The Ideology of the American Dream

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2.2 The Land of Opportunity

In generally America is regarded as the land of opportunity. Anyone in America can grow up to be President, or be a US Congressman or a US senator. All it takes is a little hard work. They playing field is level. There is no reason that any one of the people in this room could not one day be sitting in the halls of Congress, in the Oval Office or on the bench of the US Supreme Court and this mean that live in America everyone has the same opportunity in everything to get success all the thing that must be done is work hard. American Dream Myth is supposed to be a culture product of American people. It deal with social behavior covering a dream of success, better attitudes, moral values, that penetrate pattern of living socially and personally. Thus myth is to be cultural spirit that encourages one to face living. Myth is spoken mouth to mouth in the form of saying or proverbs. It summarizes the essence of worth living to achieve. American people believe that dream myth which can be applied into their life in social life such as profile or treasure.

2.3 The Ideology of the American Dream

The content of each individual version of American dream they all include the belief in the opportunity to achieve some form of quantitative or qualitative success. It will be helpful to define the different ways in which success can be measured. Jenifer Hochchild states that definition of success involve measurement as well as content. She classifies success into following three categories which have important normative behavioral consequences: 1. Absolute success: “in this case achieving the American dream implies reaching some threshold of well being higher than where on e began but not necessarily dazzling. Universitas Sumatera Utara 16 2. Competitive success : ‘’achieving victory over someone else. My success implies your failure. 3. Relative success: “here achieving the American dream consist in becoming better off than some comparison point whether one’s childhood, people in the old country, one’s neighbors, a character from a book another race or gender- anything or anyone that one measure oneself against. Relative success implies no threshold of well-being and it may or may not entail continually changing the comparison group as one achieves a given level of accomplishment. The American dream ideology is its emphasis on individual people’s behavior rather than on economic processes, environmental constraints or political structures as the causal explanation for social ordering which help American cope with or even to recognize that the fact of dream myth. The most widely accepted cultural attitudes are expressed in social ideograms like democracy, law and order, frontier, success. The use of these ideograms implies the existence of a complex of inter-related images and emotions working in the psyche in a way that defies scientific analysis. the tradition of Anglo-Saxon parliamentary history of republican experience add the images of the land of the free, equal opportunity, freedom of choice, free enterprise, right of individual and the forth.

2.4 American Literature and American Play