di Lewis H. Lapham
There may not be an “American character,” but there is the emotion of being American…that feeling…of nostalgia for some undetermined future when man will have improved himself beyond recognition and when all will be well.
—V.S. Pritchett
Home in the American scheme of things is a word furnished with as many meanings and locations as money and mother, God and the flag. A place always somewhere in mind if not on a map or lost to a bank, there to be found over a rainbow or bridge, around the next bend in a river or road. Down on the farm or back in the sticks, crossing the bar or the plate. In the burbs with the wife and the kids, out on the range with the deer and the antelope, on a centerfold page in Architectural Digest, at $10,000 a square foot where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.
This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly takes up the topic of home and its whereabouts because also in the American scheme of things the chance at a home of one’s own is the bet on a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The American democracy and dream are the building of castles in air. Whither goeth the one so goeth the other, these days up in smoke and the spout.
A high percentage of the nation’s net worth and good fortune stems from the buying and selling of home as both fiction and fact, but the emotion of being American emerges from discernible signs of a self-improving future throughout the whole of the society. Not that all present draw the same pay, but that they all share a sense of the commonwealth moving in the direction of when all will be well.
Let the proofs of prosperity appear in only one neck of the woods, the tide coming in for the rich, going out for everybody else, and the notion of home acquires first- and second-class meanings: habitation for human beings and housing for money. The advertising of the nation’s ideal shifts from the little house on the prairie to the brochure selling apartments in Donald Trump’s Fifth Avenue tower of glass—“Elegant. Sophisticated. Strictly beau monde…Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy.”
As did the grotesque spectacle of the mogul’s 2016 presidential campaign. As is the Potemkin village democracy that nowadays fronts the owning and operating of America the beautiful by the combination of financial, real estate, media, and government interests that stand and serve as the nation’s landlord. The teardown of the democratic idea, a slum-clearance project in development for the past thirty years, prepared the ground for Trump’s boasting of his escape from $916 million in taxes while elsewhere in the news it was reported that in no state in the Union can a full-time minimum-wage worker afford to buy or rent a two-bedroom dwelling; that the home-ownership rate has dropped to its lowest level in the past fifty years; that the typical American household holds a net worth 14 percent lower than it did in 1984; that 62,000 homeless people roam the streets of New York City, their number larger than at any time since the 1930s Great Depression.
There may not be an “American character,” but there is the emotion of being American…that feeling…of nostalgia for some undetermined future when man will have improved himself beyond recognition and when all will be well.
—V.S. Pritchett
Home in the American scheme of things is a word furnished with as many meanings and locations as money and mother, God and the flag. A place always somewhere in mind if not on a map or lost to a bank, there to be found over a rainbow or bridge, around the next bend in a river or road. Down on the farm or back in the sticks, crossing the bar or the plate. In the burbs with the wife and the kids, out on the range with the deer and the antelope, on a centerfold page in Architectural Digest, at $10,000 a square foot where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.
This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly takes up the topic of home and its whereabouts because also in the American scheme of things the chance at a home of one’s own is the bet on a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The American democracy and dream are the building of castles in air. Whither goeth the one so goeth the other, these days up in smoke and the spout.
A high percentage of the nation’s net worth and good fortune stems from the buying and selling of home as both fiction and fact, but the emotion of being American emerges from discernible signs of a self-improving future throughout the whole of the society. Not that all present draw the same pay, but that they all share a sense of the commonwealth moving in the direction of when all will be well.
Let the proofs of prosperity appear in only one neck of the woods, the tide coming in for the rich, going out for everybody else, and the notion of home acquires first- and second-class meanings: habitation for human beings and housing for money. The advertising of the nation’s ideal shifts from the little house on the prairie to the brochure selling apartments in Donald Trump’s Fifth Avenue tower of glass—“Elegant. Sophisticated. Strictly beau monde…Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy.”
As did the grotesque spectacle of the mogul’s 2016 presidential campaign. As is the Potemkin village democracy that nowadays fronts the owning and operating of America the beautiful by the combination of financial, real estate, media, and government interests that stand and serve as the nation’s landlord. The teardown of the democratic idea, a slum-clearance project in development for the past thirty years, prepared the ground for Trump’s boasting of his escape from $916 million in taxes while elsewhere in the news it was reported that in no state in the Union can a full-time minimum-wage worker afford to buy or rent a two-bedroom dwelling; that the home-ownership rate has dropped to its lowest level in the past fifty years; that the typical American household holds a net worth 14 percent lower than it did in 1984; that 62,000 homeless people roam the streets of New York City, their number larger than at any time since the 1930s Great Depression.
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