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6 American Idol
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166 So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 In the summer of 2001, a group of students at Boston College taking a class on the American Dream dug deep into the meaning of the nation’s core mythology. Alongside readings by John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, those students attending David McMenamin’s course first offered their definitions of the Dream, their versions as varied as the students themselves. One believed the American Dream was the modern equivalent to “40 acres and a mule” (which he translated to “a car, a garage, 2.5 kids, equal opportunity for everyone . . . [and] a house”), for example, while another thought it was about, idealistically at least, “liberation from oppression.” The class traced the idea of the Dream back to the Enlightenment, then to Plato, and, finally, to the birth of civilization near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (quite the epic journey). The “notion of the promised land is as old as humanity,” McMenamin told his students, the Puritans following in Moses’s divinely ordained footsteps.1 At the Fenway School in Boston a few years later, students were especially excited to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as part of their class on the Dream. (Boston is apparently the world capital of American Dream pedagogy.) “I think this American dream is an interpretation of a white man’s dream,” said Nicole Done, a seventeen-year-old from the Dominican Republic, thinking it was about “working hard for something you want” rather than the pursuit of money. “The American dream has a lot American Idol | 167 to do with money,” disagreed Harkeem Steed, also seventeen, likening Jay Gatsbytohis(weirdlysimilarlynamed)hero,Jay-Z.Acrosstown,asophomore English class and an American literature class at the Boston Latin School were also reading the 1925 novel (as well as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Joy Luck Club, Ethan Frome, and Their Eyes Were Watching God) as part of their own class on the Dream, the diverse collection of students there too finding its themes of possibility and aspiration relevant to their own lives. “The American dream is not open to everyone,” thought Shauna Deleon, a sixteen-year-old from Jamaica, believing “there are certain pathways , certain gateways.” Jinzhao Wang, a fourteen-year-old who had come to this country from China two years earlier, was particularly inspired by the green light at the end of the dock that for Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolized hope. “My green light is Harvard,” Wang shared with her class, already understanding something that many adults never learned. “The journey to the dream is the most important thing,” she said, quite sure that “effort is the real ideal of the American dream.”2 Such amazing insights from young people, especially ones new to this country, suggested that, more than three-quarters of a century after James Truslow Adams coined the term, the power and relevance of the American Dream remained as strong as ever. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in fact required reading at half the high schools in the country, with teachers finding that the book resonates strongly with urban teens, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants. More than anyone else, after all, adolescents relate to the concepts of striving for something, to want to achieve a goal just out of reach, or the desire to become a different person, these ideas from the book the bedrock of the Dream. That Gatsby is a cautionary tale is especially useful, teachers report, offering a lesson in “you better be careful what you wish for” in today’s materialist culture.3 Over the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century, many Americans would come to believe that the American Dream itself could very well be a cautionary tale, the price to try to make it come true too dear. Other People’s Money As Americans woke up in the new century, the digital apocalypse turning out to be much ado about nothing, however, things were generally looking [44.204.34.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:21 GMT) 168 | The American Dream up in the economy and in most people’s lives. Employment was high, inflation was low, and the Dow was still chugging along, the bursting of the dot-com bubble not yet wreaking havoc on the American economy. And with the election of...