A Liberal
Dose
May 4, 2023
Troy D.
Smith
“Frustration,
Rage, and the American Dream”
In recent weeks I’ve talked about Falling Down, Breaking
Bad, and the American Dream. I’ve done this in context of getting a finger on
the pulse of middle-class America the last couple of decades, and to have some
empathy for such folks which might lead to at least a little understanding of
what has been going on. It is easy to look at the violence, the rage, the
frustration, the sense of betrayal displayed by people across the political
aisle and simply write it off as them being foolish, thuggish, backward, or
evil. Make no mistake, some of them are evil, to some extent- I’m looking at
you, Gus Fring and the neo-Nazis in Breaking Bad. I suppose it depends on the
extent to which they go, and their willingness to harm others or deprive them
of their rights. We know that Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down was
not as evil as other characters believed him to be -at the end, he was armed
only with his child’s water gun -and, if you watched Breaking Bad, you know
that Walter White was capable of great evil. But the point of my examining
these programs is to see what set them down that road of rage.
And the opposite is true.
I’ve always said that Breaking Bad has the exact same plot
as The Godfather -but in reverse. What they have in common is a relatable
protagonist who turns -gradually -to crime and violence, justifying it as the
only way to protect their family. Michael Corleone and Walter White each viewed
themselves as moral men, but each of them discovered they were very, very good
at being bad -and relished it. In both cases, they lost everything they were
trying to protect.
But their family trajectories were different. Michael
Corleone’s dad, Don Vito “The Godfather” Corleone, had come to America from
Sicily with nothing. He was a member of a despised immigrant group. He turned
to crime and violence to carve a place for his family, and his greatest dream
was to, one day, build his family up to “respectability.”
A very similar situation is described in the fourth season
of Fargo, which is actually set in Kansas City. The opening montage of the
first episode shows how, in the 1920s, the Jewish gangs were wiped out by the
Irish gangs, who were then wiped out by the Italian gangs in the 1930s, who
were then challenged in the 1940s by an African American gang led by that
season’s star, Chris Rock. Each immigrant group tried to claw their way up to
the top, and to respectability- except the black gang, who realized (in Rock’s
words) that they would always be on the bottom, and all the other groups were
trying to prove they were better and be accepted into society. Yet Rock and his
gang kept trying to succeed and be accepted.
They were all trying to gain admittance into the American Dream. And, to varying degrees, some of them did.
But the protagonists of Falling Down and Breaking Bad weren’t trying to ACHIEVE the American Dream; they had been brought up
believing it was theirs for the taking, but due to changing circumstances in
the country, were starting to feel it slipping away from them. It was their
promised birthright. If you work hard, and play by the rules, you will be more
successful than your parents -that was how America works. They had been
cheated. And they weren’t going to sit still for it. They were going to take
action.
There was a feeling in the air in 2016. There was a lot of
anger and frustration with the status quo. I think Bernie Sanders would’ve done
much better against Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton did -because people at both ends of the spectrum were disgusted by the establishment and were ready to
tear things down.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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