The American Dream, and How it Got Killed By the British Government.

You know …

I think I’m going to have a rant.

As it’s Independence Day, over in the States …

Strange … ? Yes.

But …

Can I be honest, here?

There’s an old phrase I keep thinking of, where the USA’s concerned.

“The American Dream”.

“The American Dream”.

Nice, old-fashioned, and possibly one of the more ambiguous phrases I think I’ve ever come across.

After all, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it defined, anywhere.

And yes, I know there’s a lot of folk who’ll define it as the dream of home ownership.

But that’s not a definition that appeals to me, at any rate.

The phrase, however, has been around for a while.

And it’s one that I’ve not personally seen as being about home-ownership.

Not from where I’m sitting.

No.

You see, I grew up — or, at least, was a child — during the 1970s and 1980s.

This was at a time when the Space Race wasn’t going at full pelt: but WAS still going at a respectable speed.

After all, the Apollo 11 moon landings had been in July of 1969, when I would have been at the tender age of 15 months old.

And all through the 70s, certainly, there’d been things like the Viking missions to Mars, stuff like that going on.

That sort of thing, I think, had always caught my attention.

And always seemed to me to sum up the American Dream, that pioneering ‘Lets see what’s out there’ spirit that had driven many of the European settlers in the US to go from one side of the continent, to the other …

And then head straight, and break through the gravity well, as William Gibson once called it.

But you see what I mean, there, don’t you … ?

The American Dream, from where I’m sitting … ? Is the simple desire to get out there: to go see what’s over the next hill, to see something that’s not been seen before.

OK …

Maybe to make a bob or two off of it: especially from the oh-so-lucrative technology spin-offs*.

But that’s secondary.

The important thing is to see what’s on the other side of the sky.

VERY exciting stuff.

»»·««

Now …

Here’s where I start getting down to cases, I think.

You see, in theory that view of the American dream really shouldn’t be coming from a Brit.

But, you see …

The American Dream — or my view of it — was alive and well in Britain, at one point.

Way back in the day, the Isle of Wight, on Britain’s south coast was home to both the Black Knight, Black Arrow and Blue Streak rocketry projects: the real world equivalent’s the the Rocketry groups lead by Bernard Quatermass.

Britain even got as far as launching the Prospero satellite.

Which is still transmitting, as we speak.

But the projects came to an end in 1971, when the Department of Defence cut the projects funding.

Dear God, almighty.

I’m British.

I’m proud of my country.

Granted, I know my country has been responsible for some terrible things, in its time: the slave trade, for a start.

But, on the other hand … ?

We gave the world the basic idea of the modern democracy: the idea that our rulers are responsible to the electorate, and can be voted out by them.

We gave the world the English language, spoken as a first tongue here in the UK, in Australia, the USA, Canada and South Africa, and as a second language in India and many other parts of the world: and with the language, writers such as Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and others.

We gave the world the BBC: and with it, introduced the idea of Public Service Broadcasting to the planet.

We even had a key part in shaping the Digital Age: Alan Turing invented the basic concept of the computer, back in 1936, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the protocols for the World Wide Web that you and I are communicated through, and even, more trivially, as Jonathon Ives, then who designed the original iMac, back in the late 1990s.

Britain gave the world that, and much, much more.

But by cutting the funding from those projects … ?

Well …

I’m thinking we killed the American Dream.

* Don’t forget, I’m using a Mac, running Mac OS X 10·6·8: basically, a very dressed up version of the Unix used by NASA, during the 1960s era of their efforts.