Surprise! Positive American Contributions to Civilisation
Western movies
The Colt revolver
The banjo
R.E. Lee
Loosiana cooking
Charles Lindbergh
McCormick reaper
Charleston
Moby Dick
White clapboard country churches
Tobacco
The music that used to be known as “Negro spirituals”
Southern literature
Hot dogs
Cornbread
100 kinds of barbecue sauce
H.L. Mencken
Fourth of July picnics
“Dixie” and the Confederate battle flag
A day to honour Mothers
Sandlot baseball
Tom Fleming and Chronicles
And you thought this column was always negative . . .
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*Charles Lindbergh Sr. -- who was in every way a man to match his heroic and properly heralded son, and the unflinching enemy of the Money Trust.
*"Isolationism," a political disposition rooted in the virtue of minding one's own business.
*The elegantly pugnacious Westbrook Pegler.
*The magnificent Joseph Sobran.
*Isabel Patterson, who was more of a man than Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, or any of their ilk could ever be.
*The incomparable Fender Stratocaster.
The great people that attend the "Summer School" in Rockford! God bless them all.
Johnny Cash, an American original. I'm not sure what song of his is my favorite. "Hey Porter". "If I Were a Carpenter". "Five Feet High and Rising". So many. My kids love "A Boy Named Sue", a song I loved when it came out when I was a boy.
The Gibson F-5 mandolin.
Wallace Stevens
Robert Frost
Flannery O'Connor
Willa Cather
- I recall reading Col. Lindbergh's book "The Spirit of St. Louis" as a philosophically and existentially adrift student in the decidedly bleak and sterile environment of a small-town 20th Century public high school.
While I suspect I'd probably regard bits of it somewhat problematic today, I have considerable gratitude toward the man for the intellectual warmth his words provided to me as a pup: Here was someone who reconciled a world of science & technology with a recognition of the numinous & mystical facets of the human experience. Lindbergh was the real deal.
- BOURBON!!!!
Reverend John Jasper
The Gibson Hummingbird
The Martin D28
Etta James
Ray Wylie Hubbard
Pittsburg Hot Links
and the National Steel Bodied Guitar
a) PISTOL, Semi-Automatic, .45 Caliber, M1911A1 B) LtCol John Dean "Jeff" Cooper, USMC (Ret)
John Adams (the Father of American Conservatism)
Carl Yastrzemski
Nathaniel Greene
Clam Chowder
Edgar Allen Poe
Daniel Webster
Boiled dinner
HP Lovecraft
Baseball
Maine lobster
Herman Melville
Larry Bird
Colt Revolver
Moxie
Walt Whitman
Sons of Liberty
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Maple Syrup
Steam Locomotive
Robert Frost
"Steamers" (steamed clams w/butter)
Samuel Adams
E.E. Cummings
Ted Williams
Robert Lowell
Quahogs
Emily Dickinson
Benjamin Franklin
James Fenimore Cooper
I just don't want this one to die so I add the incomparable Hammond B-3 Organ, that it must be conceded was the brainchild of an Evanston born Yankee and Cornell trained engineer Mr. Laurens Hammond.
But when wielded by the furious fingers of the great Booker T. Jones accompanied by those fellow Memphis legends Col. Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr., and the one and only Duck Dunn... Well, as the "Big O" Otis Redding unforgettably summed it up a short 40 years back down the line: "I Got Dreams to Remember". Always will.
I second the Gibson F-5 mandolin and the Stratocaster, and would add the Telecaster, the Dobro and both species of steel guitar (lap and pedal). I would also add bass fishing,although both my spinning reel and my lure of last resort (Mepps) are ultimately of French origin.