The American Gothic as the Aristocracy of Virtue

By Jonathan Henderson

The American Dream, once an endless stream of possibilities, is today guaranteed only to those born of primogeniture and entail. For the industrious, this will never kill the moral resolve due diligence employs as one’s uniquities lead to opportunity for all to live in prosperity. As man is not indigenous of the Americas, the entire hemisphere was settled by the nomadic savage. And as man is born innately corrupt, the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can only be assured through the impartial mediation by a legitimized third party. If happiness means owning property, the right to be free is not constrained under an artificial caste system. We are each born free of preconceptions (“tabula rasa”) with the will to assert ubi panis ibi patria (“where there is bread, there is my country”). In that sense, Americans individually evoke Grant Wood’s masterpiece American Gothic. We are a nation born of yeoman farmers, an unprecedented diversity of poets’ who bequeathed in rhyme tales of the ancient mariners who sailed our forefathers to this undiscovered country as pilgrims on their exodus to their promised land…..To Read More……