In a world where Wall Streeters get billions in bonuses without regard to performance, a presidential candidate can’t even remember how many homes he owns, and a baseball player gets a quarter of a billion dollar contract, what is The American Dream? Is it the potential to become obscenely wealthy?

“Lacking a hereditary upper class, [and channeling Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie], Americans have typically looked in the mirror and asked, Why not me?” says Jerry Adler in “Why There Won’t Be a Revolution.” http://www.newsweek.com/id/183718

But, often you hear The American Dream associated simply with the opportunity to own one’s own home. Is that simple but profound dream The Real One?

John Zogby, the pollster, has written a book called The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream. Oddly enough, Mr. Zogby spends no time either identifying what The American Dream is, or how it has been, or will be transformed. Still, The Way We’ll Be has a lot of tidbits about our attitudes.

Zogby International has asked the following question of Americans for the past ten or so years:

Which best represents your life goals:

(A) I believe the American Dream means material success. It is possible for me, my family, and most middle class Americans to achieve.

(B) I believe that you can achieve the American Dream through spiritual fulfillment rather than material success.

(C) I believe the American Dream means material success. It exists but is more likely to be achieved by my children and not by me.

(D) I believe I cannot achieve the American Dream whether material or spiritual. Nor can most middle class Americans.

Zogby calls those who answer (C) “deferred dreamers” and those who answer (D) are the “dreamless dead.” (C) and (D) combined consistently represent 15% to 21% of respondents.

36% answer (A). 36% for (B), too, whom Zogby calls the “secular spiritualists.”

But isn’t something missing? Aren’t there more vectors at work than “material” and “spiritual”?

What became of “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? These cover more than materiality and spirituality; these cover opportunity, security in one’s home and pursuits, and individuality in electing what to pursue.

Maybe we have to look back to the Declaration of Independence to find what The American Dream was and, so, what it has become.

Next time.