Anna Maria Hong, Philadelphia
So, the action of the sculpture is dispersal not disappearance, which seems like an apt and more nuanced metaphor. Letting a unified and simple thing become multitudinous, roving, and infinitesimal. Is that depressing? Is that a bad thing?
If one is The American Dream, does one have more meaning as a block of ice or as an underground stream and shape-shifting clouds?
When I hear the phrase “The American Dream” I recall that it has something to do with the promise of prosperity and the idea that anyone can be anything, if they try hard enough, although I’m not even sure if that’s accurate. It’s been a while since I thought about this set of words.
Someone mentioned to me that the slogan was invented in the 19th century. A quick search turns up the date of the phrase’s entry into public discourse as 1931, coined by someone named James Truslow Adams, a popular historian, in his book The Epic of America.
The phrase certainly has a mid-20th-century ring to it. As the daughter of Korean immigrants, who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, I also recall that this sunny, aspirational mantra was not a hard sell back in the day. People—my parents, my grandparents (my mother’s adoptive parents—German and Scottish American supporters of Civil Rights and other progressive ideals)—seemed to believe in these words. They believed that American society was improving. They passed along those sanguine ideas to me.
Which was certainly beneficial. If I hadn’t believed that I could do things, I wouldn’t have tried to do what I did. Disillusionment is a painful but small price to pay for the igniting flash of hope, however ephemeral or unfounded.
To be sure, my own sense of doggedness has had many sources and probably had little to do with the amorphous notion embodied by the phrase now dripping before my eyes. There’s this Korean proverb:
“Even though a tiger is biting you, if you gain consciousness, (you can) live.”
—a more pragmatic and precise formulation of a similar concept.
Of course, many American persons never hear such words or emboldening messages and are instead bludgeoned by circumstances that obliterate that message, turning it into a taunt—something meant for other people, with the price of their prosperity paid for by our sacrifice, which is bodily, material, psychic, spiritual, personal, and communal.
And, of course, the slogan is a much harder sell now for American persons of the middle class than it was when I was a little girl. It’s possible that the only people who believe in it now are those who think the dream was taken from them by people like my parents or myself, and those who have come from places of such devastation that working 15-hour days and not being bombed daily comprises relative relief.
If you are working that much and that hard every day of your life, a vaporous saying may or may not figure at all, and why would anyone ever hold your extraordinary resolve against you?
