The Thin Dream

Gee thanks guys: photo by Jacob...KIn the American Dream we see a utopian ideal of individual freedom, ensured by personal, earned wealth; the man is made by his merit, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, out of the mire of poverty and into high society: per Horatio Alger, from rags to riches. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the imagined city of Moriana, which may at first appear opalescent, luminous and perfect, but "you have only to walk in a semicircle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face": an expanse of rust, garbage, filth and utter destitution. (Calvino 105)

The Dream, like the city's beauty, is an enchanting idea, but a thin one, its obverse inscribed as if on a sheet of paper, "with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other." (Calvino 105) This split is not the only way to view America, but the former being so prevalent in popular culture and political rhetoric, it is one of the easiest and most common. The stark contrast of the two sides of the Dream, of great wealth and great poverty, of great freedom and great servitude, allow for its adherents the kind of sentimentality and blithe expectation of a good and happy future that Rorty so angrily criticizes. However it also means that the fall from grace a former adherent of the Dream must have suffered is so precipitous and shocking that the entire society and populace that is infused with it must be regarded with bitter derision, as a pack of lies maintained by ignorant fools. Rorty for me was the most troublesome of the texts we were to read, not merely for his grim and bleak outlook but for his claim to unsentimentality, when he writes like a scorned lover. He acknowledges this though, that his attempt at unsentimentality is borne of the sentiment he once too felt, and the vigor which he brings to his mission is quite personal, borne of bitter disappointment. (Rorty 14)

The nickname "Farewell House", given to the transient shelter in Toledo, demonstrates the especial bitterness of expectations demolished: what should be a shelter is instead a gateway to physical and moral disintegration, and entry into poverty, unemployment and homelessness is for many irreversible. (Rorty 28) So many seemingly basic comforts rest upon a delicate and interlocked structure of social status, health, and finances which is much easier to maintain than to attain, but which can also be suddenly and unexpectedly torn away.

Probably the most troubling aspect of Rorty's piece, however, is that when we look back at it now, for all of its grim intonations and extreme bitterness, it was incredibly prescient.