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The American Dream
One part of Rorty’s work, Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey, that I found slightly unsettling was his palpable disregard for the belief in the so-called “American dream.” He writes: “I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make believe. Apparently, not even empty bellies can cure it” (Rorty, 13). I personally do not really know what to feel about the American dream. In our current technological, global era, the specific dream of a Horatio Alger-type character being able to pull himself up by his bootstraps only in America might no longer be relevant. However, it surprises me that Rorty would find this major flaw in American ideology during the Great Depression. Maybe I just have a lot of pre-conceived notions of the Great Depression that come from too much exposure to Little Orphan Annie and Waiting for Lefty. But somehow I did not expect Rorty to call the majority of the American population “lazy and irresponsible.” Being unemployed and down on your luck can most likely have one of two effects on people: sink into total despair or fight for your life to fix your circumstances. Rorty does not appear to find American sunk into an emotional depression; however, he outright rejects the latter possibility as well. My notion of the American dream stems from the thought that people in rough situations who choose not to wallow instead choose to improve their lives. What better time to prove this adage true than in the Great Depression, when over a quarter of Americans were unemployed? What better time to prove that you can go from nothing to something by your own hard work and determination? But Rorty contradicts these perceptions by sharing his own negative views of the American psyche. While we currently might not be living through a second Great Depression, this country certainly is experiencing an economic crisis of gigantic proportions. Can the American Dream hold true today? I honestly do not know. For one thing, the American dream might just be one of those things our parents and teachers tell us about to encourage us to work harder than our peers. But if I actually know anyone who has gone from nothing to something, they certainly do not brag about the way some might one hundred years ago. Our world has become so materialistic that it almost seems passé to admit you once had nothing or where no one. So maybe I should not be so surprised by Rorty’s observations; after all, I would probably make the same ones today.
American addiction to make-believe.
I am completely in agreement with you; I was somehow shocked to read him calling Americans everything that our public persona is today: lazy, irresponsible, adolescent, unable to face the truth. "If we, as a people, are to go down helplessly in a fatuous and seemingly unnecessary chaos, it will be this where-life-is-better day dream that ensnared and tripped us" really hit home to me... and I feel like I can take a lot from this. On one hand, the problems I see in American culture are much more deeply rooted than I first thought. Ignorance, rashness, misplaced excesses and gluttony...all of these things seemed to me to be birthed maybe two or three decades ago, or at the very earliest, in the 40's and 50's when advertising and domesticity was roaring in a particularly plastic and television-dinner way.
But on the other hand, just like every generation thinks they are going to witness the end times and writes books and makes movies about it, it looks as though we didn't go down in a flaming ball of chaos, we didn't fall into dictatorship (ahem) we didn't become a communist state, etcetera.
And even further, would it be better if we had gone down in a flaming ball of chaos? Because what, really, has changed about the American mentality?
Perhaps America missed its opportunity for painful but necessary sea-change in the great depression, and the next opportunity it has had is Right Now. Does our culture need destroying, or can it be fixed, or can it be contained to be relatively harmless?
Rorty's essay made me worried for the America of today...where life is, in some regards, better (and in some regards, worse in ways Rorty could never have imagined...malnutrition due to cheap unhealthy foods, obesity, infant mortality, terrorism and geopolitics, etcetera.)
But we are still the same lazy sitting people accepting their fate, without protest, without signs, sometimes even giving up on finding employment, shrinking the perceived percentages of unemployment in the same ways decades later.
Neither half of this cycle is good for anyone. The booming days just feed the disgusting habits that are exposed in the valleys and droughts of wealth.
If we are so the same as we were, as repulsive, perhaps we need complete annihilation. But then again, who's willing to start that? The sad 5% of thinking Americans Rorty discusses remain as inconsequential today as they were back then.