“The point is that the American Dream was once a collective ideal, not an individualist one. Then it was reduced from a political dream of egalitarian democracy to an individual dream of opportunity, and then that further devolved to mere materialism.”
Oh wow! Sarah Churchwell bashes the ceremonial stake straight through the fiend’s delusional-core. A land of exhaust-less opportunity stuffed with gallant gunslingers & go-getters or a racist back-water strewn with retards of a singularly concentrated slumping of civilization standards…. Well, naturally it’s more complicated than that, & this mighty-fine book makes hugely bold & incisive strides into the torn, twisted & tattered history that resulted in Americas take-over, corporate coup meltdown, which has only grown in intensity & preponderance, digging-in & spiraling warrens of root-networks through deregulation, years of layered dysdoctrination & factual malformation along with political lab-experiments that have now fused with the social status-quo & national identity issues. The recent drastic deterioration (the Chump Disintegration), for a vehicle that was already off the road & on its back billowing smoke & flame, may be viewed as the nemesis moment, where an insufferable & incorrigible atrocity is optimized & finally confronted & exterminated (amok immoral corporacentrism, plutocracy, cannibal-capitalism, racism, commerce-Armageddon & impunity), or implodes in entirety without salvation. Place ya’ bets….
“Business had been elevated to the point of patriotic virtue. Business ceased to be an occupation that was as subject to the moral code as all other endeavors, and began to transcend morality. ‘Money-making, having become a virtue, it was no longer controlled by the virtues but ranked with them’”
There was a lot of toeing-and-froing as the ‘dream’ fought the ‘nightmare’, but the hijack eventually took place under the decomposition of Warren G. Harding in 1921 who babbled to put – “less government in business and more business in government”. Inevitably, his inauguration was followed by a shit-heap of collapsing standards & social disfigurement for the majority people along with an open-road & ravage-all–you-can-rape waiver for the bane of business.
“Good government has almost been allowed to die on our hands, because it has not utilized the first sound principles of American business’”
Fire on the prairies, suits in the chambers.
“America First? For whom? Is it America First for the financial rulers, or America First to make the world better? … Just what is this new concept of America First that has been set up by the Harding administration? Is it America First or is it America Uber Alles? – the industrial octopus that is slowly fastening its tentacles on American life”.
The racism is just flat-out diabolic! a severe disposition of utmost reprehensibility that afflicts the country to the current day. Marauding KKK fucks, segregation & apartheid, endless lynching’s…appalling, rock-bottom, lowest level, savage, champion-depravity of the worst standard on some medieval horror shit –
“There were flyers and notices letting spectators know when and where the lynching would take place; local newspapers ran headlines announcing impending plans; reporters were sent to cover it; families brought children, and had picnics. Victims were frequently tortured and mutilated first; pregnant women were burned to death in front of a peanut-crunching crowd.”
Stolen dreams, poisoned water-wells, ‘industrial fascism’, corporate despotism & some of the shittest ideology ever to escape a human arse-hole..& we have been dealing with Frankenstein ever since. Its at this open-sewer of effluence that the current goons imbibe, slather, bathe & worship.
Chump just seems to be a consolidation/gestation of all the worst elements of America into one super shit-capsule. All ignorance & odium absorbed, potentized & secreted outwards. Just literally the shittest of the shittest of the shit in every foreseeable spectrum, odor & pathogen. Its as if over all the years, it all washed into one abscess – accumulating, festering, inspissating – & now it’s been flushed out in composite form, decay on-top of decay.
This is a fantastic trove of work. Its also incredibly well written, with a kind of outwardly sangfroid but endo-smoldering presentation & delivery. This shit is a compete mess, & the burial of untreated radioactive ordinance has now come back to poison the living who set-up society right on the disposal site. I was extremely impressed by the writing of journalist Dorothy Thompson, who is frequently quoted in the book –
“A few months later, returning to the idea that Nazi corporatism was dangerously reflected in American oligarchies, Thompson argued that the American dream was viscerally opposed to such systems. ‘the concepts and values cultivated by monopolist big business lead logically to the Nazi form of world order. The American Dream rejects it with the spontaneity with which a healthy organism vomits poison.’ Not only did Thompson hold that the American Dream had nothing to do with economic aspiration; she maintained that it was fundamentally allergic to corporate capitalism.”
There’s a lot in circulation at the moment regarding this mother of all basket-cases, but Behold, America offers something special, crucial & painfully timely that is relevant to so many areas of the crisis.
“This logic would lead a century later to the frequently espoused belief that millionaires must be good people or they wouldn’t be so successful, an extension of the vulgarized Calvinist idea that wealth is a sign of god’s grace”
Sarah Churchwell, Bloomsbury, 2018, 308 pages.