When you are born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you are born  in America, you get a front row seat – George Carlin

It could be argued, that the great American illusion, the coexistence of a dream-like unreality, and, on the contrary, the effective reality of facts, creates and highlights an intrinsic paradox that lays at the core of the American Dream of purity and innocence. As John Muirhead stated, America is “The Land of Contrasts” . This is the paradox of the pretension of being innocent without being contaminated by that unconscious forces that Bergland defined “The National Uncanny”, the paradox of the pretense of renewal without taking into account history, of purity without miscegenation, of pastoralism.

Photo taken in Oct. 2012 © Elena Brunello