Posted by
Boris Tiraspolsky on Monday, February 02, 2009 4:08:22 AM
"I am unconditionally certain that the Communist Manifesto is less essential to the History of this Nation then the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Every word of these two historic doc-uments is about the American Dream and only about the American Dream."
Further decay of the American Dream
by Boris Tiraspolsky
There was a doc-umentary motion picture named American Dream, released in 1989. It told the story of the Hormel meat packers strike in Minnesota, an event anyone hardly remembers anymore.
The film enthusiastically portrayed a labor conflict between the workers and the owners of the Hormel company who decided to cut workers’ wages from $10.60 to $8.25 an hour after declaring an annual profit of $29 million dollars.
The minimum wage at that time was almost half of $8.25. However, the strikers end up divided into two camps. One camp continued to resist. Another camp decided to compromise.
Finally, the company sold a part of the plant to a new company. The latter paid labor only $6.50 for almost the same job.
I would not have ever chewed over this twenty year old and well forgotten story and the film, if it would have had a different name. But the film was precisely titled American Dream. Well...
Is this story really about having and loosing the American Dream by one group of Americans because of the greed of another?
To me, this entire story is about a problem of lacking the American Dream by all participants in the story: the workers, the owners of the Hormel company, and especially by those who made this doc-umentary. They, to the best of their ability contributed to a decay of the American Dream, turning the story into a preposterous travesty of everything this great Nation of ours is all about.
I cannot even for a split second believe that the American Dream is as cheap as $2.35 the Hormel company decided to cut worker’s hourly wages that year. Let’s for an argument sake imagine that the workers would had gotten their $2.35 back. Where is the American Dream then?
I am positive that the American Dream is not about $29 million dollars of annual profit the Hormel company made, and a social struggle it provoked, either. I am very far from connecting the American Dream with a totally foreign premise that the history of society is a history of struggles between “exploiting and exploited”. That is called “scientific communism”, and I am with the Ideology opposing it.
I am unconditionally certain that the Communist Manifesto is less essential to the History of this Nation then the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Every word of these two historic doc-uments is about the American Dream and only about the American Dream.
Didn't the workers, the owners of the Hormel company, and especially the makers of this doc-umentary motion picture read them? Of course they did. Why did they have a totally erroneous idea when they proudly named their film? As a result of their irresponsible “creativity” they left an ideologically distorted witness account of what the American Dream is, and in fact, corroded it.
Twenty years after the almost forgotten strike in Minnesota the entire U.S. meat packing industry has found the way to further decay of the American Dream. The industry is notorious for widely using a labor of illegal immigrants. These people will never go on strike even if companies decide to cut their hourly wage below minimum wage, and they have absolutely no idea what the American Dream is, either.