The four plus or minus two or three American narratives

Josh Kirby, Discworld.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks writes ("The Four American Narratives"):

In spite of our many differences and the sheer size of the country, Americans have always been connected by a vast network of narrativium fibers, a single unifying story, or as I have called it "The Unifying American Story", also known as Passover without Jews, in which we told each other that all of us had reenacted the Exodus, escaping out of the oppressions of one Pharoah or another and into the wilderness, except instead of going to a land of milk and honey and killing all its people we stayed in the wilderness and killed all the people there and wrested the milk and honey into it with imported cows and bees and African guest workers, thus creating the last best hope on earth, so that when people around the world, similarly oppressed, were tempted to despair, they could always tell themselves, "At least there's America." 

Not that everybody could be allowed to come here, but they could still be glad to know it existed. We were so unified that even when we had a Civil War we were all on the same side, though this was not obvious to everyone at the time.

American dream

When I was a kid riding around town with my dad and we passed some particularly fine piece of domestic architecture along the way with a spiffy little Morgan in the driveway, he didn't say, "Fucking rentiers sucking the working man's blood." He was more likely to say something like, "You think those guys have a dog? I could get in at the second floor easy, but a dog would make it a problem."

But sometimes he'd say, "You know, sonny? If you work hard and play by the rules, you can own a place like that one day. In fact you can own three or four of them. Then you can flip [jump]

From HGTV Front Door.