The Great American Lie
By: Sofia Irfan
Tags: American Dream, America, Hollywood, Immigrants

Taken from zocalo, which borrowed from New York Public Library

I have written and rewritten this article at least twenty times since arriving to the (Divided) United States of America. It is only now, one week out from graduation, that the fact that I am trying to stay in a nation that doesn’t want me, is really hitting home.

My relationship with America goes way back, before I had ever set foot or eyes on it. There has not been a time in my life that it has not existed rent free in the back of my mind. As long as I have known English is as long as I have known America. Some of the first books I ever read were set in VagueAmericanCitySuburbs. Most pieces of media I have ever had the misfortune to consume have been set or made in America; TVs and Movies and Music Videos and Vlogs.

Marina of Marina and the Diamonds fame once crooned, “I’m in love with the mess that’s America.”

It’s the best way to describe my feelings towards the nation. It was like a place of legend. My father, my uncles and aunts had all gone to study there, bringing back with them a love of everything American. I grew up on a steady diet of New Yorkers sitting around in cafes, hustling and bustling for larger than life ambitions. Secrets and adventure and riches beyond one’s wildest imagination lied in wait in this faraway land.

My mother, on the other hand, made sure I knew that there was something deeply wrong with the United States and its neoliberal, neocolonialist agenda. Everyday was a get educated about the atrocities the U.S commits day.

But there had to be something, there had to be a reason the U.S was so ardently defended. Land of the free, home of the brave; there was something the country was offering that was beyond the understanding of people like my mother, who couldn’t possibly know just how special it is, offering opportunities that nowhere else competes with.

It would be natural then, wouldn’t it, that I would want to leave the home that I had always known and move to this foreign land where dreams were just in reach? I was starving to know if the stories were true.

I don’t think I need to tell you that this story ends in disappointment. I arrived here with many long held expectations, and found that almost none of them had truth to them. There was no magical solution here- it was a place like any other that favored the rich and discarded it’s poor. As I drove past skid row, the first layer of the onion was peeled. The outer layer had been bright red and shiny, enticing. Peeling away the first layer was unnerving, but bearable. It was the second layer that clued me in on what to expect for the third one, and every subsequent layer revealed the rot underneath, the disgusting, tangled mess that everyone had been trying to hide.

But how? How could a nation have a propaganda machine good enough to make it seem as though heaven was awaiting below, instead of lurking sinister truths.

Now obviously, the lesson here is to not let the movies convince you they are a reflection of any semblance of truth. But the circle of life influenced by media influenced by life is not as clear a distinction as we would like to think. “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” Oscar Wilde says in his 1889 essay “The Decay of Lying.” Artists portray and indicate to us how we should view the world, what is and isn’t worth noting. In turn, our perception of reality changes so that suddenly, the way that the sunlight slants through the meadow of flowers is a romantic notion and thus significant.

To the artists- the filmmakers, the journalists, the writers- who chose to portray America a certain way chose to do so, consciously or subconsciously, because it indicated some underlying truth interwoven in the aforementioned circle. “There’s reality, and then there’s Hollywood reality, and everyone thinks that Hollywood reality is what things actually look like so if we make it look real, they think it looks fake,” explain VFX artists from Corridor Crew. So then, I suppose, we have to as ourselves why is Hollywood reality portrayed the way it is?

(if you answered in any of the isms range, ding ding ding! but you forgot to add theory of class into your equation, so one mark down)

Many of us can end up feeling betrayed by the reality that seems to true and vivid to us, that we feel as though real life must be the lie. In my case I felt as though I’d been betrayed by nothing other than my own expectations of what I thought America would be. Expectations built up through a media circus that was proficient at providing a pretty, sanitized, white version of a country built on the backs of POC. Sitting down to analyze why I felt the Hollywood version of America this was the “ideal America” was a process in unlearning white hegemonic paradigms. I felt as though I was seeing some truth that was hidden to everyone, maybe even to mainstream America itself.

But that’s no longer true, is it? It stopped being true the moment Obama left office. Not because he was some godsend president who had been keeping America thriving, but because he had been the last vestige of a shiny veneer. He had been better than Trump is at keeping America seem like something we all now know it clearly is not. A deteriorating economy, a country dying day by day. A nation is only as great as its weakest links, and there seems to be very little being done for them here. The great empire is crumbling before our very eyes, and oh, is it a sight to witness.

It was unfortunate that I had come here with the expectations of being welcomed with open arms. I wanted more than anything in the world for myself to be accepted, encouraged even, to pursue The Dream. But an immigrant is an immigrant is an immigrant. The road to (legal) residence in America is extremely difficult and expensive. At least half the students who came here with me have had to leave, kicked out of a place that has no use for them. The other half were smarter and are now paying the price, being exploited, overworked in their more useful STEM fields. A human is valued by the labor they produce, you see. And my labor is unwanted.

Except, I have a choice. I have a home country to return to, a safe and warm place where the sun always shines. My family would be happy to have me back, and despite the loss of my so called American Dream, I would not be too disappointed going back; I am privileged. This is not a choice afforded to thousands of other immigrants, those who have escaped war-torn and famished nations, many of them deteriorated in the first place because of U.S agenda. The vast swathes of land available in the empty heart of this country doesn’t seem to be available to be given out. Neither are the rich willing to share their obscene amounts of money, save for the low-paid labor heavy jobs, of course. The immigrants’ job is to remain invisible here, basic rights be damned.

But amongst the invisible and the downtrodden is where I have found belonging. When the mainstream refuses to give them a seat at the table, the oppressed create their own communities. And oh, what communities they are. There are spaces here that I could never have imagined; gay bars and cafes; LGBTQ, Asian, African American, Latinx school clubs (and club clubs); art spaces that blossomed out of people’s sheer creativity and will.

Also: niche communities for niche interests! Would you believe that you could find a community here for just about any bizarre subject you might think of? A convention for every obsessed soul, costumes and all. There is no one that does niche like the States.

So I didn’t get the America I set out to find, but I found friends who were more amazing than I could ever have imagined. I found talented and driven, kind and giving people, those who are willing to do anything it takes to stand up for what is right. Despite how divided it is, I found that there is an ideal of America that people still believe in, one that stands together; of the people, by the people, for the people. America the place isn’t everything it’s cut out to be, but America the idea can be whatever we want it to be. And I want to believe in it, as do so many who are fighting for it. And I don’t mean by means of war and tyranny, violence and hatred. I mean those who are on the ground everyday, working together on mutual aid and resistance, those who choose kindness and empathy over and over again.

I’m done subconsciously being a simp for the greatest nation that never was. There is nothing that it can do to save the universe, but maybe it can save itself. Despite being an absolute shitshow, the U.S has enough influence and sheer monetary power that the rest of the world begrudgingly looks on, waiting for a sign that we as a species can change the course of our futures. Please Americans, I’m begging you.

I might be kicked out before I get to witness America reach the potential I know it has, but I have hope. Until then though, I’m afraid we’re going to have to take a break, America. It’s not a break-up, just you know- time enough to get frozen yoghurt or something while you get your shit together.

*Yes, I totally was inspired to write a portion of this because I watched PsychIRL recent video on mental health and how it is perceived through media- please do check out her channel!