The American dream

++Notion 1 : Myths & Heroes:The American dream

Introduction :

                I'm going to talk about the notion of myths and heroes. To begin with I'd like to give a definition of this notion; a hero is a person who helps people in need, a hero has moral qualities and sometimes super powers, it's a courageous person and not a vilain; a myth is a typical story , a traditional story which concerns the early history of people or explains natural or social phenomena. My topic is “The American Dream”. We will wonder if The American Dream is a myth or a reality. First I'll give a definition of The American Dream, in the past it meant to search from freedom during a war in people's homeland but nowaday it means to search prosperity, money, success, The American Dream is the fact to immigrate in America with nothing and reach the top of the social ladder.

In order to illustrate this notion, I have chosen three documents. In my opinion, the documents that best illustrate The American Dream are the cartoon “An Alien” which shows the Mexican border, the cartoon “This time is true” which shows a father whith his children and finally an inteview on which we can heard a old woman from Russia and young people speaking about their point of view in the face of The American Dream.

                To start we will see the document “An Alien”. This document is a cartoon which deals with a law made by the governor of Arizona against immigration in 2010.This law consists in reducing the number of Mexicans who enter Arizona illegally. In the cartoon we can see the Statue of Liberty who is talking with a policeman of Arizona. The policeman said “I can tell by the color of your skin you're not from around here are you?”. It raises the problem of discrimination because the policeman judges the people who enter Arizona by their skin color. The Statue of Liberty seems sad to hear the horrid things that the policeman says, she afraid of being sent back to Mexico. The flame of the Statue of Liberty is attached so she can't light the way to the immigrants.

So the cartoonist's purpose is  to show that The American is a myth because as we can see in the illustration, America is not open at all. It's an interesting illustration of a myth, some people think that America is a land where life is easy but the artist informs us that under all the positives we hear about, are hidden horrid things like the behavior of this policeman. He shows us that all americans are not as open minded as we are shows in the media.

                Now we will concentrate on the illustration “This time is true”. This document is a cartoon about the reality of The American Dream. This document deals with the election of Barack Obama as the president of the USA. Barack Obama is a source of hope for the Afro-American because he's president of the USA and he's an Afro-American. In the illustration, the father who's an Afro-American is telling his children that now they can achieve The American Dream because Barack Obama is president. Before, for the Afro-Americans, The American Dream was only a myth, it was unreachable because of the racial segregation. The father says “In America, you can grow up to be anything you want, and this time is TRUE!”, his position seems reassuring because the father is holding his children by the shoulders and they are sitting on his lap.