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5 The Anxious Society
- Syracuse University Press
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136 What’s that I smell in the air? The American dream. Sweet as a new millionaire, The American Dream. —‘The American Dream,” in the Broadway play Miss Saigon On February 10, 1999, a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway, running for 274 performances and winning a number of Tony Awards. (Previous Broadway revivals were in 1975, with George C. Scott playing Willy Loman, and in 1984, with Dustin Hoffman in the starring role.) Brian Dennehy played Willy in this latest production, doing justice to the character a half century after the play was first staged with Lee J. Cobb in the lead role. Although much of the world had changed in fifty years, Miller’s classic seemed as relevant as ever, with many audience members no doubt squirming in their seats as they watched Loman’s desperate longing for success and popularity. The American Dream was the real star of Death of a Salesman, with the boom times of the end of the twentieth century creating a cultural climate in which the pressure to “make it” was equal to or perhaps even greater than it was in any other period in the nation’s history. Although it was an illusion, a product of our collective imagination, the Dream was still our guiding mythology in everyday life.1 The Dream seemed to be everywhere in the late 1990s, with everyone from Donald Trump to Sean “Puffy” Combs proud spokespeople for our way of life where, if you tried hard enough and caught a lucky break or two, anything was possible. Best of all, with an apparently limitless supply of bling to be had and McMansions to be built, the Dream was potentially The Anxious Societ y | 137 infinite, a constantly expanding balloon offering endless spoils to the victors . It had only been the past couple of years that the American Dream experienced its renaissance, however, with the earlier part of the decade looking and feeling a lot like other periods when the Dream seemed nowhere to be found. Like always, the American Dream was proving to be an elusive, slippery thing, coming and going like a thief in the night. Creativity, Compassion, and Connection As soon as we started writing “1990” on our checks, in fact, one could sense something different in the air. Although “the eighties” effectively ended with the stock market crash of October 1987, the official turning of the decade’s page was more reason to observe there had been a sea change in American culture. The “Gimme Decade,” with its everyman -or-woman-for-himself-or-herself ethos, was over, those people who expressed it best (or worst)—people such as Leona Helmsley, Ivan Boesky, and Jeffrey Levitt—doing time for their transgressions. Consistent with the “kinder, gentler nation” that President George H. W. Bush envisioned in his acceptance speech for the nomination for presidency at the 1988 GOP convention, values like altruism and personal fulfillment were beginning to replace the values of avarice and materialistic indulgence, social critics were reporting, if true posing major implications to the dynamics of the American Dream. “Creativity, compassion and connection are going to be the hallmarks of the ’90s,” Douglas LaBier, a DC-area psychoanalyst, told the Washington Post, thinking the rat race led by yuppies was slowing to a crawl. LaBier’s thesis was that, as they approached middle age, baby boomers were finally reaching adulthood, a reasonable assumption given their existential growing pains. A lot of successful boomers were laying down for a spell on the shrink’s couch, complaining that there was not much more to show for their lives except an admittedly sweet Mercedes and an awesome cappuccino maker.2 LaBier was hardly the only one thinking the nation and its guiding mythology were changing skins. Fortune, that loud voice of capitalism, posed the question “Is Greed Dead?” as the title of a recent article, noting how words like save, nurture, and share were increasingly popping up in ordinary conversation. “The conspicuous consumption, cold careerism, [3.231.146.172] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:23 GMT) 138 | The American Dream and self-centered spirit that made up so much of business as usual in the ’80s now come across as a bit tacky at best, ruinous at worst,” the writer of the article observed, where all this would go not exactly clear. “People are looking for a way to go deeper inside themselves to find out what they...