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the american dream....
for the thread it seems like the old horatio alger narrative, this dream thing----some convergence of ancestry and the progressive accumulation of wealth.
well, my ancestry trails off into a history that no-one cares about.
even if in some fit of misdirected research energy, someone were to have set up the genalogy, it would result in a nicely arranged list of names, birth and death dates, marriage dates and names of children i will never know, implying stories that have vanished about situations that have been erased. it might provide a nice diagram that i could look at on those rare occaisions when all other images i have around here bore me.
but it would not serve to locate me in any particular sense.
the trajectory of wealth accumulation:
property
commodities
insulation
seems uninteresting to me.
it is strange that this "Dream" is only secondarily about doing....what you do, what moves you, what prompts you to develop your capacities, to find new ones---which in my experience has only secondarily (if you are lucky) to do with your day gig.
if the cash thing is important, it is mostly as a framework that lets you do something other than worry about it. because if you are worried about eating, it is hard to do other things than worry about eating. (at this point, things could easily veer into a political space--i'll run up to the edge of it and stop)
for some--most of my family included--the cash is itself the object of fascination. but i do not understand that. this is not meant as a statement laced with self-righteousness---it is more like a circuit that they developed that enabled them to watch cash as if it glittered and morphed simply never took hold in me.
it would seem to me that if there is some american dream, it would have to do with what you do, and whether the space in which you find yourself is congenial to that.
in which case, it would be a much harder thing, to live this dream.
i certainly am not doing it.
is anyone?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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