Myth of American Dream

Or how we learned to stop worrying and love plastic — surgery and money

December 26, 2010|Buzzy Jackson, Globe Correspondent

“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word . . . plastics.” When Mr. McGuire offers this advice, if you can call it that, to young Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 film “The Graduate,’’ is it possible he had “boob jobs, credit cards, and our quest for perfection” in mind? “[O]ne cannot understand America,” Laurie Essig writes, “without understanding plastic.” Like Mr. McGuire, Essig believes that understanding plastic is the key to understanding contemporary America.

Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But in this fast-paced book, Essig, a sociologist at Middlebury College, makes a strong case for the idea that plastic — both in the form of money (e.g., credit cards and other forms of easy credit) and in the form of surgery (e.g., breast jobs, nose jobs, etc.), has become Americans’ favorite problem-solving tool, whether they can afford it or not. “We wish the world were different. We wish we were different. The solution, it seems, is plastic.”

Essig’s style is breezy but her message is as pointed as a syringe full of Botox: The American Dream is a myth and our addiction to plastic conspires in obscuring that fact. “Our desire for plastic is the result of massive shifts in our culture and our economy that affect us all. Plastic money covered up the fact that most of us were getting poorer while a few of us were getting richer.”

Hers is at heart an argument about political economy. Essig’s approach adds a new facet to a growing argument about the complicated web of consumerism, health, and the American ethos of individualism expressed in recent books such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America’’ and Judith Warner’s “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.’’ As Essig argues, America’s cult of individualism “grew up alongside capitalism to free the state from responsibility to the individual and make the individual see failure as a personal, not a structural, problem.”

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