Dream On

This is my 50th Up With a Twist post. To mark that milestone, and in light of the sensitive and timely nature of this essay, I’m offering it to all subscribers.

Author’s Note: I wrote the first draft a year and a half ago with the intent to indict wealth and income inequality in this country as the culprit for making the ‘American Dream’ little more than a castle in the air out of reach for many if not most Americans. Venal politicians and wealthy benefactors have long been bedfellows, but their incestuous relationship has mostly been kept from the public eye until the emergence of one Donald J. Trump. Astoundingly, the helm of this country has been handed to him again, and this time he is making no effort to hide or apologize for filling the government with and selling influence to his ultra-rich friends. That we are officially a plutocracy rather than a representative democracy is no longer in doubt. The bitter irony of this twist in the arc of our history is that a majority of people who voted for Trump are the ones most denied the American Dream by his iniquitous personage and policies. For the record I changed little in the essay save for mentioning Trump’s re-election and updating Elon Musk’s net worth. I did, however, rewrite the ending.

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Can I tell you something?

I’m living the American Dream. Which according to the late, great philosopher-comedian George Carlin is called such because you have to be asleep to believe it. Actually, all Americans are living the dream because we reside in the land of milk and honey – a country of wealth equality, economic prosperity, and limitless opportunity where any man or woman of any color, creed, sexual identity, race, or religion, regardless of how humble their upbringing or low their social standing, can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become successful beyond their wildest dreams.

No, wait. That’s Switzerland.

Okay, so we don’t have those pretty mountains, or trains that run on time, or holes in our cheese, but here in America we have inalienable rights, right?

We are blessed with life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness. And a house and cars and trucks and a boat and braces and college for the kids and new clothes we can wear until they go out of style.

But who can afford such happiness? Rich people, that’s who. Excuse me for using a pejorative term, I meant to say people in the upper-income bracket. Which makes it sound like they live inside a box instead of a 17-room house on eight acres with a pool and a pickleball court.

Before you roll your eyes and delete this post, I promise it’s not a communist manifesto or an angry screed pillorying wealthy people. America is a great place to live, and I feel fortunate to have benefitted from a middle-class upbringing with a good education and ample opportunity. It’s entirely my fault I screwed up and missed the boat buying a boat. It’s just that not everyone is as fortunate.

The American Dream is nothing more than a mirage for the many who thirst for a roof over their head, food on the table, and a shred of dignity to call their own, let alone get rich.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Little-known author and historian James Truslow Adams – no relation to the Presidents – coined the phrase “American Dream” in his 1931 smash best-seller Epic of America. He wrote of a dream that “life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” Just in case you haven’t read Epic of America, the Oxford Dictionary graciously includes women in the dream and defines it as “the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.” That axiomatic ideal has inspired millions around the globe and attracted wave after wave of immigrants to wash up on our shores, often at great risk to their lives, in hopes of living the dream.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Those lofty words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty greeted freedom seekers whose hopes must have soared when they read them. Except of course for the people who couldn’t read English, or those who arrived before 1924 when there was no statue or welcome mat or even a Walmart greeter on duty. Not to mention the indigenous people, here long before white men arrived, happily living their own version of the American Dream thank you very much, or the boat loads of black Africans who washed up on our shores in chains.

The American Dream is now widely accepted as the aspirational gestalt for people born in this country, and more on that in a minute, but the truth is the dream was originally packaged and sold primarily as a sop to the European working class who were tired of curtsying to royals and high hats before cleaning their chimneys for a sixpence or a sou.

This was an easy sell because many longed to stop curtsying, which is not only demeaning but hard on the knees, and start their own chimney cleaning business, buy a fleet of Econoline vans and hire other immigrants to clean the chimneys. Dreamy, right?

Rapid industrialization during the latter part of the 19th century in America led to wages going up dramatically and that was a huge attraction for the chimney sweeps of the world. Some did find success and it is testament to the incredible drive and perseverance of those immigrants, many of whom arrived with little more than the shirts on their backs – I’m guessing pants and shoes as well, but you never hear about those do you? – and only a couple words of English to communicate with.

Trouble was, most of them found not success but shitty and often dangerous jobs working for slave wages because the money bags being generated in factories and on railroads was purloined by a handful of greedy men.

Thumbing their noses at noblesse oblige, these men were so rapacious they earned the moniker “robber barons”, which conjures images of rascally cartoon characters when in fact they were heartless bloodsuckers. This two-decade-long period became known as the “Gilded Age”, mostly because Mark Twain called it that in his aptly titled novel The Gilded Age. Despite making it sound like a grand time to be alive, the name implied that massive economic inequality and social upheaval following the end of the Civil War was gilded over like a gold-plated toilet in the executive washroom.

Back then it was considered an outrage, un-American even, that only 2% of the population controlled a third of the wealth. It was so troubling to the country writ large that it actually caused politicians in Washington to take notice.

One such noticer took to the bully pulpit and warned, “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, who’s chief interest is to hold and increase their power, could destroy American democracy.” And I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t Bernie Sanders. It was Teddy Roosevelt for crying out loud.

Picture if you will a time when politicians from both parties reached across the aisle to craft legislation that addressed the social and economic issues which plague America and tried to solve problems with the greater good as their goal. I am not making this up. And the Gilded Age was such a time.

Teddy Roughrider was able to threaten Congress with his big stick and thus became the proud father of the Estate Tax and Capital Gains Tax, both of which it was thought would make wealth inequality less of a threat to democracy and level the playing field so that a chimney sweep might have the opportunity to earn a decent living and maybe even get ahead. At least get an Econoline van.

All that outrage and aisle-crossing lasted through World War II, culminating in a 90% tax bracket for top earners during the Eisenhower administration which counterintuitively fueled a post-war economic boom. Sadly, by the end of the 1960s, the Vietnam War and civil rights movement had so shredded the fabric of American society that bi-partisan politics became an anachronism.

When in 1980 Ronald Reagan declared government was not the solution but the problem and started playing with economic voodoo dolls, the nose of the wealth inequality camel was back in the tent and we’ve been basically fucked ever since. Except for rich people. And big corporations, which since Citizens United in 2010 are now rich people too.

Okay, I may have misled you earlier. This is an angry screed. I didn’t mean it to be, it just happened. And maybe I’m being too cute by half, but my beef is not with rich people per se, it’s with a system that encourages the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few and rewards them with outsized political power. If you really believe your vote counts as much as a billionaire’s, I’d like to talk to you about investing in my new cryptocurrency.

More to the point, unlike when Teddy wasn’t just another pretty face on Mt. Rushmore and people in this country cared about fairness, equality, opportunity, yadda, yadda, yadda, a majority of Americans are now not only fine with consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few, they think it’s pretty cool. And will buy bibles and bobblehead dolls to celebrate those who do.

To wit, bobbleheads actually elected a robber baron as president a few years back, then after he tried to overthrow his own government and committed numerous other felonious acts, they did it again.

So, what happened to the American Dream?

Oh, it’s still a thing. People who have strappy boots are occasionally able to pull themselves up by them – that makes no sense if you think about it – and working the drive-thru at Mickey D’s is still better than spending your entire life up to your keister in a rice paddy.

But as much as we celebrate wealth in this country, the fact of the matter is your chance of living the American Dream has a lot more to do with who mom and dad are than how much initiative, ability, and determination you have or how sturdy your bootstraps are.

Wealth comes from two things. A few folks do hit the lottery, and savings and investments can generate capital gains, but that only goes so far. The truth is most wealth comes from inheritance. It’s how the rich get richer. But wait, what about the Estate Tax you ask? Thanks to regularly scheduled Republican tax cuts and the creation of loopholes so big you could drive a Brinks truck through them, wealthy people avoid most if not all of that tax, and on capital gains too for that matter. Saying the quiet part out loud, Gary Cohn, who had a seat on Trump’s first National Economic Council of mountebanks, once acidly observed that, “only morons pay the Estate Tax”.

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends.

In our modern Gilded Age, the top 1% owns 35% of all wealth, 50% of the stock market, and has 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. As this essay goes to press, Elon Musk is now worth $434 billion. To put that in perspective, the median U.S. worker has an annual income of $65,470 and would have to keep his or her nose to the grindstone six-and-a-half million years to earn the same amount. You read that right.

During the first year and a half of the pandemic, American billionaires added $2.1 trillion to their collective wealth while the rest of us made sourdough bread and went on Zillo to find out we couldn’t afford to buy a house. Today, 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, while some can’t even wait for the next check and have to pay usury interest rates just to buy sourdough bread.

I’m not saying the American Dream is completely dead, just that corporate greed and collusion of the very rich with the U.S. government have squeezed the fabled middle class nearly out of existence.

In many ways, this is the inevitable result of combining two potent forces – bridled democracy and barely bridled capitalism. With apologies to Winston Churchill who coined the phrase describing democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others. The sad truth is that our founding fathers, in order to escape the oppressive rule of a monarchy and the manifest unfairness of a plutocracy, created a bold and unique form of self-government meant to be a democratic meritocracy, yet inadvertently created the world’s greatest plutocracy. An impressive achievement but sad, nevertheless.

The unfortunately named but famous French economist Claude-Frédéric Bastiat – so famous he had not one but two accents in his name – once said critiquing capitalism, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

Not so famous American moralist and social philosopher Eric Hoffer put it more bluntly. “Every great cause starts as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” And now the Racketeer in Chief is back in charge.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

The great American lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II wrote his classic love song When I Grow Too Old to Dream in 1934 during the depths of the Great Depression. It has been covered by a virtual who’s who of top recording artists over the past century and to this day hasn’t lost any of its poignancy. I’m 68 and hopefully have a few years left, but seeing Donald Trump take the oath of office again made me feel very, very old.

When I grow too old to dream, I’ll have you to remember. When I grow too old to dream, your love will live in my heart.

Sweet dreams, America.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.