Jack Burns Lives!

The American Dream

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.-Edward Abbey

Ah, the American Dream. An oft repeated phrase we all probably first heard in our youth. The official national myth that any hard working, honest person can and realize their dreams. Start from nothing, work your way up, save, get a starter home, maybe a starter wife and gradually increase your net worth until you reach the economic summit.

Most Americans probably don’t dream of reaching the same heights as people like Bill Gates or Ted Turner. For most of us, just having a nice home, a comfortable living and decent healthcare and education for our kids is sufficient. But like most summits, the trip to the top is fraught with peril.

2009 was a wake up call that perhaps even the most basic achievements in life are becoming more difficult to realize for an increasing number of people. Healthcare costs are astronomical, and our public education system is so bad in many large cities that private schools are now viewed as “necessities” by families that want their children to gain admittance to even moderately selective colleges and universities. And even if you’re fortunate enough to own a home there are certainly no guarantees you’ll keep it. Most of us are just one major illness away from bankruptcy and potential foreclosure, but alas, you can protect yourself from that via another miraculous capitalist invention, mortgage insurance.

Why do I always think of those bogus 19th century opportunists selling “miracle tonics” when I see an insurance salesman?

I simply don’t believe the American Dream is what was, and I don’t believe we’re anywhere close to recapturing it. It’s become a perverted lie, cast upon schoolchildren at an early age and repeated like a mantra all the way through compulsory high schools where kids are fed whitewashed versions of history, and where everything seems predicated on your ability to pass standardized tests where the odds are incredibly stacked against inner-city youth. From there, the fiends at Sallie Mae sell the concept of going into massive amounts of debt so you can get a college education and from there, a tedious, meaningless job selling cheap plastic shit manufactured in China. Credit cards, mortgages, bigger houses to house all the shit you accumulate. Then there’s the inevitable depression and anxiety followed by therapy and drugs. You’re a rat on a wheel that keeps turning but goes nowhere.

That’s no dream. It’s a nightmare.

My own dream has long been to have a small house or cabin with a reasonable amount of land for farming, gardening and livestock. My own version of the Vogelin Ranch. A refuge and a place where I can live out my remaining days in peace and a respectable level of self-sufficiency. I don’t want to see my human neighbors peering into my window from their own windows while I eat breakfast. Wren’s and Chickadee’s are welcome. I don’t want to hear their stupid leaf blowers or the hum of their swimming pool pumps. I don’t want religious nutjobs knocking on my door.

So how do I get there?

Remember the phrase “40 acres and a mule?” It was a practice in 1865 of providing arable land to African American former slaves who became free as Union armies occupied areas of the Confederacy. Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s January 16, 1865 Special Field Orders, No. 15 provided for the land, and some of the recipients received from the Army mules for use in plowing as well; the combination was widely recognized as providing a sound start for a family farm. 40 acres (16 hectares) is a standard size for rural land, being a sixteenth of a section, or a quarter quarter-section, under the Public Land Survey System used on land settled after 1785. (Wiki)

Well, that much land can cost you a pretty penny these days, especially if it’s already got a house, barn and driveway. In some areas of Tennessee, my home state, you find places for less than $300,000. I suppose if you’re in California, that sounds like a deal. But where does even that much money come from? Unless you were in the lucky sperm club and inherited it, you’d probably have to spend years working in the belly of the beast. Living in the city, working a corporate job and saving money. You had to save, a reasonable endeavor, but you probably had to have some luck along the way, and even if you do all that, you have to make a living once you find your nirvana.

If you want to move to a remote place before retirement, assuming you’re not established there, meaning, you weren’t raised in a rural area and have no connections in the area, how will you make a living to pay the mortgage? Working at the local cafe won’t pay the mortgage and everything else. Neither will farming if you’re a city slicker like me. Real estate? Sure, show the locals how to carve up what’s left of the countryside into little ranchette’s and sell ‘em off to more city slickers so the property values and property taxes go sky high. Pretty soon, the locals won’t be able to live there any longer. Just look at Teluride, Colorado. And if you decide this is going to be your retirement home, assuming you’re paying your bills with your retirement, how certain is your retirement?

My aunt, recently retired, just lost $300,000 in her retirement during 2009. She’s reasonably wealthy, so that’s not a huge loss for her, but she was worried. Not enough to get her to resume practicing medicine, but people with more meager savings probably couldn’t take much of a hit before having to become a greeter at Wall Mart.

Want 100 acres so you can raise a modest number of cattle or sheep with your chickens and horses? Expect the numbers to reach closer and usually over the one million dollar mark. Sure, you can buy some dry, mesquite laden tract in West Texas for $90,000, but there’s no house and no water.

Build your own? Not a likely scenario for most Americans. We’re citified and too used to having things done for us.

Occasionally, however, you can find a good deal. Something that’s “ready to go” in so far as farming operations are concerned and that is potentially affordable. Assuming you’re willing to lease space to cellphone tower operators and hunters, which I am not. I suspect if you’re diligent and have some money, you can find a decent spot, but it’s becoming more difficult, and it’s certainly out of reach for most Americans. For those of us with a chance, because we’re smart and somewhat lucky, we bide our time in the corporate cesspool, or get a job with a real retirement plan and hope for the best.

Who’s to blame? We have to blame someone or some group, right? I say we start with land speculators and real estate agents, two of the most pestiferous, vile and despicable classes of people in the country. They thrive off uncontrolled growth and promote it without apology. It’s one of the reasons why I hate the notion of ever buying another home. I can’t stand the thought of having to deal with agents, mortgage bankers and credit bureaus. A pox upon all your houses.

There are too many people crawling all over the continent already. We’re jam packed into cities like New York, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit and Phoenix, towering edifices of steel, concrete and drywall, seasoned with inconceivable amounts of smog, traffic and noise. But such a landscape, if we can call it that, creates new industry and new profits. Anti-depressants, therapists, health clubs (since there’s nowhere to hike or do noble work like cutting your own wood), psyche wards and private prisons. Can you imagine what the countryside would look like if even twenty percent of the current population, which is over 300 million, decided to become self-reliant farmers or ranchers?

According to the United States Fact Sheet, there are over 2.2 million acres of arable land with slightly over 900 million acres used for farming in the United States, or 40.8 percent of the total available used for crops, woodland and pastureland.

That means that if even twenty percent of the total population decided to pursue the dream of being a self-sufficient farmer or rancher, they’d only have fifteen acres of the current total land used for farming, and that also assumes that they could somehow get their hands on the privately held land.

Revolution? Redistribution of wealth? Once again, do the peasants and serfs rise up against their wealthy capitalist masters and demand equality?

Which of course brings me to another issue, that of private property. The Holy Grail of the American psyche. The untouchable. You can attack or question just about anything in American culture except for the notion of private property. Even God is open game (as he should be) as evidenced by Richard Dawkin’s best selling and excellent book The God Delusion. Had Dawkins written The Private Property Delusion, he’d find himself banished to the far margins of acceptance, much like Marx, Abbey or Naess, perhaps even to the point of his name becoming a pejorative.

Despite drawing careful distinctions between terrorism and sabotage, Abbey was marginalized by the mainstream literary establishment and labeled a “regionalist.” He was never accepted by the mainstream, even mainstream environmentalists, because he wrote about attacking private property. Dare bring up evil notions like the redistribution of wealth and most folks will respond with something elementary and ridiculous like “the USSR proved communism doesn’t work” or “Reagan defeated communism.”

To which I respond by saying such a system worked pretty well on this continent for hundreds and hundreds of years. Before whites showed up, and to some degree, even after whites showed up, at least for a period of time. At least until industrial, growth capitalism took hold and fouled the watershed. No, not the pure communism envisioned by Marx. Something better. Democratic, bioregional, steady-state subsistence economies where no man has the power to dominate others. Neither to serve, nor to rule.

Until we find our way back to that, the American Dream is just that, a dream.