Who are the characters, historical, fictional or iconographic that represent the American Dream?
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The American Dream: Past, Present and Future. Ever since James Truslow Adams coined the phrase in 1931, each generation has rendered the American Dream in its own image. Today, we face a variety of crises that have rudely awakened us. Our nation is sharply divided over the values that should prevail. We no longer know what we aspire to. The materials collected on this blog will become the source material for a live Performance Installation at Palomar College in April of 2010.
The Epic of America
The Characters inhabiting the American Dream are the ones that I learned about during childhood. And they don't exist "in real life" anymore:
ReplyDelete- The Nuclear Family with a Dad with a solid job, a Mom who took care of the family on the home front, and a couple of kids and a dog.
Things were already changing for my Mother. She left her career as a teacher when she married in her mid 30's (WWII got in the way of "traditional marriage age" for her). By the time that my sister and I were in school the only way to afford a family vacation was for her to work outside the home part-time (pre-school circa 1960) but she was always home in time to clean the house, do laundry, and get dinner on the table.
The "American Dream" Nuclear Family --- being one of the first kids in first grade, our extended family, neighborhood and CHURCH --- meant that to have divorced parents, one did not fit in. The nuclear family was everyone else's family, acrsss the street, next door, on television.
ReplyDeleteThe American Dream characters in my life are anybody whose own hard work pulled himself or herself out of a bad situation and into a decent life that he or she enjoys. In the culture itself, I guess the American Dream was anybody we read about who escaped from a life of poverty into wealth...that is why Abraham Lincoln and others were heroic to me. They educated themselves and worked hard to succeed.
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