The King Is Dead; Long Live The King!

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“But I believe in my mask—The man I made up is me.”

Sam Shepard, The Tooth of Crime

By a freak of chance, I recently reconnected with a fellow high school graduation speaker after years of long silence.  The silence wasn’t due to hostility, just the normal neglect that affects most of us about such things.  In response to my initial outreach, she shared the events of her life after having achieved the necessary escape velocity to steal away from the isolated eastern Washington valley in which we went to high school.  In return, I provided her with the elevator speech version of my life as a transactional/corporate lawyer in Seattle.

Her response was a surprise.  It began: “What an interesting life!”  I haven’t especially thought of my life as interesting.  I have thought of myself as a kid in a candy store – a kid chasing the American Dream courtesy of a solid education provided by the University of Washington and the University of Michigan Law School.  I was lucky, after all.  As a former law partner once told me when I was bemoaning the fact that I never win anything in lotteries or drawings:  “Quit bitching.  You and I won the most important lottery of all: the lottery of life.”

The spirit of the American Dream was preached relentlessly in that isolated valley, and its imagery was powerful enough to send me on my journey to elsewhere.  But it was a myth of the same caliber as that of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the existence of Sasquatch.  While it proved to be real for me, it was only because I won that lottery of life.  Those who told me of the dream lied to me about its universality by conveniently omitting mention of the fact that entry into the steeplechase was denied to anyone unlucky enough in the genetic lottery not to have been born a male or awarded a white skin, or to have been assigned to some classification the white male majority felt was beneath notice.  Truth be told, the cream of the valley’s society didn’t want me to succeed in the chase either, because I came from a very poor family too recently arrived in the wealthy valley as determined by valley time and should have known better than to demand a place in the starting gates.  But they couldn’t have maintained the myth of the American Dream if I – another white male just like those in authority – was patently excluded based only upon wealth or time in residence in the valley, because to do so would have contradicted the essence of the Dream’s thesis.

On election day this November, I had lunch with one of my mentees – a wonderfully bright and charming young African-American woman whom I was privileged to meet while enjoying the fruits of my success in chasing the American Dream.  Mentoring requires trust, and trust requires candor and honesty; the result is often a close friendship, especially when the so-called mentor realizes that he is learning as much from the relationship as the so-called mentee.  Over the coffee that followed a good lunch, I told her the story of my re-acquaintance with my fellow graduation speaker and shook my head over the vicissitudes of the American Dream.  Deadpan, she stared me in the eye and asked with a challenge in her voice: “What is the American Dream?”  And because of the required candor and honesty, because of my knowledge of her personal history, I had to tell her that my American Dream had once truly existed for some: for those who were white; for those who were male; for those who weren’t a member of some powerless class; for those were focused, stubborn, and not easily deterred; for those who had the necessary intelligence and were eligible and able to acquire the requisite education by hook or by crook; for those in the know.

After the long string of steeplechase contestant qualifications/limitations had been laid out for view on the table between us, I felt obliged to apologize for the reason she had been denied access to the Dream’s starting blocks: the reason that she wears with such pride, grace, and intelligence; the reason that is the source of her singular determination to succeed – a determination identical to the one which motivated my escape from that isolated valley.  The impediments to possible success which I had been dealt had proven temporary and discardable once the valley was in my rear view mirror; hers are permanent, were exploited by society to deny her entry into the starting gates, and are of a wholly different order of magnitude than mine.  She is still busily engaged in teaching me about those differences; I still have much to learn, and her ability to impart so much by uttering so few words is as powerful as her stare.

On my way home afterward, I pondered the meaning of the lies by omission made by my parents’ generation.  Even as I condemned them, I achieved some measure of forgiveness.  The Dream’s myth has always been potent, and within the culture of time and place its power undoubtedly blinded them to something they couldn’t see, something they probably hadn’t the ability to recognize and understand had it been called to their attention.  After all, I reasoned, those were the days before the Great American Dreamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., spoke, did his utmost, and died in order to change the entry qualifications for the steeplechase.

But contemplating the effects and meanings of my parents’ lies made me realize that my own generation must be lying as well and wonder what lies it might be telling – by omission or otherwise.  Every generation lies to the next either deliberately or for no other reason than it knows only what it knows and is incapable of understanding what will be important and necessary in an unknown and unknowable future.  What any generation believes the future will hold for the next is nothing more than an educated guess.

As I pondered this epiphany, I realized that I still believed in my American Dream even if my luncheon partner knew it to be false; I realized I was still teaching skills necessary to be successful in its pursuit, without asking whether the Dream itself was still relevant, still valid, still possible.  And I realized that my generation – a generation whose pride is founded in the generational conflict of the Sixties that arose from our realization we were being lied to about many things by those then in authority – was engaged in its own lie.  As the distance between the haves and the have-nots increases, as the percentage of our population holding 90% of the nation’s wealth continues to shrink, those of my generation continue to profess a belief in our 1950s American Dream despite the disappearance of the culture which spawned it and the lies which made it unattainable for so many because of genetics and the then-existing power structure.

All because it worked then for what is fast becoming a minority still clinging to power; all because we haven’t yet acknowledged that the new wealth-based disablement criteria are simply surrogates for the 1950s criteria society can no longer accept; all because we refuse to acknowledge that a belief in the goodness and job creating ability of those few members of my generation who enjoy the benefits of the concentration of great wealth is nothing more than a lie designed to achieve the same ends as those 1950s criteria were, made on behalf of the same, still-powerful minority who were born then and are now of an age to rule.  People possessing the same genetic qualities as I do.

There is no denying our nation’s need for a unifying American Dream – a new one that takes our revised cultural imperatives and ever-changing technologies into account, one in which all can believe and keep alive through the ministrations of invigorating debate.  The telltale signs of the death of the one I dreamt can be found in ongoing congressional deadlock and the depth of the anger on display in this November’s election.  The path to that revised American Dream must begin with a recognition that we have been lying to ourselves, and an understanding of what those lies have been.

Lying to oneself is the hallmark of despots, fools, and desperate minorities clinging to power by their fingernails.  Only when our society quits lying to itself about what it has become will we be able to dream anew; only when we empower everyone to run the Dream’s steeplechase if they possess the wit and will to do so will the dream become American.

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