Mary Kenny: From 'Dallas' to debt -- American dream fades as money runs out
Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in a scene from 'How to Marry a Millionaire', a film that epitomised the American dream. PHOTOS FROM 4
Surely one of the most dramatic changes we have seen in recent times has been the image of America, from the land of opportunity where everyone had a chance to grow mega-rich, to a country apparently on the edge of collapsing in its own debt.
That America could go bankrupt and be unable to pay its debts -- triggering a tsunami of economic woes throughout the world -- is an almost unthinkable notion to anyone who grew up in the golden American age that followed the end of World War Two. Yet that was what loomed into view this week as Congress battled over President Obama's proposal to raise the national borrowing limit, or "debt ceiling".
Could this be the United States, not only the "land of the free and the home of the brave", but the society that for so many generations glittered with money and riches?
American millionaires like the Guggenheims and the Mellons endowed the greatest art museums in the world, and America often acquired the most highly prized art and artefacts in the world. The Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts had been legends for generations, and the fabulous Kennedys came to be right in the same bracket.
The Hollywood movies portrayed, for the most part, a land in which everyone could aspire to making, or maybe marrying, money. Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable starred in movies like 'How to Marry a Millionaire', and Monroe's party piece thereafter was 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend': Crosby and Sinatra did a fabulous double number in the iconic 'High Society', dueting in 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' and Eartha Kitt scored with a truly thematic hit in 'Just an Old-Fashioned Girl', in which she sang about loving old flowers such as violets -- "have them made in diamonds by the man at Tiffany!"
The most charismatic and typical of American novels could have been Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby', with its alluring and enigmatic billionaire protagonist, Jay Gatsby. And weren't 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty' classic fables of American wealth?
Money and its acquisition was a central theme in American narratives in a brasher, more open way than it had ever been in Europe, where tradition advocated a more discreet approach to fortune. The American way was "if you got it, flaunt it", as illustrated by the stretch limo, a vehicle invented purely for flaunting. And it wasn't just a chimera: Irish emigrants often did well in America, sent vast amounts of remittances back home; in the 1950s and 1960s families also often received parcels from America with glitzy clothes and real 'Yanky' accessories.
We knew about the Wall Street Crash of 1929, but what emerged was how resilient America could be. Dramatic as that event was, America recovered, and quicker than many countries in Europe, so that by the time the US joined World War Two every American seemed bigger, healthier and richer than every European. American servicemen stationed in Britain and Northern Ireland in the 1940s were quickly, if a little enviously, dubbed: "overpaid, oversexed and over here".
America was a goldmine. Not only could anyone get rich, but its financial might dominated the world, as proved when the Marshall Plan saved a broken Europe after World War Two. Even when the Soviet Union seemed to be a great power, a US dollar was always worth 10 or 20 times more, in the streets of Moscow, than the rouble.
As the international financial crisis continued, America's dire debt problems seemed to run counter to the traditional image of wealthy Uncle Sam. Tomorrow looms as the day that America could go bust. US credit ratings could slump, the government default on loans and salaries and commentators might be comparing the United States to Greece.
Then, gradually, the politicians moved towards some kind of patchwork compromise over the debt ceiling, preventing an immediate financial Armageddon. But it's not the America any more of Jay Gatsby, "if you've got it, flaunt it", and 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.'
Many of the European commentators blamed what they perceived as the crazy, right-wing influence of the Tea Party tendency on American Congress: and yet some of the discourse from Tea Party voters revealed another side of American values -- an old-fashioned, Protestant anathema of debt. I heard Tea Party voters interviewed who said things like: "It's immoral to try and spend your way out of debt. We have to put a ceiling on our borrowings," and I thought there was something admirable in that attitude.
And there's something fundamentally American about that too, which I remember noticing whenever I was in the States. If times were hard, Americans thought nothing of moving to a smaller apartment and trimming costs. "If you've got it, flaunt it," may apply to the good times, but when you haven't got it, there was more of a willingness to be practical about adjusting your circumstances. It wasn't shameful to go bankrupt in the States, but it was a sign that you should "pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again".
America has lost some of the glamour and glitter it once had -- we are much more aware of poverty in the US these days, and the perennial problem of Americans without health insurance. The movies and the music don't have the optimism that was once characteristic of American brio.
But I still believe in America's powers of resilience and recovery: and that the cliff-edge debt debate has generated a stimulating and productive homespun energy.
Irish Independent
