1966 airline strike, the college sit-ins, or the race riots in 1964, ’65, ’66 and ’67.

Perhaps the Chicago police riot during the ’68 Democratic Convention was America’s expression of its truest aspirations.

I remember a moment during the 1966 congressional campaign when President Johnson opined (rather pleadingly, I thought): “I’m not saying you’ve never had it so good, but have you?”  The GOP led by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s election as Governor of California along with the loss of forty-seven Democratic House seats was the American people’s response to LBJ.

America, just like every other nation, has always possessed an agenda for its immediate and long-term future.  However, that agenda is often tempered by our individuality.  More to the point, an agenda isn’t necessarily a dream. Many (but not all) Americans hope to own a home, send their children to college, and prosper in the safety of a highly tuned social, economic, and militarily protected environment.

I suggest that immigrants who dared to set out for American shores were most likely the primary American dreamers. Some (and I’ve got to believe they were few in number!) believed that American city streets were actually paved with gold.  Faced with hard labor in our mines and in our sweatshops, with low pay and with social discrimination, immigrants in the late 18th Century and early 19th Century encountered the growing pains of legitimacy and equity. Accomplishments inevitably bring about growing pains seldom foreseen by dreamers.  Some of these pains, the result of unanticipated economic and social circumstances, were the ultimate American reality.

Back on Wednesday, August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King could assert: “I have a dream today…!”  However, Dr. King wasn’t a politician. He was a preacher.  A preacher is expected to dream of an incomprehensible future that encompasses our fates as individuals, not as a nation.

The politician gains the most when he or she seems sympathetic to his or her constituency. Thus, we insist our leaders must identify with our anxieties, share our frustrations, proclaim and reinforce our anger, stamp our victimhood with the magic seal of legitimacy, and then we assert “you’ve got my vote.”

There’s nothing new about this.  Certainly, FDR listened and reacted to the voters of Depression- ridden America in 1932 as every president has ever since.  Still, this insistence that America is about a “dream” is exceedingly silly!

If they insist that America has reached its pinnacle of freedom and prosperity due primarily to a dream, today’s political peddlers of prosperity and profit must be trying to sell you and me a dream that they, not we, have been dreaming about.

I could be wrong.  However, my guess is that their “dream” is their possible occupancy of that 132-room house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY