I am not dumb enough to believe in the American Dream(TM) anymore...

[originalpckelly]

I have realized that's all it is.

Just a dream, not a reality. Someone else's dream at that too.

Just look at the houses that were supposedly part of the American Dream (TM), they may come in different flavors, but they all taste the same. I won't provide pictures, you all know what they look like. Miles and miles of the same damn house, in different colors sometimes, but they all look exactly the same. You can have any color you like, just so long as the builder already made the choice of what color it will be. Those houses are the surest sign we live in a planned economy. They're nicer than Soviet cookie cutter apartments, but they're no more free market or free or yours.

There used to be a time in America, where it wasn't exactly strange to build your own house, or to at least have a large part in designing it. Today, it's absolutely an unthinkable idea except for the richest among us. You know those rich people, the ones who own the American Dream and our lives along with it.

That's why when Congress votes for the bailout of the rich people, it will help us. They own us like the slaves we are. Oh yeah, they don't whip us, no they taser us. Whipping is too physical and leaves big marks. Tasers just leave little marks where the probe gets you.

You can say anything you want to, so long as you buy it on a T-shirt from a major retailer. If you should, however, say something even slightly unpopular, they slam your ass in a free speech zone. You can say what you want to, so long as it doesn't matter. What's really disheartening, however, is that even the counter-culture is brain dead and uncreative. If there is creativity, it's of the useless variety that won't go noticed.

America's going down like a $20 hooker desperate for more crack, and it's not all that bad. There's not too fucking much good about this bullshit ridden hellhole. Enjoy your decline America, you're definitely over your limit.

[melody]

1. The American dream is whatever the American people make it

Our people have a long and good history, far beyond the days of the CIA and Bush. We're as flawed as any nation but our culture (as one amalgam of many cultures) is as old as any other culture and just as rich.

We are not Wall Street or Main Street. We are whatever we decide to be.

[magellan]

2. My grandparents built their house

It cost like $8000 to do back in 1925 or so. Beautiful 3-bedroom colonial style, not huge, but it had a lot of character. I always wanted to buy it and live in it. Still do. Except now it's valued at over $500K and there's no way.

My grandparents were never rich, just ordinary working folks. My grandfather was a house painter/carpenter and my grandmother was a secretary in a silk mill. They really suffered during the Depression. They bought chickens and sold the eggs just to afford to eat.

My grandmother loved FDR and voted straight ticket Dem her entire life after the New Deal. My father, who remembers candling eggs as a child, said it could never happen again.

Well, guess what. It will happen again, but only because the people handling the financial problem now aren't honest brokers like FDR and his administration were. They don't have the country's best interests at heart and never have; they're the ones who made it happen and the only thing on their minds is how they can use it to get what they want from Congress.

I'm glad my grandma isn't alive to see this, or what's become of the Democratic Party.

[hfojvt]

3. you've gotta be pretty rich to buy one of those McMansions

but they are pretty nice. My brother and sister both have one. I remember once I was looking for my brother's house. I didn't know the number because it was 16,000 something, and they all looked alike as I drove down the street. However, when I saw the basketball hoop whose rim was bent from too many slam dunks, I figured I had the right house.

My own house was built in 1887 and my two previous buildings before that were built in the 1920s. You must be older than me though, because neither my parents or my grandparents built their own houses in 1964 or 1928. Although dad finished the basement himself and built the interior walls there and we added an extra garage, a screen porch, and a family room, doing much of the work ourselves.

I think Home Depot and Lowe's attest that there is still a lot of this going on. Recently my in-laws built a new porch for me.

"Not to much good about the bullsh*t ridden 7734hole." Well, thank goodness you don't, like, hate America or something.

[Mnemosyne]

5. You just need to 'think' you're rich to buy one. Two younger sisters

both have them. One's husband is border patrol, the other, well no one is quite sure anymore.

They 'had' to special order switch plates, etc. They base their own value, and that of others, by their possessions. They learned that at home. How sad.

I must be adopted.

[Mnemosyne]

4. 'Little Boxes'

Little Boxes

Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1962 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1990. Malvina and her husband were on their way from where they lived in Berkeley, through San Francisco and down the peninsula to La Honda where she was to sing at a meeting of the Friends’ Committee on Legislation (not the PTA, as Pete Seeger says in the documentary about Malvina, “Love It Like a Fool”). As she drove through Daly City, she said “Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”


Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

http://www.wku.edu/%7Esmithch/MALVINA/mr094.htm

Exactly right, opck.