"[S]omething that's always been the greatest strength of America is a thriving, booming middle class, where everybody has got a shot at the American Dream. And that should be our goal. That should be what we're focused on. How are we creating opportunity for everybody [pause] so that we celebrate wealth; we celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products? We expect that person to be rich, and that's a good thing. We want that incentive. That's part of the free market." —President Obama, Dec. 22, 2010 Press Conference
My heart sank a little bit more when I first read this about a week ago. Is there any justification for hope if the only thing government can dream of is getting back to "booming?" Is there anyone left abstaining from the free market kool aid long enough to wonder how "Grow, baby! Grow!" could ever be anything but a recipe for disaster?
I don't want to make the mistake of turning this into a "shoot the messenger" discussion. True, it makes me sad to think how disillusioning the past 2 years with Obama as president have been on occasion, but I can't imagine anyone else having done better and I can imagine way worse.
To be quite honest, the real disillusion I feel is with the whole fucking thing, from hard right to hard left. Nobody's got what it takes. No one is able to untangle the mess.
Obama says he's dedicated to getting us back to the good ol' boom times? Whatever. it's all just more water poured into the bubble machine with high hopes there will be a few more shiny things pumped out, maybe a bubble or two that won't pop before the masses are mesmerized by the Great American Dream again ...
All I see happening is a continuation of everything we've been doing wrong since we fell under the spell of free market capitalism. We've become incapable of thinking outside the box of mass consumption. (Don't kid yourself here, wanting to get the middle class "booming" again is just another way of saying "let's get all the middle class livestock back into the mass-consumption pen.")
My immediate problem with this is that global climate change is not something you want to fuck around with, and nothing feeds it more than mass consumerism; nothing pushes it further or faster in the wrong direction. It could already be way too late to avoid mass casualties but it's not too late to proceed with the assumption that the less we feed global warming the better off we'll all be.
I have a less urgent though no less serious problem with it all, though; namely that the American Dream wasn't originally about being rich. It wasn't about consuming. It wasn't about favoring the pursuit of wealth over good morals and ethics. It wasn't about confusing the pursuit of happiness with the possession of desired things.
I'd like the real American Dream back in its rightful place.