The American Dream Is a Delusion

While rummaging today through a huge pile of accumulated papers and personal documents, I came upon this little gem of mine: my letter to the Editor of the then popular European magazine The European. I must admit I have actually forgotten about this important event in my life. But now I have more respect for myself and feel much better. I have done my duty as a college educator.

———————–

Letter to the Editor of the European (24-30 October, 1996):

The American Dream Is a Delusion

I left Poland 15 years ago [in 1981] to study American culture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I was searching for financial and intellectual freedom—my own version of the American dream.

Today, although my PhD in American studies is prominently displayed in my living room, I know that I have come short of my goal. Moving to the US with my family was a difficult gamble, one that happened not to work very well. I had escaped from the horror of being trapped between two inhuman ideologies—Soviet communism and Polish Catholicism—but it was only to find that American intellectual freedom is a delusion.

The only genuinely free people in the US are some tenured university professors and those who are “out of sight”: the hopelessly poor and the insanely rich. These three classes of people account for hardly more than 5 percent of the total population. The overwhelming majority of Americans—the middle classes—are ruthlessly manipulated by the religious-corporate establishment.

Another disappointing thing about the US is an embarrassingly low level of educational standards in public schools. Science education is infused with Judeo-Christian superstitions. In New Mexico, for example, the Board o Education is now trying to suppress teaching evolution and to put the Book of Genesis on a par with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Many American educators dismiss evolution as “just another theory” and sagely debate the scientific merit of Hebrew creation fairy tales.

A typical American college student has never read Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” confuses Gore Vidal with Vidal Sassoon, knows more about ghosts than about Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, and has no idea who were the founding fathers of the American Constitution.

It is still a challenge to teach an average American student how to use the apostrophe and how to distinguish “there” from “their.” I have spent the past few years doing just that.

In short, although I love my new country, I do not love many of my new countrymen. Censored news coverage here is termed “freedom of the press.” In Poland we used to call suppression of politically incorrect news “communist propaganda.”

I listen to the BBC World Service, read The European, and fly to Europe every year. When I do, I feel fine. I am, after all, a European with an American passport.

Kaz Dziamka, Albuquerque, NM, USA

---

Btw: I don’t listen to BBC any more. I stopped listening about 5 years. BBC has now become just another outlet for mindlessly pro-Western and mindlessly russophobic propaganda. Regrettably the European folded a couple of years after my letter was published.

Wikipedia: The European, billed as “Europe’s first national newspaper”, was a British weekly newspaper founded by Robert Maxwell. It was published from 11 May 1990 until December 1998.