Fantasy Aspirations and the American Dream

[elfs]

1.

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh the other day, and he was going on and on about how Obama's health care plan, whatever it is, must be stopped. His major reason, in fact for the half hour I listened his only reason, was on something that affected him personally: it'll raise his marginal tax rate.

I'm sure a lot of Rush's listeners don't have healthcare of any kind. They have too many assets to qualify for state aid, yet have so little income they can't afford their own health care coverage. Here they are, listening to a man with his own private jet, and then some of them will still go to the phones and call their congressman and tell him not to vote for the health care reform package. I had ask myself, why, why would they do such a thing?

2.

Shortly after my encounter with Limbaugh, I was in a convenience store where a big, middle-aged woman in a shabby, fading summer dress was scratching at a long streamer of lottery cards with the kind of frantic eneregy starving badgers reserve for abandoned termite mounds. She must have spent fifteen or twenty dollars on a game where we all know the house wins, no matter what, and state lotteries especially are nothing more than taxation against those who were failed by the school maths system.

3.

Andrew Cherlin has a book out, The Marriage Go-Round, in which he writes:

Americans believe in two contradictory ideals. The first is the importance of marriage: we are more marriage-oriented than most other Western countries. The second is the importance of living a personally fulfilling life that allows us to grow and develop as individuals–call it individualism. Now, you can find other countries that place a high value on marriage, such as Italy where most children are born to married couples and there are fewer cohabiting relationships. And you can find countries that place a high value on individualism, such as Sweden. But only in the United States do you find both. So we marry in large numbers–we have a higher marriage rate than most countries. But we evaluate our marriages according to how personally fulfilling we find them. And if we find them lacking, we are more likely to end them. Then, because it's so important to be partnered, we move in with someone else, and the cycle starts all over again.

There is a part of me that can't help but think that Cherlin has put his finger on something that explains the other two, but there's a piece missing, and that piece is this: The American dreams come from a fantasy ideology of eternal aspiration to magnificence.

Fantasy ideologies are those that are pursued even at great personal pain and great communal cost-- indeed, that pain and cost validates and grants significance to the pursuit-- because the core story of the ideology is personally satisfying, even though the participants also know the goal of the ideology to be impossible.

Limbaugh's listeners, the lottery player, and the re-re-remarried, all have the same ideology: the American aspiration to some form of magnificence. I think Cherlin is wrong about the personal fulfillment part; it's more profound than just that. The personal fulfillment is a consequence of having a magnificent marriage, just as Limbaugh's listeners will act against their own self-interests, and the lottery player will spend money she's almost guaranteed to lose, because while the chances of magnificence are infinitesimally small, making them even smaller (by re-arranging the tax code, or by not playing the lottery) are even smaller.

I read somewhere that the Danes tend not to be too worried about the state of the world because they are not especially aspirational, and they are not anticipating overwhelmingly positive outcomes, and so every year they're happier than the rest of us precisely because they're pleasantly surprised, year in and year out, to discover that life isn't as crappy as they expect. Americans are the opposite, and so we divorce and remarry, with the hope that the next marriage will be magnificent. We play the lottery, in the hopes that we will win that magnificent prize. We listen to Rush Limbaugh, because he is (for some definition) magnificent, and we aspire to someday have a private plane like his.

The funny thing about all of these examples is that all of them contain an implicit element of fate: we know that to have a good marriage you must not only find the right person, you must be the right person, but most people assume that both of those are a matter of luck, not effort; the lottery is, of course, pure luck; and even making it big in any industry is as much a matter of being lucky, of being in the right place at the right time, as it is one's skill and persistence.

Americans, of course, will deny that they believe life is a lottery. Yet they act as it is, and taking it away from them, making them actually see the numbers, draining away the emotional energy that powers fantasy, brings to the fore more outrage than most politicians can handle.

I think that's a lot of the game. Even the birthers play it: they know the whole birth certificate thing is a dud. But they reserve the right to fantasize otherwise. Democrats did it during Bush's term: "Wouldn't it be great if Congress finally impeached Bush?" Republicans are doing it now: "Wouldn't it be great if a nuke went off in Chicago?" (I didn't make that one up.)

Fantasy aspirations to personal magnificence, especially of the ideological flavor, haunt this country. The marriage fantasy hurts children, especially since it's neither single-parent or dual-parent homes that help children, it's affirmative long-term stability that helps children; I've seen what happens to kids whose parent introduces lover after lover as "my life partner," only to have each relationship shatter on a frighteningly reliable three-year cycle. The lottery fantasy hurts the poor; the Limbaugh fantasy hurts the lower middle class willing to listen to him.

America was not always driven by such fantasies. We were much more hard-eyed a century ago. Our current bout of navel-gazing will be much more difficult to get out of than it was to get in to. But we have to do it, or we are looking at the latter days of a once great nation.

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure at least half of those first settlers who held such fantasies died within the first two years, just so you know.

But I suppose they *did* keep coming, in spite of the disastrous personal and societal cost.

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

I'm not attempting to make a point that being a nation of fantasists is necessarily all that pleasant, at least for the disappointed majority. (I just recently stumbled across an Economist article which was discussing some preliminary research linking depression and unreasonable goal-setting.) Only that it's not a recent phenomenon.