“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even more stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is; a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its own message.” Jean Baudrillard, America
I am a greedy heathen. I indulge in gluttony and wickedness. And I live for its entirety. Every night I quit the futility of my daily chores, my indentured servitude, my muted hysteria that I’ve bottled up and clothed in the civility and decorum of a normal person. I crawl into bed with an exhaustion of the day, but an excitement for the night, as if this sleep was a reward for making it through another day. As if it was going to be a little adventure I had been planning and was about to embark on. I snuggle up, pull the sheets up to my chin, peel my socks off and toss them away like old condoms, let my toes wiggle their way to warmth in their linen cave. And I set forth into the unknown, and I dream.
But then something happens, always the same. I am robbed, my memories of experience are stolen from me. I spend eight hours every night in that other nobler uninhibited realm, and I remember almost none of it! My eyes open to the sun poisoning me all around, songbirds mocking the sordid air, perfumes of the world overwhelm. I’m awake, yet again, forced to punch back into this world with a frightening immediacy, like those people in that show Severance, forgetting the brighter and better other realities in the dark, discarding nearly everything I had just experienced in that scintillating marvel of escapism. I groan, and fart and piss, and make coffee. And then I realize I’m late, and drive off to work.
You only dream for about two hours of each night, the majority of which you surely don’t remember. If dreams were meant as lessons or messages or pleadings from your subconscious, like you were some other thing that your dreams were trying frantically every single night to bestow some wisdom onto, then it’s not working. The few dreams that you do manage to hold onto, and bring back with you from the other side, quickly evaporate into little puffs of lost memories, like fetid queefs escaping into the churning tornados of the mind. When you wake up suddenly and disapprovingly in the middle of a particularly good dream, you pull the sheets over your head and shut your eyes, trying desperately to return to the marble-coated escapes, boundless and dancing, naked, beautiful, and alive again. You think: do not wake me up. Don’t you dare. Out there, you have to go to work, finalize the spreadsheet for the boss, pick up the kids from school, and then when you actually do have a moment of free time to yourself, in the bathroom taking a shit, you spend it staring into the hole of your phone until your legs fall asleep, buying socks on Amazon, sending fire emojis to hotties you’ll never sleep with. In our free time—the allotment we are allowed to daydream for ourselves, in the quiet corners amidst the chaos—we choose to subsist on a diet of podcasts and porn. You spend it by sending memes to your ride-or-die. We cram the air with other faceless voices, like we are trying to manifest voices in our head, like we were trying to be sent to the madhouse. Through your fragments of free time, you survive somehow, like eating the crumbs tossed to the ground for the beggars. Let us sleep!
When you were young, you’d throw tantrums when it was bedtime, your angry snot-riddled outbursts protesting against this purgatory. Because you knew that sleep was the lull of life that it is. But now you can’t wait for bed again, because sleeping is when you get to live again. Seductions of those untethered fantasies. You wander off into heroic perversions, stalwart and honorable. You can mimic impossible scenarios, you can have sex with whoever you want, fly, become a dolphin, travel through time, tell people how you actually feel about them. You can be brave for once.
There’s presumed wisdom in saying you should never achieve your dreams because it’s what keeps you pursuing them. Not achieving your dreams allows you to wake up in the morning and “get after it.” Until I can make a living as a writer or a painter, I have to wake up at six in the morning to write a couple hours before I have to slug away to my job, and then immediately upon returning, I go back down to my studio to write or paint some more. Yes, I dream of being able to spend all my time here, of getting paid tons of money to write freely in Harpers or The New Yorker, just like I dream of pressing pause on the sheer rage of time slipping away, to just pause the whole world and the sun and the churning cosmic enterprise like you would command a television with a remote control, and then spend as much time down here writing novels and screenplays that I don’t have the time to. Dreams are what keep us slugging through it all, even when we know most of them will never be realized.
Dreams are, of course, the overwhelming consummation of our everyday lives. We dream in order to make better sense of the world we are required to return to and participate in. Movies are dreams, and we dutifully go back to them night after night because they are more tangible than the ephemeral and perspiring hauntings of our sleep. Paintings are probably more dreamlike than any of the art forms. They are a single frame of infinity that are presented to us, and the really talented artists can bring us the mastery of strangeness from other dimensional realness.
The British Pre-Raphaelite painter, John William Waterhouse, depicted sleep’s proximity to death in his 1874 masterpiece “Sleep and His Half-Brother Death,” of the two slumbering boys side-by-side in bed, one weighed heavy in shadow, the other soaked in light while holding poppies, the first boy dead and his brother only sleeping. Everything philosophically and artistically important finds a way to connect itself back to Greek mythology, and this painting of course is no different. The boy in light holding his poppies, is a representation of Hypnos, the godly personification of sleep; the brother in shadow is Thanatos, or death. And so we ask ourselves from time to time: when the lights go out for good, are we dead or are we headed to a newer stranger land than here? Or what about when people leave whatever godforsaken land they used to call home to come here, to this godforsaken land, to pursue the American dream? It was once a real thing.
The other day I was standing behind someone in 7-11, waiting for them to dig through their pockets for the last scabby lint-choked dollar bill so they could afford a five dollar scratcher. The cashier then handed him the scratcher, told him good luck, but the man didn’t leave. He furiously scratched away the silver coating with the edge of a penny, still crowding the line that was now stretching down past the rollers of rotating hotdogs glistening in grease, people waiting with their muffins and coffees and microwaved biscuit sausage sandwiches, little huffs of impatience coming from the back, the man scratching away in a frenzy, like hope addicted to itself, little pulses of these dreams of freedom and riches squirting into the failing goo of his brain. And then he paused, scanning what was now a postcard of defeat, and his realization of failure, like having just ejaculated into a sock and then instantly hated yourself for it. He realized he won nothing, leaving the sheet on the counter, and walking out in a rattle of annoyance, back down the alleyway from where he came, him against the world, one scratcher at a time.
I paid for my coffee, bought a lotto ticket, and walked out, trying to ignore the man with his pants fallen to his ankles as he stared down the bruise-colored cement like it was his enemy. Before I could get into the safety of anonymity of my van, where I could honk and curse at the stupidity of everyone from behind my little private fortress of glass and metal, another man came out of nowhere and asked me for a cigarette.
But I didn’t. So I got into my van and drove away.
There’s something innately cruel about the phrase “the American Dream,” like it was some dementor of syntax that crept up on you and tried to get a rise out of you. Not because it’s a preposterous concept, of coming to a new land with only a few rags on your back and making the most and the best of your capabilities. (It’s probably the most romantic and courageous of efforts.) But because nobody actually believes in it anymore. Just those three words commits a modern mockery, a malodorous phlegm caught in the back of the throat, something you hack up and spit out. Because the term, although a simple one, has aged into resembling something more of a diseased mascot performing its famous lampoon, rather than the rosy sentiment of its origins.
It is strange, in a way, for a country to have a slogan, a sort of catch phrase and attitude of how a disjointed frontier sees itself, or at least how it wants to be seen by others. Because as far as slogans go, States have them—Maryland’s “Manly Deeds, Womanly Words,” New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die,” New Mexico’s strangely profane “It Grows As It Goes”—serving as little performative jockeying quips on license plates to tell other people driving behind them what they’re missing out on; politicians have them, for the dull-minded to chant them furiously at rallies like they were concert anthems; and most of all products have them, usually cheap plastic things that require a lyrical identity in order to convince you to buy it. But entire countries typically do not.
There’s myriad polls taken from time to time that report things like, “85% of US adults say that things in the country are headed in the wrong direction.” (CNN) “Three-quarters of Americans (76%) believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.” (ABC News) “A whopping 70% say it’s on the wrong track.” (MSN) These are largely meaningless polls that do little to signify what’s behind this sentiment. (Do you blame it on the Democrats or on Trump? Because that’s the choice you get.) Measuring such a vague impression without detailing any of the immense nuance and reasons behind it isn’t trying to be a constructive poll, and it fails in identifying what people are most discouraged by. But it does signify a general tone and mood of us Americans as a whole. It’s not what it’s been cracked up to be. We bought something, and now we don’t like it, and now we want to write an angry Yelp review. This is mostly what politics is, or at least what our political opinions consist of: a reactionary spasm that prides itself in the contempt of the last guy who messed it all up.
But what is the American dream? It’s hard to define, in the simple terms that James Truslow Adams defined it, because a country naturally changes as it passes through the undulations of time. With that in mind, America is a product. It’s a plastic strip mall offering different options of all-you-can-buy buffets. You buy America. You bring it into your life, you welcome it in like a vampire, every time you wave its flag, every time you root for a sports team, vote for your people and your party, march at protests, perform your opinions online about how it should be.
It’s not the United States, not even North America, it’s just America. The American Dream. The first and last standing hallmark of grief and cowardice, a metamorphosis of snarling hogs trying to clamor out of the mud. We have a different history from other countries. There’s something obviously horrific in it, but also remarkably romantic. Adventurers and enterprise men and prospectors-of-wealth taking a gamble on a new land and turning it into the bounty of garish fortune. Most of my favorite writers are American, the Whitmans and Emersons and Melvilles and Faulkners of our country who managed to articulate our unique place and circumstances in the whole history of the whole world. There’s something uniquely quixotic and sentimental about Whitman’s poem, “Pioneers! O Pioneers,” in that, even if the poem hasn’t necessarily aged to our modern sensitivities, it is exciting even as a memory, to set out into the unknown wildness and begin anew.
Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson,
wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal,
and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize,
World of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
But we get something else. We don’t get poetry, we get the political speeches, the debates and warring ideologies, we get to export our war machines, and let our people rot and die in the street. Nixon said, “The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.” An exceptional politician’s platitude. A nice little play on words, and the perfect level of a vague gaseous notion that sounds good but you can’t hold onto, like teachings from a self-help book.
But the American Dream isn’t exactly a dream. It’s not even the dreary laziness of fantasy, but more of a kind of fetish, a way of cheating reality that we got away with for a while. Promising infinite growth within a finite system isn’t the con only reserved for the politicians—we convince ourselves of this too, everyday waking up to compete again in the brutality of a doddering war. A few weeks ago I bought and read David Grann’s bestselling book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, about and English warship in the 18th century that shipwrecks off the coast of Patagonia, and all hell breaks loose. It’s a perfectly fine and interesting read into the dynamics of power and leadership, but Grann rambled by the most impactful part, only briefly mentioning the most monumental fact in the book: that it required over four-thousand old-growth oak trees to construct the one warship. It puts the whole notion of empire into perspective. You can’t sustain an empire on a soggy, claustrophobic island in the storm-rattled frontiers of the Atlantic for very long if you don’t reach elsewhere to sustain it. So, the logic goes, you need to clearcut the forests at home in order to reach new worlds that will provide you with more forests. That’s kind of our entire collective legacy in a nutshell, a summation of our death drive on a global order, in which at this point we all know is true but we just continue playing the game with everyone else, hoping it won’t all fall apart within our lifetime, hoping that we won’t be forced to return to mutiny and calamitous gore. My wife and I are planning to have our first child within the next year or two, and this decision again fails to render the full calculus of how much longer we have here—or, how much longer we’ll have it good. Climate models look unavoidably devastating for everyone, and we’re all just carrying on normal.
When Europeans washed ashore onto the two new enormous continents of the Americas, they did indeed discover an entirely brand new world, abundant in its scope of resources. But it was more a place to solidify your personalities, your expectancy of opportunity. The world was flat and limited, it had boundaries just beyond the horizon, and we were all rummaging through the paddock of time, filling the tedium of our days with survival, our mud-caked instincts burdened by horror and angst.
I’m a socialist. We socialists believe that on the larger seismic scales, it doesn’t matter a great deal if a Joe Biden wins or Donald Trump wins the next election. (Of course it matters to a degree, and as a straight white man of some privilege, I understand that I am not as burdened by the immediacy of a political threat as some people.) But the future is still the same, with only little rapturous variables on either side that we then emotionally invest ourselves in. We get to vote over insane things like if women are allowed autonomy over their own bodies, something the Democrats could have codified as law but chose not to because retaining it as an issue of importance wins them elections, and raises money for the party, something proven all too successful since the reversal of Roe v. Wade. And so the Democrats and Republicans agree year after year to increase the military budget, leaving us to starve and get sick, and get addicted to pain killers, and eventually die. But we get to squabble over a few things, volleying them back and forth every few years, all the while the arching trajectory of the future is some AI controlled techno-feudalism that will dominate our senses until all the resources are dried up and something somehow even worse then prevails. The only alternative of course is through the social ownership of the means of production, carrying a common interest in our future because it is a collective future, and not one bread in the selfishness and mania of private enterprise, in building up our personal stockpiles to keep us safe and richer in the competition against everyone else. In sharing the experience of alienation and exploitation, workers can unite to create conditions and lives of dignity and meaning.
The only thing that truly matters, above any of the pedantry and pettiness of our everyday politics, is the health and stability of the planetary ecosystems, of reserving them not as resources for our eventual use, but rather, as what the deep ecologists would consider as intrinsic value in and of themselves. The American Dream was always a dream, a fetishization of a life that couldn’t be realistically achieved and sustained through the eons of time. At least not by these means. It’s still an enormous country. When you fly across it from coast to coast, you inevitably marvel at how much empty space there actually is, how we voluntarily pack ourselves into these festering sores of cities, and we attempt to get along, to slog through it all like deranged mutants, moving our entire lives slowly and entirely onto the internet, conversing more with strangers on endless volatile scrolls of comment threads than with your neighbors, addicted to porn and drugs and the other rapturous canons of escape, in our frenzy, our foaming mouths with rabies, like trying to open those annoying baggies of coke in the dark, soothing our agitation with some clean paranoia, wasting away in encampments, children playing hopscotch and tetherball on the blacktop that’s actually just a prison yard.
It’s probably better that way than if we all spread out across the open country uniformly, contaminating it evenly, everyone given an acre of land to sustain themselves where they’re supposed to grow vegetables and nurture their God-given dominion over the land, but instead they annoy and defecate themselves out of their own home, and micro-wars break out, attempting to steal the parcels of land not defecated on as much as others.
This country is big, with seemingly endless stretches of untouched land, but the fact that there is no new frontier left to wander into, no lost horizon to stumble over like an unveiling fortune, an infinity of unburdened life feeding our desirous impulses for more, we are left to pace back and forth in our resplendent cages. And maybe that’s a good thing, a necessary fortune. We are left, finally, to deal with ourselves, here. To see the dream all the way through.
Nailed it again