The American Dream is done. Now, it’s the Chinese Dream. The American Dream used to be a fantasy about how great life was going to be in the future. Now, it’s a memory of how things used to be in the past. You want to see the American Dream now, you have to go to China. If we’re lucky, we’ll be the guys in Inception, and we’ll figure out how to break in, so that we can have a nice dream too. Otherwise, we gotta keep living this nightmare.
It’s upsetting. We’re supposed to be doing better than generations before us, and we’re doing worse. . . . And, we have the Internet. Think about that. We have a tool that can transmit money and ideas faster and more powerfully than any Army. You can push a button and wipe out someone’s identity or, by contrast, donate enough money to feed an entire village. And, with all that power, we’re dying economically, and there’s still nothing to watch on tv. What good is the Internet – a giant shopping spree that’s one button-push, one mouse-click away — if you have no money, and there’s nothing to watch to take your mind off how bad things are?
Making it even worse is that you don’t even need an Internet connection anymore. You don’t even need a house. You could be a homeless person who lives in a Starbucks as long as you have an iPhone, and you can get groceries delivered to you. But, then there’s the rub — a Chinese guy on a bicycle shows up with your delivery and reminds you that this is his dream, not yours. Then he steals your iPhone, reverse engineers it to make a better, cheaper model made in Beijing, and then throws you out of Starbuck’s, which has been renamed General Tso’s Tea Room.
The other day, my girlfriend and I paid the cleaners to deliver our laundry. So not only didn’t we clean or fold the stuff, we didn’t even bring it home. One hundred years ago, you had to schlep your stuff to a river and bang it against a giant rock. To do laundry, you had to be stronger than a bodybuilder. Just cleaning your jeans meant that you probably could bench 225. Now you don’t even need to be able to lift your laundry bag, you just have to be strong enough to hit “Enter” or to go SWOOSH on your iPhone touchpad. But, if you don’t have money, and the Chinese guy took your iPhone, all of that doesn’t matter. And, of course, the ultimate in-your-face irony of it all is that the Chinese guy probably made all his money by owning and running dry cleaners and laundromats.
So, I’m pissed. This is bullshit. The American Dream was promised to me. I was told that if I did well in school and played by the rules and did what I was told, I’d get the American Dream circa 1954. I’d have a good job, and a beautiful wife and a great house, and marvelous kids who would be fantastic. And, a dog, and two cars and an awesome garage with awesome stuff. And, I could come home every day at 5, and have a martini and read the newspaper, and fuck my wife (when she wasn’t in a valium-induced haze) and take 4 weeks paid vacation every year with full benefits, health insurance with dental and life insurance and a guaranteed pension. And, where is that? It’s gone. They pulled the bait and switch on me. I held up my end. I did what they said. I played by the rules. And, I live in a dump. I’m not married, not because I don’t want to be (though we can debate that topic another time), but because the marriage tax is way too heavy a burden. At the same time, I live in sin, not ‘cause I love my girlfriend so goddamn much (though I do — that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it) but because I can’t afford to live alone. I have health insurance that covers me in the event I get hit by a bus (as long as it’s going 55 mph, being driven by Keanu Reeves, and Dennis Hopper has rigged the thing with dynamite), but otherwise, I’m on my own. And, if I ever have a kid, the best thing I could do for him or her is to give it up for adoption or sell it to a lab for the stem cells because I can’t afford to raise the child.
It’s so depressing. And, making matters worse is that women (with their feminism, and their great educations, and their work ethic) are making men increasingly irrelevant. It used to be that a guy could say, “This is my house. I bought it with money I made at my job.” You can’t say that anymore. I’m living paycheck to paycheck. Plus, my girlfriend makes more money than I do. So, now, not only am I not the breadwinner, I’m practically a freeloader. If I’m lucky, I’ll have the money to chip in on the new big-screen t.v. she wants. Do you know how demoralizing it is as a man to know that you might not own your own t.v.? Screw the house. Because whether she pays more for the house or not, your wife or girlfriend was always gonna be in charge of what happens in the house. But, if you don’t own the t.v., and can’t control what’s being watched, you’re screwed.
And, let me tell you something, making less than your girlfriend blows. And, what’s worse is that she doens’t get in my face about it. She’s really nice. She’s perfectly happy to pay for things. Like it’s no big deal. She doesn‘t realize that every time she buys our dinner or pays for our trip, it’s like I’ve been magically transported to a time when I was 12.
But, as bad as housing costs have gotten, college costs are worse. So, even as I sit here thinking that it might be nice if my girlfriend and I had a kid or two, I’m thinking there’s no way we can afford to educate (much less raise them). And, that sucks. The American Dream does not involve paying more for college than for a house . . . at least it shouldn’t. I got lucky. I was able to pay off my student loans. But, right now, my girlfriend and I barely have enough money for a vacation. In fact, we don’t. Our vacation money only gets us as far as our parents’ houses, and that’s not a vacation. That’s a yearly reminder of how much we don’t have.
And, why is it so expensive? Why do 4 years of college cost what it takes to buy a house? You can’t live in your college dorm forever. A diploma is nice, but it’s not gonna keep the rain from falling on you or keep the cold out. Believe me, there are homeless people with college educations.
Besides, what do you learn in college that you can’t learn elsewhere for a lot less? I spent my college years drunk most of the time. You know what I learned from that: how not to throw up in bed, and that if I take a midterm exam drunk I do just as well as when I’m sober.
We were supposed to go off to college and learn all these great things that would help us have a bigger, brighter future than our parents. Every generation is supposed to do better. We’re supposed to be physically bigger, smarter, more capable. Well, I’m shorter than my dad, not as smart, and he managed to work his entire adult life without getting fired. I had been fired 7 times by my thirties. He lives in Florida now, living off the retirement money that he socked away while he was working. I have a 401(k) from the one job I managed to hold onto for a couple of years, but if I had to live off of it, I’d be living on my dad’s porch with a tin cup and a sign.
My dad has lived in million dollar homes that he bought with his own money. I live in a rent-stabilized apartment, that I couldn’t afford to buy if they sold it a foreclosure auction, and it was located in Mexico in the poorest section of a town that has no name.
You see these articles about whether buying real estate is a good idea. And, it’s such a foreign concept when you have no money. It’s like a person with false teeth reading about the benefits of flossing. Yeah, it’s a great idea, but it just doesn’t apply to you.
The articles about buying real estate might as well be about life in India. Because that has about the same effect on my life.
What else is part of the American Dream? A good job with benefits? Well, I think we all know what happened to that. Gone. Baby. Gone. Benefits today is when you show up at your job and you still have it for at least one more day.
And, what about the retirement party with gold watch for years of service? Used to be that most people worked for the same company for their entire career. Now, it’s a miracle if you work for the same company for an entire year. As I mentioned, I’ve been fired 7 times since college, no one’s giving me a gold watch. They might give me some Gold Bond medicated powder for my ass — for all the time’s it’s been kicked. And, they’re certainly not giving me a watch. Maybe a stopwatch, so I can time how long it takes for me to exit their premises.
The point is, the American Dream is an illusion. It’s a fraud. It’s not gonna necessarily be better for you than it was for your parents. That used to be the case. In the beginning of the country, it was the case. Yes, if your parents came here from some country where people’s hands were cut off for shoplifiting, where women are beaten for looking at a guy, where they chase Jews with farm implements for sport, where getting a drink of water was your day’s activity, than yes, you almost certainly will have a better life than your parents. But, if you’re like me — raised in the suburbs — it’s not necessarily gonna be better. It’s probably gonna be worse. Because our parents — those selfish bastards — decided to do all the fun stuff with the bad consequences and leave us the mess. And, they didn’t have the decency to get rich doing it and leave us a big inheritance.