Dreaming of the White House

On shattering American exceptionalism

“Daddy, why don’t you run for president?” I asked him.

On a good traffic day, we lived about 30 minutes outside Washington D.C. On weekend strolls around the city, I’d trail behind as we passed the White House, mesmerized by its sprawling landscape, ever inaccessible behind security-guarded fencing, and dream that one day I’d be lucky enough to live there. From what I knew about the world, if you dreamed hard enough, the dream was yours to keep. The American dream was yours to keep. So, I dreamed of America. I dreamed of the White House. Call me naive, but could you blame me? I was a child, and these were the dreams we were all spoon fed—at least where I grew up.

Before I ever knew who Hillary Clinton was, my mother dressed me up as her for an “America” themed spirit day—or was it the Fourth of July?—I was seven years old and in summer camp, that I know. She draped me in a white T-shirt picturing the American flag, reading “Future President” underneath, scribbled in children’s handwriting—one of many iterations immigrants sold at tourist stands scattered around the Capitol—and put a chunky pearl necklace around my neck. She informed me that Hillary Clinton was a blonde, like me, and an inspirational woman worth looking up to, like I would certainly be one day. I accepted the role without question, obviously—I loved playing dress-up. My camp counsellors, aware that I had no clue who she was, chuckled as I introduced myself. I pretended to be in on the joke.

The pledge of allegiance tattooed into my forehead every morning, I already gladly worshipped America. Hand over my heartbeat, I chanted the words like I meant them before I had even a clue what they meant. I bled red, white, and blue. In school choir, I sang songs of freedom, because this was where freedom rang. There was no question in my developing little mind that America was the best country on Earth. And the White House? It was the best house on Earth, obviously—that’s why they gave it to the president. Only the very best for the president and his family. Naturally, I wanted a taste of the best. Naturally, I wanted to live there one day. And naturally, indoctrinated with bootstraps mythology of the American dream, I earnestly believed I could. So I asked him,

“Daddy, why don’t you run for president?”

“I don’t have enough money,” he muttered impatiently.

“Why does that matter?” I naively pressed. “I thought anybody can be president. You just have to be old enough.”

“You need a lot of money,” he replied shortly, and he left it at that.

No further explanation. I didn’t question him.

My father, you see… he never had a problem with shattering children’s illusions. He was more than willing to hit kids with the hard truth—happy to, even. He raped us, after all—the most earth-shattering truth of all, crushing any assumptions I held of family, safety, and protection, all in an instant. Breaking the harsh news of capitalism, of corporate-bought elections, of corrupt politicians—that shouldn’t hurt too much worse. He was just being honest. And I had to give him credit—if someone had to bear this bad news eventually, he was well-suited for the job. He loved to squash naïveté right under his boot. Unless it served his own interests, he had no interest in the preservation of fantasy. The facts of our shared reality were constructed in accordance to how they benefited him, and he sifted out whatever couldn’t. That fly buzzing in his ear, asking him to run for president, was nothing short of annoying—didn’t serve his interests at all. So he swatted me away with the hard truth.

At least it was the truth. For all of his crimes and cruelty, on the rare occasions he decided to tell the truth, my father had a knack for telling it bluntly. Cannily similar to our next president, he was a liar who told the truth—simultaneously above the law and knee-deep in the murky swamp of criminal activity, participating in it and exposing it at the same time. He was willing to blurt a select few truths others would never dare (as long as they benefitted him), to speak them from the heart, even, in a manner that somehow managed to build trust with listening ears—my listening ears included. I easily trusted my father’s words. Seven years old, I learned the harsh truth that day: only rich people can be president.

Digesting this reality was challenging—it fully contradicted the gospel of meritocracy I was actively taught in school. Accepting my father’s words threatened to shatter the vision of equality I had been fed. My entire elementary curriculum had been designed to instil faith in the perfection of a post-racial America, where class differences were merely a measure of how hard people worked in life, the direct reflection of one’s moral and spiritual standing. I was raised by the Protestant work ethic—wherein the world was set up fairly for everyone, money was always earned through hard work, power was always earned through hard work, and thus those in positions of power could be automatically trusted, because surely it reflected their history of hard work, and hard work reflected both goodness and Godliness.

We were spoon-fed a state-sanctioned curriculum of nationalist propaganda, one where sugar-coated stories of breaking bread over Thanksgiving feasts erased the violent history of colonialism. And while the motivations behind this gross simplification of the world are justifiable to colonial powers—preserving the “innocence” of childhood, creating good workers, imposing normative morality—the inevitable unlearning process feels like pulling teeth. American exceptionalism proves to be a myth far more challenging to unlearn than the tooth fairy, a myth far and few set out to unlearn at all. Good thing my father had no interest in preserving innocence. My rapist’s careless, illusion-shattering rhetoric was precisely what I needed to crush my own illusion of the American Dream, albeit prematurely.

No more dreaming of the White House.