Another note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.
OK, now to the really frustrating bits. Mr. Stiles wants, in a series of chapters on different kinds of problems that we can see from our handbasket to hell, to persuade me that the American Dream is killing us. And, as I said, I start by agreeing: the American Dream is killing us. So why do I disagree so strongly with all of his evidence?
The first chapter is called “Burnout”, and it details how we are, you know, burning out. This is a brand-new phenomenon, according to Mr. Stiles, and it is hitting us here in the US, what with our being so overwhelmed by The Market and all. The main thing, here, is how depression (mainly) is disabling us. Well, technically, it’s how The Market is driving us all crazy. Now, remember: I’m sympathetic to the idea, and I do think The Market is driving people crazy. On the other hand, I hate being snowed by statistics. “Most striking of all, the disease burden for mental illness is highest in what researchers call “the Established Market Economies”. In other words, the ones with the leisure to diagnose mental illness, to keep mentally ill people alive longer, and to decrease the incidence of physical disease. Mr. Stiles also confuses an increase in usage of the word stress with an increase in the condition it has come to describe. Perhaps there is more stress lately, but since the vocabulary has certainly changed, an examination of the vocabulary will give us only garbage about the subject.
In fact, Mr. Stiles gives short shrift indeed to the idea that people might have been stressed before the word was commonly used. He insists that “the accelerating pace of life puts increasing time demands on people, both at work and at home.” Again, this may well be true, but the sun went down on the fields every day, and if the cotton wasn’t picked, I’m sure what the farm hands felt was, well, stress. When the foreman threatened to fire the workers who didn’t make their quotas, when the foreman actually did fire the workers who didn’t make their quotas, life wasn’t a piece of cake. It’s just an ignorance of the past, or a blindness to it, or perhaps a dishonesty in representing it.
He passes along the quote (which I’ve seen before) from Stephen Bertman’s Hyperculture, where a sixtyish man talks about how when he was born there were no jet planes, there were no computers, there were no fluorescent lights, no touch-tone phones, no credit cards, etc., etc. And, you know, he’s right. There has been a breathtaking amount of change in sixty years. But somebody born in the US in 1860, who saw a city electrified, who saw commercial train service instituted, who saw the building of the New York Stock Exchange, who saw the first federal income tax, who saw the first punch-card tabulating machines and the first machine gun, who saw the rise of unions and corporations, who saw suffrage become a little closer to universal, who saw the first real sound recordings, who saw the introduction of the car, the movie, the telephone, the airplane, the traffic light, the radio, the lie detector, the rocket, the corn flake, the stapler, the light bulb, the grocery store, the expotitions to the poles, the splitting of the atom—hell, who saw the introduction of sliced bread—might be justified in thinking that Mr. Bertman’s guy is a wimp. For that matter, Your Humble Bloggers grandfather, may he rest in peace, who was a World War One refugee and who watched the 2002 World Cup on satellite television, might wonder what the hell the fellow his son’s age was talking about. If things are speeding up now, then they were speeding up then, so if we’re getting killed now, why weren’t we then? I’m not saying it isn’t so, I’m just saying that it needs explaining.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.