The End of the American Dream –or-- What’s a Generation To Do?

There is something deeply troubling brewing in America today. For a generation raised on the prosperity and hubris of the 80s and 90s, the turns we are taking in this country are a bit hard to stomach. Not only has corporate America and the rise of Yuppiedom raised our lifestyle standards to unprecedented and unsubstantiated levels, it’s also made it so that we have, ironically, very little choice about the lifestyles we can lead here. Gone are the days when one could make it as a jazz musician, or a poet, or even an independent proprietor in Manhattan, once the center of the bohemian movement in America that fostered the creation of great art, and music, and literature. Similarly, the beat poets and hippies and other counter-culturalists that once found a home on the streets and cafes of San Francisco must look elsewhere if they hope to keep their lifestyle alive. I, for one, believe that this is a tragic turn of events in the history of American culture.

This country was built upon the idea of the rugged individualist, a place where you—any free person—could claim your plot, dig in your heels, and make a life for yourself on your own terms. At one time, rejecting the status quo only made you an outsider; now, it makes you an endangered species, a dying breed with nowhere to turn. What does a generation such as mine do when faced with a future of crippling debt, a shrinking job market, and an increasingly homogenized culture? Honestly, I do not know. What was once the American dream has been transformed into the American burden—no longer a dream but a standard, a prerequisite, a requirement—and what’s left in its wake is a society without options and choices, only obligations. We’ve started to become everything we feared communism represented during the cold war: a country without opportunity or individual freedom, two of our loftiest American ideals. Think about this: once the American dream was finding a place in our society where you could be the person you wanted to be, own your own house and car, and raise a family in the secure confines of a community and society where your children could grow into the people they dreamed of being. Now, those things have become what we deserve, not aspire to, and its what we do after we have the job, the house, and the family that makes us who we are. Our expectations of what we deserve are destroying the idea of the individual, and with it, the sprit of what has made this country so great, and so pioneering.

Why do I bring this up? Because here in Nashville, I’m meeting people from all over the country who’ve come here because it’s the only place they can afford to live where they feel they can be a part of a large-scale creative community. I have friends in almost every major city in America, from Chicago to Los Angeles, New York to Seattle, Boston to San Francisco, and not one of them can truly afford to live in the fashion we’ve come to expect. And my friends are, for the most part, not in the arts. They are engineers, or chefs, or accountants--smart, well-educated, ambitious folks barely scraping by on salaries that would have made them flush if they had grown up when their parents did. And forget about the main pillar of the American dream, namely property ownership—trying to find an affordable mortgage in California is like trying to find clean in a bucket full of shit.

Great art has always been inspired by a social context, and historically, hotbeds of cultural and artistic innovation have grown in the tumultuous and frenetic landscape of the city—think of how contemporary American music was born in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century; or of the birth of the American cultural identity in Boston with the rejection of the imposition of British cultural and economic policies. Now, all you can do in cities is try to keep your head above water and work your way to the corner office. Cities are no long fortresses and ports where communities can be grown and ideas hatched, but mere gulags of luxury. We are losing our cities and our dreams, and with it the things that have made America great.

And, simply put, there is no way to have it all back. What the next frontier will be for cultural human evolution is unclear, and the kind of place in the world that the 21st century thinking individual will be able inhabit is yet to be seen. But before we get there, I’d like to take a moment to say a few last words for the American dream: it was a good run, while it lasted, and we’ll miss you.