Empty Phrases: Times of Innocence and The American Dream

Oh, he's pursuing The American Dream

Here's a good way to know a person does not know what he/she is talking about: Just listen for the phrase, "The American Dream"  or "It was a time of innocence."

What do people mean, when they use that phrase: The American Dream?   What they are really talking about, almost always,  is simple avarice, the desire for stuff, for money, for a well paying job and the money it provides and the things it will buy. 

"The American Dream," then is nothing exalted, ordinarily. It's simply a wish for prosperity. 

Unless, you are Martin Luther King. When he used that phrase in his astonishing "I Have a Dream" speech, he went on to define a very different and more powerful dream for life in America than simply the mundane acquisition of wealth. He defined the American Dream not simply as a world in which people had all of the stuff they dreamed about having when they were suffering through the Depression, or sitting in foxholes. He was talking about the dream of world in which justice would reign and liberty would prevail for everyone, not just white men and women and their lucky progeny. His American Dream is a new plane of psychological liberation, in which his four children will be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. Now that, is a real dream state, new state of mind. 

She's Got her American Dream

Not Innocence: Willful Ignorance 

But, when most people use that phrase, "The American Dream," they are really just talking about making more money, and that is nothing all that exalted. In fact, they'll tell you on Sunday, the pursuit of mammon is not a good thing. Ah, but if it is the pursuit of the American Dream, that is a good thing. So the "American Dream," the dream of riches, the dream of acquiring mammon, stuff, nice houses and fast cars, that is a socially acceptable, commendable dream. 

And then there is that dreary phrase, "Oh, it was an age of innocence."

Fact is, since Homo sapiens stood up on hid hind legs and became Homo erectus, there never has been an age of innocence. Every generation has known about murder and rape and greed and vice and nastiness. Some have tried to banish discussion. Some have tried to portray a society in which the mass of men and women did not have any of these traits--the asexual, aseptic, eternally smiling men and women of those ads from the minds of 1950's Madison Avenue mad men, who made the ads.

 Fact is, never was such a world nor such a time. The fifties were no more "innocent" than the 1920's or the 1930's. The fifties were simply more repressed. They were a reaction to the horrible 1940's, when rape, murder, destruction, societal breakdown happened on a massive scale worldwide. Armies swept through Europe and women were raped on a massive scale.  Children, women and men were lined up and gased and then cremated.  Whole cities were incinerated.  In reaction to that, people dreamed about a time and place where none of that would happen, where people didn't think about all that. 

There have always been times when discussion of sex, desire, lust and ambition have been suppressed, but that does not make those times "innocent." It makes them simply dishonest or, at best, times of denial.

So let us banish these phrases, "a time of innocence" and "The American Dream" from American discourse. 

Good riddance to bad rubbish.