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1. The lemonade at Toomer's Corner (Auburn, Alabama): When God was a little boy and He needed extra money, He put up a card table outside His folks' house. This is what He sold.
2. The word self-evident. The most important adjective in all of history. All men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. And that is self-evident.
3. Hawaiian Punch.
4. Deleted
5. T. and F. D. R. were two of us.
6. Winston Churchill was half one of us.
7. Lincoln's second inaugural address: the greatest speech ever delivered by an American politician, delivered by the greatest writer who was ever president at the hardest time in American history.
8. Parkway Diner (Worcester, Massachusetts): One of the last of the originals in the town that invented them. There is no better place to eat than a diner at 2:00 A.M., especially if you don't realize that it's 2:00 A.M.
9. 24-Hour: banking, doughnut shops, convenience stores, mass transit, TV news, sports scores, liquor stores, video shops, grocery stores, hotlines, wedding chapels.
10. While U Wait.
11. All U Can Eat.
12. Einstein came here.
13. Neil Armstrong left from here.
14. John McCain left from here and came back.
15. The fact that we have six national anthems, to wit: "The Star-Spangled Banner"; "America the Beautiful"; "This Land Is Your Land"; "Battle Hymn of the Republic"; "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (points off for being a melody devoted to the king whose sorry ass we ran off the continent); "God Bless America."
16. The fact that we have Ray Charles to sing them all.
17. Aunt Carrie's Restaurant (Narragansett, Rhode Island): What happens to sushi when it becomes food again.
18. Cameron Diaz, especially when she's funny.
19. The brothers Farrelly and Coen.
20. The Whopper Jr., the best fast-food sandwich you can manage with one hand while steering with the other.
21. The down-and-out.
22. The hit-and-run.
23. The pick-and-roll.
24. The jump shot: Sometimes, when it just 3/4ows from the balls of your feet to the tips of your fingertips, you can believe in--swish!--telekinesis.
25. Jumptheshark.com.
26. Corned beef heaven: Slyman's delicatessen (Cleveland). Yes, size matters. So do succulence, simplicity, fresh rye, and warm fat. Lunch, noonish: When the corned beef is gone, they lock up shop.
27. Gettysburg National Military Park: Stand behind the wall at Cemetery Ridge and look out over the wide, sweeping fields across which came Pickett's Charge and you wonder, all glory aside, whether Robert E. Lee might've been the Bill Buckner of field commanders.
28. The Mall of America (Bloomington, Minnesota): Why would you take a water slide to get to the bookstore? Because you can.
29. Onion rings at Burke's Cafe (Baltimore): Five inches in diameter. Wear one for a hat.
30. Patsy Cline's voice: In case one day we all forget what red neon looks like at the dark end of a street on a lonely, rainy night.
31. Jon Stewart, the best thing to happen to television since the cancellation of Designing Women.
32. TiVo, the best thing to happen to television since Jon Stewart.
33. Philip Roth is one of us.
34. Robert Penn Warren was one of us.
35. And William F. Buckley is an Elvis fan.
36. Gable: "You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how."
37. Bogie: "Like a dame, you don't feed 'em, they won't do nothing."
38. Spence: "Not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce."
39. The Duke: "Fill your hands, you son of a bitch."
40. Jack: "If Marxie Heller's so fucking smart, how come he's so fucking dead?"
41. Jennifer Connelly's eyebrows.
42. The Great Lakes: Industry. Recreation. Deep, cool forests that run right down to the shoreline. Shipwrecks and haunted lighthouses. Cleveland and Milwaukee and Detroit and Chicago. All the immigrant dreams. And really, really big fish.
43. The 1966 Ford Mustang convertible.
44. Dual exhaust.
45. E-ZPass.
46. Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey.
47. Aged, dark bourbon, which is not the same thing.
48. Medgar Evers was one of us.
49. Huey Long was one of us.
50. Crazy Horse was one of us before we knew who we were.
51. Canada and Mexico: We could do worse for neighbors.
52. Rumsfeld's Rules. In particular: "Don't blame the boss. He has enough problems."
53. Coffee milk shakes at McDonald's Drugstore (Durham, North Carolina): Made with real fresh-brewed coffee. Afterburners for the morning soul.
54. Tater Tots. Corn on the cob. Peanut M&M's. Big, juicy, corn-fed, dry-aged steaks.
55. Spread Eagle, Wisconsin.
56. Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park.
57. Intercourse, Pennsylvania.
58. Genuine drive-ins, with the speaker that hangs from the window.
59. Climax, Michigan.
60. Jujubes.
61. Real butter.
62. The butterlike substance they pour on movie popcorn that can give you a stroke just from smelling it.
63. Coming soon!
64. The Exhibition Hall of the National Archives: the Declaration on the wall, like the crucifix in a church, and, below it, spread out like an altar rail, the Constitution.
65. The Great American Novel.
66. All the Great American Novels--even the ones that Great Americans don't think are Great American Novels, especially the ones about boxing.
67. Huck and Gatsby. The Invisible Man and Rabbit Angstrom. Willie Stark and Frank Skeffington. The Snopes and the Gants.
68. Flannery O'Connor's changing backwater South. Nelson Algren's festering industrial North. Cheever and Updike prowling the spiderweb suburbs. Don DeLillo's resolute spelunking through the dark caves of what came after all of them.
69. "I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's 3/4ames before I give him up."
70. Leaves of Grass: Hey, it helped a president get lucky.
71. The annual Pie Festival in Pie Town, New Mexico. Home of the coconut cream pie. Local motto: "Life goes on, days go by, that's why you should stop for pie."
72. Three million miles of paved roads and enough cheap gas to enjoy them all.
73. Audrey Hepburn's neck.
74. The Mütter Museum (Philadelphia): More than nine hundred anatomical specimens, mostly grotesque disfigurations like the giant disembodied human colon in the main lobby. (It's about eight feet long and weighs roughly forty pounds.) This museum is nothing if not a celebration of differences. This is what the great American melting pot is really all about.
75. Home Depot.
76. The Ryman Auditorium (Nashville): It was designed as a church, and a church it remains. Its congregation took in every backroad and bootlegger's trail, every logger's truck and every miner's cabin. Services were both Grand and Old and were held every Saturday night.
77. Route 66.
78. Highway 101.
79. Beale Street.
80. Bourbon Street.
81. Highway 61.
82. Bob Dylan: Ever notice how so many of the songs you never had time for and didn't understand when you were younger all make perfect sense now? Fuck Nostradamus. This guy's always known your future, good and bad.
83. Designer hubcaps.
84. Designer mud 3/4aps.
85. Jiffy Lube, muscle cars, and lawn darts.
86. The sporting-goods department at Wal-Mart.
87. The riding lawn mower: Once, when his wife hid the car keys, George Jones rode his mower to the local saloon.
88. George Jones is one of us.
89. Willie Nelson is one of us.
90. Ernest Hemingway was supposed to be all of us, I think.
91. Affy Tapple caramel apples (Chicago): Watch the old ladies make them by hand. Admire their hair nets. Feel your molars begin to ache.
92. Drive Thru: fast food, liquor marts, banks, lap-dancing.
93. Amtrak's Adirondack train route.
94. Primanti Bros. (Strip District, Pittsburgh): A world-class cheesesteak with fries, slaw, and tomatoes. In the damn sandwich.
95. The Hammond B-3 Organ. Think of all the songs: "Green Onions," "Born to Be Wild," "Like a Rolling Stone," and on and on and on. Some people still play these things. Seek them out.
96. The beer bong.
97. The knockdown 2-iron.
98. The Bobby Jones quote on Jack Nicklaus: "He plays a game with which I am not familiar."
99. The "Marseillaise" scene from Casablanca: Absolute chills every time, especially when the strolling lady guitar player starts hitting the strings like Pete Townshend. And Bogart was supposedly plastered when they filmed it.
100. John Huston was one of us.
101. Dan Rather is one of us.
102. Peter Jennings is not.
103. The New York Times. It still does one thing better than any other newspaper: It can be The New York Times.
104. Election Day: You can get a half million votes less than the other guy and you still become president. And nobody grabs a tank and seizes the radio stations on you.
105. Hot dogs at Walter's (Mamaroneck, New York): Fried in butter and served on squishy bread. All the major food groups in one serving, except the healthy ones.
106. Jennifer Capriati's biceps.
107. The suicide squeeze.
108. The 7--10 split: Pick it up and you feel as if you can change the course of history.
109. The ol' Statue of Liberty play.
110. The Jim Thorpe reply to the king of Sweden: "Thanks, king."
111. The Green Wave, the Crimson Tide, the Thundering Herd.
112. Fight Songs: Okay, so, in Henry V, Shakespeare probably invented the pep talk. But the fight song is all ours. My own vote always goes to the University of Michigan's "Hail to the Victors," having never been much of a fan of Notre Dame's famous advertising jingle. And respect any man who can get further through "On Wisconsin" than "Plunge right through that line."
113. Bronko Nagurski was one of us.
114. Pedro Martinez is one of us. We adopted him.
115. Big foam fingers.
116. An Old Fashioned on a Saturday afternoon. Place a sugar cube at the bottom of a heavy glass, wet it with 2 dashes Angostura bitters and a few drops water, grind, swirl, add 2 ice cubes and 3 oz good bourbon, squeeze a lemon twist over it, and stir. Do not add cherry or orange slice.
117. The opening scene in Apocalypse Now, when the jungle explodes and, for the first and only time in their sorry-ass career, the Doors make sense.
118. The mirror scene in Duck Soup.
119. Robert Shaw's USS Indianapolis monologue from Jaws.
120. The lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.
121. The slide guitar: A completely unique sound that never occurred to Segovia, developed by people using butter knives and the broken necks of whiskey bottles. Without it, the blues ain't half as sad or half as sexy.
122. The Chuck Berry riff.
123. The Bo Diddley beat.
124. The Phil Spector Wall of Sound.
125. Bruce Springsteen, and John Fogerty before him, and Woody Guthrie before the both of them.
126. Hank Williams was one of us.
127. Tenacious D are two of us.
128. The whole eternal, immortal package that is Julia Roberts.
129. Boomhauer's unusual English.
130. Also that of Porky Pig, Cartman, Yogi Bear, Yogi Berra, Woody Woodpecker, and Archie Bunker.
131. Buzz Aldrin's footprint.
132. Good ideas that look better with time: religious pluralism, cultural pluralism, due process of law, public education, women's suffrage, collective bargaining, no quartering of soldiers without your consent.
133. The GI Bill: Gave us, among other things, a middle class.
134. The Marshall Plan: Gave us, among other things, Western Europe.
135. The Job Corps: Gave us, among other things, George Foreman.
136. The civil-rights movement: Gave us, among other things, our souls.
137. John Lewis is one of us.
138. James Madison was one of us.
139. George Wallace was one of us, too, goddamn him.
140. Super Bowl Sunday: the first American holiday dedicated to the great American sport of sitting around on your big fat ass.
141. The National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame (Hayward, Wisconsin): It is shaped like a huge muskellunge, and you can take your kid's picture as he leans on the teeth in the muskie's mouth.
142. Tomato Heaven (Healdsburg, California): Red. Green. Yellow. Black. Yes, black.
143. John Coltrane and "My Favorite Things": Watch The Sound of Music as Julie Andrews sings this with Liesl and Kurt and Brigitta and the rest of the Von Trapp brood. Then listen to Coltrane and ponder the question of how the song managed to get to Neptune.
144. Otis Redding was one of us.
145. Little Richard is one of us and also, perhaps, one of Them.
146. Jerry Lee Lewis is four of us.
147. Butter sculptures.
148. Ice sculptures.
149. Chopped-liver swans.
150. Mount Rushmore.
151. The Nebraska Cornhusker: The sine qua non of goofy big-head mascots.
152. The Grotto at 3:00 A.M.: After the security force has swept through Hef's backyard, after they have combed over the forest of redwoods and the shrieking spider monkeys, trolled through the peacocks and mallards and Playmates strewn about the lawn, after the host has slipped upstairs with all of his many lovelies, then, if somehow you're still standing, and if you're man enough to keep going, then you go to the Grotto. . . .
153. The Castro Theatre (San Francisco): Who cares what's playing? Go for the live organ music before the show.
154. The boll-weevil monument (Enterprise, Alabama): There are not many insects immortalized anywhere--unless you count the Baseball Hall of Fame and certain deceased European royalty.
155. New York on a spring day, when the halter tops have begun to run.
156. The carousel in Central Park.
157. The Staten Island Ferry.
158. Times Square and Broadway.
159. A day game at the Stadium, too.
160. Subway exhalations. Sirens two streets over.
161. And skyscrapers, too.
162. Skyscrapers.
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