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American Dream and Technology
For fear of being rote I won’t look too closely at the predicaments of Lem Pitkin and instead look broadly at his aim. I began to mention in my last post that there seems something fundamentally different with the down-and-out today in that the idea a bum could make a fortune would be a far out laugh. “A Cool Million” couldn’t be written today merely for the fact that such an activity taken on by such a man would itself be the punchline. Because it just doesn’t seem to happen anymore. A farm boy doesn’t grow up to start a major motor company. A boy raised in a one-room rural cabin will not do business in the Oval Office. Besides the arts and entertainment industries, and unless one’s fostered out of poverty, he or she would unlikely leave home with any prospects of fortune at all.
If the Great Depression lead many to dispute the American Dream in the 1930s, today its already been deadened.
It seems that success today is so depended on technology that the advancements of the last two decades have created an impossible gulf between the homeless and those with access to it. Without a cell phone, without a computer or without the internet it would seems you are set much further back than someone who merely lacks a home or income. And wit
Lincoln's Birthplaceh our generation and all those who come after, a technological acumen is not only helpful to gain a proper education but today it seems necessary. This very class would be a prime example. Getting a bed and a minimum wage would be a small step towards fortune today. One must go much further to make a decent income and even further than that to make a fortune, let alone a motor empire or a presidential campaign.
In the literature we’ve read, the American Dream seems primarily the dream of the homeless and the low middle class. Today it seems a dream for the middle classes who have something of a fortune to start with, and the immigrants who may have less understanding than they do have hope. (The entertainment industry does seem like one, however, to which this might not apply. I just read that Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” was raised on a rural farm in Mexico and crossed the U.S. border illegal twenty years ago. He became a U.S. citizen this year and his company will soon be worth $100 million.)
Dog Whisperer: Cesar Millan
iPods for the Whole Family
It is very sad indeed that humans have already become so dependent on technology. I was hoping for at least 20 more years of using my brain before I had to succumb to the iPod army. As an extremely wealthy youth, I can say that I like life at the top, surrounded by my gadgets and gizmos, only doing something when my iPhone calendar tells me to. I think that there are many people out there, including entrepreneurs and investment bankers who are seeing things just like you are. They are developing that little laptop thing for kids. Wow I'm about to put a link in a comment: http://laptop.org/en/. This is an organization hell-bent on giving poor people laptops so that they can check their facebook every thirty seconds in the most imporverished of nations. Another organization, the OCPPC (one camera phone per child) is supplying poor people with little cameras so they can flesh out their facebook profiles and tag their friends about all the fun they're having in the Sahara desert. With these little hundred-dollar laptops, maybe we can have a new Abe Lincoln in the white house. And that little laptop with have it's own display in the Smithsonian museum: here was the laptop of (presidential name here), he came from nothing and facebooked and networked his way to the oval office. Tis only a dream, but a wet one nonetheless.