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nice--i'll check out the film as soon as time permits of it.
there is a version of this "american dream" thing that is probably ending--but it's never been one thing, this "dream"--it's mutated continually, no?
nothing is stable--identity is an illusion, even when you think about rocks and stuff. it's also not quite an illusion. what it is, identity, is partial. that's all.
anyway, the version of this "dream" that was of a piece with the development of mass produced housing, accessible mortgages for working-class families--which was of a piece with the marketing of long production run-based appliances (for example)--so the dream that was constructed in the image of what the regulation school called fordism--that's ending.
if there was a rational synch between such dreams and the material conditions which enabled it (and most marxist-types assume that there is, so the assumption isn't particular to anyone, more a floating thing, kind of a zeitgeist residuum) it'd have been over for a while now. but it's happening now, a function (to wax marxian again) of the "dream"--or the model based on the dream--itself and it's own internal contradictions.
but there are no doubt other dreams. that there is a single american dream is one of them. that it will continue is another.
besides, there are lots of americans, in the biggest possible sense, and all of them dream things and who's to say which among them will shift from something fleeting to the status of the next organizing meme? could happen to anybody's, really, if you make yours repeatable.
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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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