Get rich quick... or is the American Dream an illusion?
OKAY, we’ll all have our individual opinions on this. But after almost five decades on this planet, I have been thinking about those acquired tastes that really aren’t worth the bother.
It hardly needs saying that there isn’t enough space to go through the full list here. But let me run just a few of them past you: custard, Bounty bars, Morris dancing, cucumber (although perfectly acceptable as a garnish in a gin ’n’ tonic), Phil Collins obviously, Regina Doherty, lederhosen, Red Bull, airports, oysters, hip-hop and countless others.
That said, there are also acquired tastes worth sticking with. It is a much shorter list, of course, so I can probably run through it in full: Guinness, mustard, jazz (although there are limits), stilton cheese, smoked salmon and, er, that’s about it. Except for the American comedian Rich Hall.
Frankly, I harboured a deep dislike for Rich over many years. His deadpan, monotone delivery when he was doing stand-up routines really got on my nerves. I also found many of his contributions on TV panel shows to be crushingly unfunny.
But I started warming towards him four years ago when he fronted a quirky, idiosyncratic and highly entertaining documentary on California.
Since then, he has done a couple of one-off specials and now he is back with Rich Hall’s Working For The American Dream.
It is, of course, an ambiguous title. Is it a statement of intent about the presenter trumpeting opportunities in the Land of the Free? Or has his name just been stuck on the front to drag in some extra viewers?
Even before I had seen a moment of the show, my money was firmly on the latter.
I wasn’t disappointed. Previous experience suggests there was little chance of Hall talking up his native land and so it proved here. This was a 90minute examination of how a national ethos has utterly failed vast swathes of the population.
First of all, though, let’s try and define the precise terms of the American Dream.
According to author James Truslow Adams in 1931, it means that ‘life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone’ regardless of their origins.
Unfortunately, there will
always be innumerable cases where Adams’s mention of ‘opportunity for each according to ability or achievement’ is never an option.
With his cowboy hat and stubbled chin, Rich Hall looks a bit like Desperate Dan’s puny younger brother. Not sure he can lift a cow with one hand or needs a blowtorch to get rid of his five o’clock shadow, but there you go.
His theme was that blue-collar life for the typical American isn’t exactly a walk in the park. At one point, he visited a particuarly unpleasant-looking town in Ohio. It was so grim, observed Hall, that even Bruce Springsteen ‘wouldn’t write a song about it’.
Meanwhile, he neatly skewered the ridiculous myth that there is no such thing as a class system in America.
He also observed that ‘a huge chunk of America’s problem’ stemmed from the cotton plantations of the Deep South. Relations would have been less fraught ‘if only northerners had been happy wearing wool or hemp’, he said.
It was a glib, throwaway remark delivered in typical smart-aleck style. But that was a rare slip. This programme was essentially an informative extended monologue about the history of ordinary Americans – and Rich Hall’s erudition shone through.