One of the many great things from The New York Times recently has been a canvass of 17 – count ‘em, 17 - opinion columnists of a cultural icon that best exemplifies the United States. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/20/opinion/nyt-columnists-culture.html After perusing the list, my first reaction was how many Times opinion writers chose highly accessible television series – many of which I have never seen. Please, this is not a value judgment. We all need entertainment/stimulation that is more enjoyment and less work. I’m likely to be watching the Mets – my patience with these poor slumping mugs is not endless – and coming soon, the Women’s World Cup of soccer, a quadrennial delight. And I spend way too much time gaping at the Bureau of Wishful Thinking, hoping for a few guilty verdicts, and soon. The NYT’s feature demonstrates that many of its best and the brightest commentators have a life, which helps them understand this vast and divided country as well as relax and enjoy. I was tantalized by all 17 choices, but a few that stuck with me that most: ---Bret Stephens got me by picking the film “Pulp Fiction.” Sometimes, just for fun, I go fishing on Youtube for the last 20 minutes or so, starting with Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolf a mob fixit man wearing a tux who cleans up a very messy murder scene. The movie ends with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as two gunslingers who foil a hapless couple trying to stick up a diner. I don’t know if that segment is about America or rather about LA a very distant generation ago but either way I love it. ---David Brooks wrote: “I nominate Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 rendition of “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” Brooks added: “Johnson is playing his slide guitar in a way you’ve never quite heard a guitar played, and he is not really singing so much as humming, groaning and intoning. There are few words, just verbal renderings of woe.” ---Nick Kristof wrote: Horatio Alger’s “first blockbuster novel, published in 1867 as a serial, was ‘Ragged Dick.’ Its hero is a 14-year-old shoeshine boy who sleeps on the streets of New York City. While Dick is illiterate and likes to gamble, he has a good heart, a willingness to work hard and a strong sense of honesty.” This being my personal therapy website, I came up with my own quirky visions of America: --- “The Sopranos” – the only series I have watched in the last 40 years. Not just for Tony and Carmela but also the Italian hitman Fiorio (“Mr. Williams") muscling the smug golfing doctor into the water hole or the cool one-legged Russian woman who dumps Tony. I still ponder what the final episode meant. --- For novels about America, I could choose Mark Twain, but I will stick with Thomas Wolfe, who taught me how to read and feel as a teen-ager. Most of his books are based in Asheville, N.C., but I would nominate “O Lost,” a revision of “Look Homeward Angel,” with the first section (inexcusably excised by the original editor) about of a teen-ager standing on the highway south of Harrisburg, sassing Confederate soldiers as they march toward Gettysburg, summer of 1863. That boy will become Thomas Wolfe’s father in North Carolina. The fissure in the United States that summery day is as real as today’s news. ---Every Thanksgiving, our son David plays the classic Scorsese film, “The Last Waltz,” the final concert of The Band – four Canadians and Levon Helm from Arkansas, with guests as diverse as Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, the Staples Singers, Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, singing “Forever Young.” However, if I have to choose one icon that catches America, I will go classical. I think of the long flights I used to take, over the Great Lakes or the Rockies in daylight, or the reverse flights, heading home in the midnight hours, the twinkling necklaces of highway, lone cars, small towns, rivers, so much space, so much promise, so much beauty, from 30,000 feet. Then I think of the composer from Bohemia, somehow getting himself to deepest Spillville, Iowa, feeling the vast space, hearing America’s great asset, the spirituals and the soulfulness of the Blacks, and how Antonin Dvorak put it together in “Symphony No. 9 --From the New World." (And if I have a choice, conducted by, himself an icon, Leonard Bernstein): Your choices/suggestions/comments?
Ed Martin
6/26/2023 07:43:51 pm
For a song. Ray Charles, “America the Beautiful.”
GV
6/27/2023 09:07:07 am
Ed: thanks for being first with the suggestion.
Ed
6/27/2023 12:03:24 pm
GV, Just saw the video—GREAT! thanks
curt schleier
7/10/2023 02:47:56 pm
Next colimn on Times decision to close sports department? What next, the food section?. I hope you are as ticked off as I am.
bruce
6/26/2023 09:02:13 pm
george,
Andy Tansey
6/26/2023 09:51:40 pm
Thanks, George, for the opening to spew an uninformed stream of consciousness and your nod towards, perhaps, ambiguity or unresolved tension. It seems that, if there's a theme here, it is the juxtaposition of contrasting views, perceived good versus perceived evil, truth versus popular myth, joy versus tragedy. Putting aside the very current and very American political dichotomy involving assaults on truth:
GV
6/26/2023 10:17:19 pm
Andy:,all due respect to JR42, but it's
bruce
6/26/2023 10:36:37 pm
george,
bruce
6/26/2023 10:32:17 pm
andy,
GV
6/26/2023 10:00:35 pm
Dude: I don't have space for all those Canadahooskies.
bruce
6/26/2023 10:34:34 pm
george,
GV
6/27/2023 09:09:10 am
Bruce, I forgot Celine Dion.
bruce
6/27/2023 09:14:57 am
george,
Marcia
6/26/2023 10:58:02 pm
As far as I am concerned, there is no one cultural icon that represents all of our great country. Every area seems to have its own way of thinking. How about celebrating our freedom to choose…something many parts of the world don’t share
Marcia
6/26/2023 11:02:55 pm
If you absolutely need to have a cultural icon I would choose Lady Liberty
GV
6/27/2023 09:14:08 am
Marcia, a very good point. America (as we are often reminded) is a highly regional entity...my Appalachian friend Randall brings up a steel-drivin' man named John Henry. (below) GV
GV
6/27/2023 09:25:14 am
Ooops, my friend from is Randolph not Randall.
John McDermott
6/26/2023 11:47:55 pm
There are so many. But music comes to mind first. The music of Pete Seeger, Motown, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin, Lyle Lovett, Nat King Cole.. But above all, jazz, in all its forms, which is so largely an American phenomenon.
Ed
6/27/2023 11:46:47 am
John, I am agreeing re jazz, in this citadel of country I thought you might need a friend. Alan’s son, likes jazz too.
Alan D Levine
6/27/2023 02:08:55 pm
Ed--You nailed it. George Shearing emigrated here from Britain. The true American Icon of each one of us is the ancestor(s) who came here from elsewhere (voluntarily or involuntarily) and helped make this country what it is, for better or worse. As for me, I tear up when I hear Joan Baez sing "There But For Fortune" and I bless my grandparents.
John McDermott
6/26/2023 11:54:42 pm
Sadly, perhaps the one icon which defines the United States at this specific moment in time is Donald Trump. Or maybe it's just a gun-the AR-15.
GV
6/27/2023 09:18:50 am
John, the interesting part is that we New Yorkers (I grew up half a mile from TrumpHaus) sussed out Trump early and often -- not just the buffoon but the swindler. He cast his fate with church people. Ss PT Barnum said...GV
bruce
6/27/2023 12:04:11 am
thought i'd give youse 'merikans a chance to name an obvious one but you're run out of time....
GV
6/27/2023 09:21:57 am
Bruce, you are right. Only in America. But I do give credit to the skinny kid from Brantford who finished last in the Edmonton Oilers' physical testing (his teammates made sure I knew that during a mid-winter visit to the Oilers' lockesr room) but he somehow managed to flick in a ton of amazing goals. GV
bruce
6/27/2023 09:30:41 am
george,
Randolph
6/27/2023 06:40:17 am
The Big Bend Tunnel is an abandoned railroad tunnel, located near the Greenbrier River in southern West Virginia. There is a statue there of a working man who died building a tunnel. The tunnel was constructed to haul coal from the mountains to make a few people very wealthy.
Altenir Silva
6/27/2023 07:15:29 am
As a foreigner who loves America, principally New York City, my knowledge about this country is something like this:
GV
6/27/2023 09:33:49 am
Altenir: You have a great feel for the regional mosaic of America -- how I fell in love with the novels of Thomas Wolfe from western North Carolina. You mention my Hofstra friend Francis Coppola, who captured an American failure in "Apocalpyse Now." We both read "Heart of Darkness" in English class...he did something with it.
Ed Martin
6/27/2023 11:55:03 am
Altenir, just to reverse the game a bit in your honor.
Andy Tansey
6/27/2023 10:58:44 pm
Bring "Girl From Ipanema" back to the USA and it leads to Stan Getz and, why, Roy Orbison's twist on the theme, "Pretty Woman."
ira licht
6/27/2023 09:26:33 am
BUSTER KEATON'S THE GENERAL. A GREAT AND FUNNY FILM, BASED ON A TRUE STORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
bruce
6/27/2023 09:33:49 am
ira,
GV
6/27/2023 09:46:38 am
Ira,, good to hear from you. I've always been in awe of your knowledge, from walking home from Jamaica (right past TrumpHaus) back in the day. best GV
Jean Bartelt (via GV)
6/27/2023 02:09:25 pm
(Via GV: Jean played third trombone in the Jamaica High orchestra and band. She is one of the very few JHS graduates still living in her family home. Jean sent me a few notes and I put them together.)
Steve Jellinek
6/27/2023 03:13:14 pm
You really started something, George. Great! Someone already mentioned Pete Seeger. I would expand that to The Weavers and especially to their classic “This Land is Your Land.”
GV
6/28/2023 09:59:39 am
Ira, a few blocks from your house, back in the day, a couple of 30s lefties were playing vinyl records by Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. They were our icons, standing for what my parents taught me. Thanks for the comment. GV
GV
6/28/2023 09:56:49 am
Steve, good one...Woody nailed that one. Regards to you both, GV
Ed
6/28/2023 05:00:31 pm
Another Queens tie
Terry Troiano
6/28/2023 12:17:50 am
Somehow I came up with icons of comedy…
GV
6/28/2023 10:09:29 am
Terry: (the girl who made home room my favorite event of the day in Jamaica): Great to read your suggestions. I get where you are coming from. "Vertigo" was on TCM the other night but I got sidetracked. 6/28/2023 03:40:20 pm
Never in a million years would I have ever considered criticizing George in any way, but this post has opened the door. The scope of possible comments and examples is just too great when one considers all the possibilities including sports, music (folk, classical, world and jazz just to get started).
Ed
6/28/2023 05:04:01 pm
Alan, as Quakers say, “In the Light” to you and your wife. Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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