Just What Jersey Needs

Xanadu is an idealized place, home to Kublai Kahn and made famous in works of fiction. The American Dream of perpetual upward mobility is a idealized fiction, too. Since the onset of the Great Recession, Americans have learned to downsize their dreams.

Now “Xanadu” is the “American Dream.” The long-stalled Xanadu project in North Jersey’s Meadowlands has been revived as “The American Dream.” (A better name for the multi-billion-dollar nightmare might be “Cruel Irony.”)

The revival is thanks in large part to New Jersey’s own Genghis Kahn, Governor Chris Christie. His administration arranged an estimated $200 million in tax incentives to restart the project.

What does that buy us? Just “the world's largest and most comprehensive retail, entertainment, amusement, recreation, and tourism project ever built," according to the new developer. The American Dream will include “high-end shopping, a 26-screen movie theater, nightclubs, a performing arts theater, restaurants, an indoor ice-skating rink, and an indoor ski slope (with moguls and a snowboard half-pipe).” Oh, and “glass-domed amusement and water parks - with sand and palm trees.”

Christie, who never saw a teacher’s salary or public employee pension that wasn’t worth slashing, refused to elaborate on financing details. “It’ll work,” he said simply. And why shouldn’t we believe him? Who cares that the project has “already burned through $1.9 billion and two developers, each of whom ran out of money.”

The administration predicts that the project will generate 30,000 permanent jobs. So, when "The American Dream" opens in 2013, multiplex ticket-takers can dream of scaling the ladder of success to become indoor ski-slope groomers. It’s the American Dream