In the April issue (It takes a while to read these cover-to-cover and still polish off four to six books a week!), David Kamp writes an insightful exposé on the American Dream. A sample:
And what about the outmoded proposition that each successive generation in the United States must live better than the one that preceded it? While this idea is still crucial to families struggling in poverty and to immigrants who’ve arrived here in search of a better life than that they left behind, it’s no longer applicable to an American middle class that lives more comfortably than any version that came before it. (Was this not one of the cautionary messages of the most thoughtful movie of 2008, wall-e?) I’m no champion of downward mobility, but the time has come to consider the idea of simple continuity: the perpetuation of a contented, sustainable middle-class way of life, where the standard of living remains happily constant from one generation to the next.
I love a good voice of reason.
3 comments:
Haven't read the article, but I would worry that this is a voice not of reason but of right-wing demagoguery trying to get the middle class of this country to shut up and do as they're told.
Given that the last thirty years the wealth of the top 1% of this country has skyrocketed and the wages of the working people haven't increased at all, combined with the increases in healthcare costs and the 45 million Americans who don't have healthcare insurance, plus how much more of our money these days goes to necessities rather than luxuries compared with 30 years ago, not to mention the wiping out of so many people's retirement funds and the huge unemployment we're facing since the financial meltdown in October, I don't think we're at the point where we should all be happy with what we've got now, or even what we had before October.
Actually it's more about how rampant comsumerism co-opted the virtues of an "American Dream" and not a nostalgic look at abject poverty. And it is pretty much targeted onlt at upper-middle class readers.
Oops. Sorry. On the anti-consumerism thing, I'm with you.
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