Ding Dong the Dream is Dead, Long Live Egoism

Generation X has never before sang in such harmony across the nation. Tonight I attended an art expose of who I now know is one of the hottest commodities on the New York art trading blocks. Chris Jordan, whose refreshing originality can be found at www.chrisjordan.com, put on a fine portrait of American over-consumption and shared his editorial on the problems of reaching the Utopian dream.

Briefly stated, Mr. Jordan captures images of America's most wasteful pastimes, such as the water bottles we throw away every day or the plastic cups we use during commercial airline flights, and depicts an accurately scaled image of the quantity of items we consume over a given time period, such as a day or a week. Visit his website for two minutes and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

About halfway through Mr. Jordan's lecture, I began thinking about Mr. Jordan's own wasteful empire. Although approachable and very well spoken, Mr. Jordan was essentially fighting a losing battle. Nothing he has done nor anything he will do will have any significant impact on American's concept of social and economic growth. In fact, his actions are part of the problem. From a literalist point of view, the hours upon hours he spent developing each pixel in his work, the jet fuel he consumed to get to the lecture hall, the fuel that I and everyone else in attendance consumed to get to the auditorium--all scarce resources in their own right--could have been used in pursuit of something else, something perhaps more productive and certainly for something besides Mr. Jordan's losing cause.

Surely, I thought, Mr. Jordan has come to this conclusion. He as much admitted the same during the question-and-answer session tonight. It's a grand feat to educate the public on the long-term effects of pollution. It would take the bows of divine province to convince millions of Americans to stop buying what has willfully been shoved down their throats. Or it would take the mountains of money used to produce everything we consume. Neither event is probable.

Why then, I wondered, had Mr. Jordan chosen to be so hypocritical? He struck me as pure and intelligent an activist as there is these days. He also struck me as sharing, at least previously in his life, many of the same problems that I experience all too often: the feeling of dissatisfaction with work and with the direction that my life is taking me; the repulsiveness I feel knowing that I do what I do not because it's truly the essence of my being, but because I have to pay my credit card bills and save for my retirement. The path Mr. Jordan has chosen is not waste, not even in a literal sense. It is his reaction and his answer to the dilemma we all face: Will I choose to be me or will I choose to be what is expected of me? Mr. Jordan is the antithesis of the American Dream. He is himself and no less.

I say bravo to Mr. Jordan. He illustrates our need to redefine the American Dream--our need to pursue that which brings happiness to the individual, and derivatively to our people.

To do solely to satisfy some standard or model of accomplishment is self-limiting. To do solely for yourself, motivated by standards and maxims that you define, is self-actualization--it is the New American Dream.

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