{"id":808,"date":"2026-07-04T10:38:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T10:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=808"},"modified":"2026-07-04T10:38:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T10:38:15","slug":"american-idols","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=808","title":{"rendered":"American Idols"},"content":{"rendered":"
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HENRY JAMES<\/div>\n

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Selected by Hernan Diaz<\/em><\/p>\n

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I am an American by choice. I moved to New York, in 1999, because I wanted to live in English and be in close contact with the literary canon that I had learned to love at the libraries and secondhand bookstores of Buenos Aires. The first American novel I read in the original, laboriously and with the aid of a violently abridged Oxford Dictionary with navy leatherette covers, was Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s \u201cThe Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.\u201d The second was \u201cThe Portrait of a Lady,\u201d by Henry James. Same dictionary, yet this time it seemed insufficient, not because words were missing but because it could never account for the syntactic vertigo that I felt on every page. Being a teen-ager, I xeroxed a portrait of my new top-hatted hero, put it in a cheap plastic frame, and had it preside over my IKEA<\/em> desk.<\/p>\n

Read more Misophonia Fireworks<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition to offering a new architectural approach to sentence building, James taught me that the distance between people is often what connects them, that silence is an activity, that truth and ambiguity are not at odds, and that observation has a way of affecting whatever is being observed. But the lesson of the master wasn\u2019t only a literary one. He also showed me how to be an American while being an outsider. Of course, James spent a great part of his life abroad, and toward the end of his life became a British citizen. Yet this didn\u2019t prevent him from obsessively thinking about the United States and what defined its ethos, tone, and literature. As someone who has lived on several continents, I found James\u2019s eccentric and dislocated experience of his national identity immensely appealing. And, after almost thirty years here, I believe this obliqueness captures something fundamental about our country, where most of us, at some point in our family history, either as immigrants or emigrants, longed to be someplace else.<\/p>\n

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ELAINE PAGELS<\/div>\n

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Selected by Tara Westover<\/em><\/p>\n

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When I was a child, I lived in an ordered universe. Whatever happened\u2014injury, illness, flood, or drought\u2014felt preordained, part of God\u2019s grand scheme. It\u2019s a relief to grow up like this, held in the palm of some incomprehensible power. Even death is not a real loss, if you believe in the hereafter.<\/p>\n

When I was twenty, I lost my faith and the world shifted, became capricious and disordered, and, worst of all, indifferent. I remember those early months, seeing the world in this new way, as quietly hellish. Suddenly, there was no comfort to be found in tragedy. I\u2019d lost my certainty that all would be made right, and the result was a spiritual sickness.<\/p>\n

A year later, I discovered the work of Elaine Pagels, one of America\u2019s foremost scholars of religion. Pagels wanted to understand the history of belief: how beliefs come about and what purpose they serve in our lives. I didn\u2019t know it then, but Pagels was intimately familiar with tragedy. Her son was born with a rare disease. The doctors said that he would not live long. Pagels had to raise her son, caring for him as an infant, a toddler, a small child, knowing that he would never reach adolescence. He died when he was six. Soon after, Pagels\u2019s husband was killed in a climbing accident. Pagels wrote about these losses in a memoir titled \u201cWhy Religion?\u201d I\u2019d long admired Pagels\u2019s scholarly work, but this is the book that taught me how to live in the world as it is: imperfect, bizarre, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind. What I learned from Elaine Pagels is that to have something is to lose it. We die because we live.<\/p>\n

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FRANCES PERKINS<\/div>\n

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Selected by David Simon<\/em><\/p>\n

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Behold the bureaucrat. Endlessly mocked, constantly parodied, and vaguely resented, the mandarins in American civic life have no real allies or admirers. To the extent that their fellow-citizens refer to them at all, our government functionaries are perceived not as active agents of change but as inert, self-protecting obstructions. \u201cThe nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I\u2019m from the government, and I\u2019m here to help,\u201d Ronald Reagan once declaimed in a moment of pitch-perfect cynicism.<\/p>\n

Enough. Ask me for my favorite American and I\u2019ll summon an image of our greatest bureaucrat: a matronly thirty-one-year-old white woman crossing New York\u2019s Washington Square after having tea, hearing sirens wail, and looking up to see young Jewish and Italian girls, fresh immigrants mostly, jumping from the upper floors of a burning building, betrayed by an employer who locked stair doors so that they couldn\u2019t take work breaks.<\/p>\n

Witnessing the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in 1911, would transform Frances Perkins into the central architect of Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal. Before she was done\u2014and after twelve years as the country\u2019s Secretary of Labor and the first female Cabinet member\u2014she had quietly and competently done more than any other soul to insure safety and dignity for American laborers, to humanize the treatment of immigrants, and to eliminate child labor. As a capstone, she also planned and shepherded the legislation that created Social Security.<\/p>\n

Frances Perkins was, by temperament, cool and aloof, even a bit boring. But she was from the American government, our government, and, by God, she did help.<\/p>\n

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NESSMUK<\/div>\n

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Selected by John McPhee<\/em><\/p>\n

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Nessmuk is my all-time favorite American, at least for the moment. You can learn more about him at the Adirondack Experience, a museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. Like Twain or Le Carr\u00e9, Nessmuk was a pen name. His other one was George Washington Sears. He was from south-central Massachusetts, and he had a canoe that weighed ten and a half pounds. At nine feet, it was half the length of most canoes. In homage to a character in Dickens\u2019s \u201cMartin Chuzzlewit,\u201d Nessmuk named it Sairy Gamp. In 1883, he paddled the Sairy Gamp from Old Forge to Paul Smith\u2019s and back, two hundred and sixty-six miles on Adirondack lakes, ponds, and rivers, rolling out his duffel wherever darkness overtook him. The St. Regis lakes. Upper Saranac Lake. The Raquette River. Raquette Lake. The eight lakes of the Fulton Chain. He recounted these travels in the magazine Forest and Stream<\/em>, and, in 1884, published \u201cWoodcraft,\u201d a foundational text of American forest camping. Nearly a century later, I could not help referring to \u201cWoodcraft\u201d in these pages in a four-part piece on Alaska, one of which was included in the issue of July 4, 1977. In the second of those installments, I said that Nessmuk\u2019s journalism contained \u201cso much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.\u201d Nearly a century before the modern environmental movement, Nessmuk was fairly shouting contempt for a society full of \u201cpetty, narrow greed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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MADONNA<\/div>\n

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Selected by Carl Phillips<\/em><\/p>\n

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I was teaching at a small boarding school in 1984 when Madonna\u2019s \u201cLike a Virgin\u201d appeared. A mania quickly took hold of the students, partly reflected in how they tried to adapt the school uniform to include such Madonna trademarks as fingerless gloves, large hair bows, bustiers as outerwear, and tulle skirts. As faculty, I was to report any infractions of a dress code that, honestly, I found ridiculous. I couldn\u2019t. I wouldn\u2019t, I explained to the headmaster. My time was short there.<\/p>\n

From the start, Madonna advocated for freedom of expression, especially queer and sexual expression, at a time when media was silent on these topics. She spoke fearlessly about AIDS<\/em> and, just as important, about queer joy and freedom, for which many people considered AIDS<\/em> a form of punishment. Married to my best friend from college\u2014a woman\u2014I had no clear idea of my own queerness. Madonna\u2019s music and her public example were irresistible, made me start questioning everything; I began writing the poems that would eventually out me when I didn\u2019t seem able to come out myself.<\/p>\n

Just as important to me has been Madonna\u2019s indifference to societal expectations around art-making and what\u2019s appropriate. Like any artist, she has ambition, but the largest part of that still seems an ambition to make the art she must<\/em> make, for herself<\/em>. Her work redefined American life at the time; maybe more accurately, it awakened a country that had all but fallen asleep, embodying a freedom the nation had forgotten was its founding purpose. My first book and Madonna\u2019s \u201cErotica\u201d came out within a week of each other, in 1992. I hope we\u2019ll keep travelling together a good while longer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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CARTER G. WOODSON<\/div>\n

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Selected by Nell Irvin Painter<\/em><\/p>\n

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If, in most any era, you had asked for my favorite American, I would have shot up my hand to volunteer Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), the twentieth century\u2019s Father of Negro History, with \u201cNegro\u201d asserted proudly and proudly capitalized. In 1912, Woodson, a Harvard Ph.D. freshly in hand, was thrust into a world of anti-Reconstruction backlash, when racial insult was a normal part of so much formal knowledge. In response, Woodson, who also worked as a schoolteacher in Washington, D.C., created the institutions of Negro History Week, The<\/em> Journal of Negro History<\/em>, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. \u201cLife\u201d alongside \u201chistory\u201d\u2014Woodson understood the importance of Black culture, the ways in which the creative life and the past were deeply enmeshed. His handiwork lives on. The<\/em> Journal of Negro History<\/em> endures as The<\/em> Journal of African American History<\/em>, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History will hold its hundred-and-eleventh annual conference this September, in Norfolk, Virginia.<\/p>\n

Today, Woodson\u2019s institutions confront a President who insults Black Americans as \u201clow I.Q.,\u201d and who\u2014in his support for Confederate symbols, his campaign to distort and simplify school curricula\u2014wants to purge Blackness from the public sphere. Yet 2026 is no 1912, no matter how vigorously MAGA<\/em> would have it so. Today\u2019s America has been shaped by Black studies, the grandchild of Carter G. Woodson. His interdisciplinary foresight inspired one of the most popular museums in the United States, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And his legacy has armed a legion of Americans with the intellectual confidence to know who they are.<\/p>\n

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ELOISE BUTLER<\/div>\n

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Selected by Jenny Odell<\/em><\/p>\n

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Eloise Butler was an early-twentieth-century botanist who established the country\u2019s first botanical garden for native plants. Born on a farm in Maine, and instructed in local flora by an aunt, Butler availed herself of science classes at the University of Minnesota and went on to become a renowned phycologist. In 1907, she and local science teachers petitioned the Minneapolis Park Board for space to establish the Wild Botanic Garden. She eventually planted seven hundred and ten native species there, keeping detailed records of their success rates and flowering schedules, and pioneering methods for propagating species that were notoriously temperamental. Unlike traditional botanical gardens, which favored showy European species, Butler\u2019s wildflower plot aimed to show plants growing \u201caccording to their own sweet will,\u201d in community with other plants and in various ecological conditions. In short, she gave us a new form of attention to a particular place. The native-plant restoration project I volunteer with every week is directly indebted to Butler\u2019s eye for what grew closer to home.<\/p>\n

Butler was one of several key women in the history of environmental restoration who took advantage of the fact that botany was not entirely restricted to men\u2014though this also meant that it was denigrated as a feminine pastime. Compared to a laboratory, the \u201cfield\u201d of botany was relatively open. In \u201cWild by Design,\u201d Laura J. Martin notes that, on one expedition for a particular species, Butler and her sister, a naturalist, dug a hole under a chicken-wire fence, hiked up their skirts, and \u201c\u00a0\u2018trudged through the wet grass some three miles across the country,\u2019 to emerge \u2018dusty and triumphant!\u2019\u00a0\u201d One of the few extant photos of Butler, a self-described \u201cbog trotter,\u201d shows her in the garb of her time\u2014a full skirt and a big hat\u2014balancing atop a large fallen tree in the thick of a bog, where she would collect her plants. In a time with precious few pathways open to women, Butler neither married nor had children, and she stewarded the Wild Botanic Garden until she died, in 1933. When I visited a few years back, her legacy was still blooming.<\/p>\n

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THEODORE DWIGHT WELD<\/div>\n

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Selected by Marilynne Robinson<\/em><\/p>\n

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Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-95) came from the unprosperous side of a prominent family. This must be said, since otherwise his name might be used to neutralize his example. He was a central figure in the American abolitionist movement. He evaded the fame and much of the influence that seemed to flow to him naturally. In those days, there were divinity-school students from Yale, Andover, and Amherst preaching abolition and establishing schools throughout the frontier. Weld, who had done farmwork in exchange for his education at the Oneida Institute, in New York, was the acknowledged genius among them, the great orator and organizer.<\/p>\n

All these young men deserve endless gratitude for choosing and persisting in this rough, perilous, and holy life. They are usually forgotten, even at the colleges they founded. Where they are remembered, they have not escaped the cynicism that presumptively discredits or trivializes admirable figures and moments in our history. Still, what an enviable thing to toil in a righteous cause, and to act with such certainty that humane education fosters freedom. Their colleges accepted Black and female students before the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Weld travelled by water to Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, which was across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. Other students followed him there. He converted almost all of them to abolitionism, and they set up schools for the free Black population of the city and assisted fugitives with their escape. Cincinnati had a history of violence against its Black minority, and the Seminary thought it prudent to forbid student activism. Students left the seminary en masse and continued with their schools and their aid to fugitives. The philanthropist and abolitionist Arthur Tappan came upon Oberlin, then just rising from a swamp, brought the Lane Rebels there, and in doing so created a great center of abolitionist influence, under the quiet, unofficial leadership of Theodore Dwight Weld. He was a man who never became wealthy, who never sought power in any conventional form, who repeatedly suffered mob violence for speaking the truth. I hope something of his spirit abides with us still.<\/p>\n

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BARBARA MCCLINTOCK<\/div>\n

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Selected by Siddhartha Mukherjee<\/em><\/p>\n

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I tried to meet Barbara McClintock once, but I was told that she was out on a walk, and had left strict instructions not to be interrupted. It felt like a brushoff\u2014but it was quite the opposite. A walk, for McClintock, was a scientific communion. It meant meandering through the corn fields in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, examining the plants as if she were conversing with her closest, most intimate friends.<\/p>\n

McClintock was (and still is) the only woman to win a solo Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She did so by answering a question that had puzzled every biologist: Why do the kernels of some corns have different colors? If every kernel inherits the same genes, why would such variation exist?<\/p>\n

McClintock\u2019s research revealed that genes are not static elements trapped within chromosomes. Rather, in an organism\u2019s cells, genes can move around\u2014\u201cjump\u201d\u2014from one chromosome to the next. Even whole chromosomes can break and reattach to each other. Think of nature as dynamic, McClintock taught biologists. Develop a feeling for an organism.<\/p>\n

I think of McClintock each time I treat cancer patients, whose bodies often contain broken chromosomes that goad malignant cells to divide. I think of her when I devise a treatment plan that is personalized. And I think of her when I use immunotherapy\u2014immune cells sent to battle cancer cells, a strategy crucially dependent on imagining the disease in its entirety. McClintock\u2019s colleagues, obsessed with scientific reductionism, scoffed at her near-spiritual dedication to understanding organismal biology in its fullness and complexity. But McClintock\u2014secular, skeptical, profoundly unorthodox\u2014wasn\u2019t seeking the holy. She wanted us to understand nature, wholly.<\/p>\n

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JOHN RAWLS<\/div>\n

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Selected by Ted Chiang<\/em><\/p>\n

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What is the ideal that America should aspire to? I think the person who best articulated an answer is the philosopher John Rawls. Rawls enlisted in the Army during the Second World War, but what he saw as a soldier caused him to lose both the Episcopalian faith of his youth and his confidence in the military. After he returned, he devoted himself to thinking about what justice means at the institutional and individual levels. He eventually concluded that when visualizing the society we want we should assume that we don\u2019t know what place we\u2019ll occupy in it. Rawls described this as sitting behind a \u201cveil of ignorance\u201d; it removed self-interest from the process of designing a society.<\/p>\n

Read more The Met\u2019s \u201cCostume Art\u201d Makes a Case for Fashion<\/a><\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean a society where everyone is paid exactly the same. It\u2019s to everyone\u2019s benefit to have neurosurgeons be paid more than janitors. What the veil of ignorance insures is that the floor isn\u2019t too low; you wouldn\u2019t create a country that exploits a certain group if you knew that you might be part of that group. By eliminating your class and your ethnicity, your natural talents and weaknesses, from consideration, the veil reminds you that those traits are beyond your control, making fairness an incentive.<\/p>\n

The United States likes to think of itself as the land of opportunity, but, in reality, those opportunities are often \u201cfor me but not for thee.\u201d Rawls didn\u2019t offer a blueprint for a perfect society, but he wasn\u2019t trying to have the final word; he was trying to set the ground rules for a productive conversation. Whenever I contemplate the direction the country should move in, I think of him as pointing the way.<\/p>\n

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CARDI B<\/div>\n

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Selected by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio<\/em><\/p>\n

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Like many young Latinas, I grew up hearing from adults that if I was going to have any shot at being taken seriously in the world I had to lose the hoop earrings, dress more conservatively, and never wear the color red. This was apparently true even at the highest levels! I was around twenty years old and at an Ivy League college when I learned that the Obama Administration had advised Sonia Sotomayor to wear a neutral nail for her confirmation hearings. The path to respectability seemed clear: a college diploma and a modest blouse. Cardi B showed me a different way.<\/p>\n

Belcalis Alm\u00e1nzar was raised in the Bronx, by a Trinidadian mother and a Dominican father. Her journey took her from the projects and the stripper pole to hip-hop superstardom, as she became the first woman to win a Grammy in the historically man<\/em>opolized category of Best Rap Album. It\u2019s a story that could only have happened in America, and this woman\u2014who told David Letterman how much she hates J. Edgar Hoover while wearing six-inch nails\u2014could only have been from New York.<\/p>\n

Cardi reminds me of a very specific kind of New York City daughter: child of immigrants, multilingual, moving through worlds as different as reality TV and high fashion and tax policy, unbothered by the muchness of everything she is. All of us determined to help retire our parents. The stakes feel impossibly high, so taking risks with your life\u2014like becoming a writer, or exotic dancing, or rapping\u2014might seem insane when the smart thing to do is keep your head down, work hard, and blend in. But insanity is a condition of the American Dream, which immigrants\u2019 children are known to take literally, and to the bank. Seeing Cardi B succeed without sanding down her edges gives me great hope\u2014yes, hope!\u2014that the gap between what America is and what it can be is not fatal or final at all.<\/p>\n

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TENNESSEE WILLIAMS<\/div>\n

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Selected by James Gray<\/em><\/p>\n

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Ten-year-old me got lucky: no school. It was \u201cBrooklyn-Queens Day,\u201d and I was able to convince my mother to take me to Polk\u2019s Hobbies, near the Empire State Building. Before going back to Queens, we stopped at a coffee shop famous for its turkey sandwiches. As we sat, my mother spotted a man seated alone at the counter. \u201cOh, my God,\u201d she said, way too loudly. \u201cThat\u2019s Tennessee Williams!\u201d I turned to stare. He had heard her, of course, but didn\u2019t look. He just let out the slightest smile and went back to his coffee.<\/p>\n

Later, she had me watch the film version of \u201cA Streetcar Named Desire\u201d when it came on television. That guy from the coffee shop wrote it a long time ago, she told me. I had no idea what the movie meant, but it stayed in my head for days. Why was everyone so vicious to poor, noble Blanche? She suffered, suffered terribly, at the hands of those who knew from their own experience what heartbreak meant. And, even if I couldn\u2019t truly understand the film, I knew what it felt like to be on both ends of such cruelty.<\/p>\n

As I got older, Tennessee Williams began to mean more and more. For him, love was the one essential in a world perpetually on fire. A \u201cburning building,\u201d he had called this life, and compassion was his remedy for its violent and mercurial ways. He believed in love fully. It was our salvation. He died four years after our brief encounter at that coffee shop, about nine miles away from my back yard. When teen-age me heard, the news barely registered, but now I look back and tears well in my eyes.<\/p>\n

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STAGECOACH MARY<\/div>\n

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Selected by ZZ Packer<\/em><\/p>\n

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Stagecoach Mary, the gun-toting, whiskey-slugging, six-foot-tall former slave, combined the gravitas of Sojourner Truth, the grit of Harriet Tubman, and the insouciant swagger of every good-guy outlaw we\u2019ve seen in Westerns, spaghetti Westerns, neo-Westerns, and\u2014increasingly, thank goodness\u2014Black Westerns. In the wake of the Civil War, Stagecoach Mary delivered mail by horse-drawn stagecoach near Cascade, Montana. This was a business adventure tantamount to endangering one\u2019s life, since it meant braving wild winters, scorching summers, vigilantes, thieves, and\u2014for an African American woman whom whites of the day had no qualms about calling \u201cNigger Mary\u201d or \u201cBlack Mary\u201d\u2014people who may simply have viewed her as an affront to their sensibilities.<\/p>\n

But that came only after she\u2019d escaped slavery in Tennessee and signed on to help an Ursuline convent, whose sisters bore witness to her habit of dressing like a man and being unafraid of a duel. Born Mary Fields, she might have been lost to obscurity were it not for a 1959 Ebony<\/em> article\u2014written by Gary Cooper, the country\u2019s avatar of rugged cowboy individualism\u2014that catapulted her from mere Montana legend to national heroine. Fifty years ago, Elmer Eugene Wells wrote in The Negro History Bulletin<\/em>, \u201cWhether you\u2019re watching Bonanza<\/em>, The Virginian<\/em>, High Chapparel<\/em>, or Gunsmoke<\/em>, the streets of Dodge City say, \u2018we were white, we were white!\u2019 But we were not.\u201d The Bulletin<\/em> had asked \u201cWhat Can Blacks Celebrate During Bicentennial Year?\u201d Wells began the piece by considering whether Blacks \u201chave a moral obligation to the nation, considering the \u2018progress\u2019 made.\u201d<\/p>\n

I find myself, during this Semiquincentennial, asking the same question. Last month, the U.F.C. fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory on the South Lawn of the White House by declaring \u201cMichelle Obama is a man,\u201d invoking the old trope that Black women are intrinsically masculine. This endures, despite the equally entrenched Hottentot Venus trope of the hypersexualized Black female. That\u2019s why Stagecoach Mary fascinates me: long before we accepted the idea that identities can overlap and be upended, she embodied it, claiming ownership over her own image and destiny.<\/p>\n

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JOHN TRUDELL<\/div>\n

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Selected by Tommy Orange<\/em><\/p>\n

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Not many Americans know the name John Trudell. I\u2019m not even sure that many Natives know it, either. Trudell was a Santee and Mexican American activist and poet, who died in 2015. There\u2019s a documentary about him, and I\u2019d recommend that you see it, but the director turned out to be a Pretendian, and that makes it all too messy for a simple recommendation here. Still, I suggest you look Trudell up. I got to hear him speak at a screening of the film, at the American Indian Film Festival, in 2005. I was blown away by how he saw and contextualized colonialism and Indigenous ways through the long lens of human history, making it clear that the same things have been happening in cycles throughout human time, and that white people once experienced the kind of displacement and erasure that Native people have suffered here in America. I\u2019d seen him once before that, in Santa Cruz, reading his poetry to a set of that take-a-load-off-Fanny-style instrumental jam-band rock. Trudell was very critical of the U.S. government. Vocal and straightforward in the way that gets you a seventeen-thousand-page F.B.I. dossier. An early F.B.I. memo called Trudell \u201cextremely eloquent therefore extremely dangerous.\u201d He believed that his activism cost him his family: his wife and three daughters died in a mysterious house fire twenty-four hours after he led a protest outside F.B.I. headquarters. But, even after that, he kept resisting and he kept writing poetry.<\/p>\n

On the country\u2019s two-hundred-and-fiftieth, we are confronted by how little is left of its vital every-citizen-is-created-equal foundation, but even if there is almost nothing there should be, at the very least, something of Trudell\u2019s spirit of resistance to an easily identifiable evil at the helm, which will ruin everything if we don\u2019t believe we have the power to speak at every little level where we find we have a voice.<\/p>\n

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AUDRE LORDE<\/div>\n

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Selected by Min Jin Lee<\/em><\/p>\n

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Audre Lorde unsettled me because I knew she was right. More than any other sentence I\u2019ve read, the one that begins her essay \u201cThe Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action\u201d changed me from a quiet immigrant girl into an American writer. \u201cI have come to believe,\u201d Lorde wrote, \u201cthat what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.\u201d It was as if I had physically crossed a red line demarcating my former self from my present one. It was O.K. to be me\u2014foreign-born, naturalized, feminist, Presbyterian, working-class, public-school-and-Queens me. I would not have to mortify any part of myself. Lorde gave me courage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s unlikely that I would have known about Lorde had I remained in Seoul, where I was born. But my family moved to the U.S. in 1976, when I was seven, and for my birthday in 1988 my friend Dionne, who I felt was the smartest person I\u2019d met in college, gave me a copy of Lorde\u2019s essay collection \u201cSister Outsider,\u201d which had been published only a few years before.<\/p>\n

I regret never having had a chance to meet or hear Lorde, a daughter of Harlem, New York, born to a Barbadian father and a Grenadian mother. A graduate of Hunter College High School, Hunter College, and Columbia University School of Library Service, Lorde began her professional life as a librarian and eventually established herself as a writer, publisher, and college professor. In her brief life, which ended with liver cancer, in 1992, when she was fifty-eight, she struggled on behalf of poor, marginalized women, men, and children in America and around the world. In her writings, Lorde argued that her differences from the majority made her more, not less, and she fought for inclusion and liberation for the largest possible global community. To me, Lorde fulfills the promise of America, where we can live truthfully as ourselves in our complex totality and seek freedom and justice for all.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

BULLWINKLE J. MOOSE<\/div>\n

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Selected by Mary Gaitskill<\/em><\/p>\n

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Bullwinkle J. Moose (of \u201cRocky and His Friends,\u201d \u201cThe Bullwinkle Show,\u201d and \u201cThe Rocky and Bullwinkle Show\u201d) is my idea of a great American. This is a quixotic choice, and my reasons for it are so ephemeral that they are practically nonexistent. But, when I was asked this question, Bullwinkle was who (or what) popped into my head. Specifically, what popped in was a snippet of dialogue between the hairy cartoon moose and his squirrel sidekick as they confronted yet another instance of villainy: \u201cBullwinkle, this is terrible!\u201d \u201cIt is?\u201d Those last two words, spoken with guileless, game uncertainty, have periodically appeared in my mind for decades, evoking something bright and primary colored\u2014like cheap toys, cheap clothes, cheap music\u2014that instantly evokes an American dreamworld of abundance and delight.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In his ability to create an enchanting something from nothing, Bullwinkle bears some relation to another legendary American, Harold Hill, a.k.a. the Music Man, who makes a glorious marching band out of slovenly youths and the delusional dreams of their brutally scammed parents. But, whereas Hill is basically a charming criminal, Bullwinkle is an entirely ethical force for good; he would never scam anyone. He couldn\u2019t, even if he wanted to, because he\u2019s too\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. stupid.<\/p>\n

Bullwinkle\u2019s stupidity is announced in practically every episode of his shows, emphasized to the point where it comes to seem like a kind of sublime credulity (You want me to get in this mink cage and jump up and down squeaking like a mink, so the villains won\u2019t know I\u2019m a moose? Sure!<\/em>) or existential Everyman condition that, squarely faced, may even be heroic. (\u201cOnce again,\u201d the excited voice-over in \u201cMoosylvania for Statehood\u201d intones, \u201cBullwinkle\u2019s incredible stupidity had saved the day!\u201d)<\/p>\n

Warm, fuzzy feelings for noble stupidity are an American thing, especially in politics. And they can, alas, transform into hot and hateful feelings for actual intelligence, or, indeed, for anything of exceptional quality, or, even worse, anything aspiring to be exceptional. But none of this is true of Bullwinkle! Though he matter-of-factly acknowledges his limits, Bullwinkle has aspirations! He loves knowledge and culture! In Bullwinkle\u2019s Corner, he recites poetry, sometimes wearing a dress or a classical tunic. Donning a tux, he performs as Mr. Know-It-All, dispensing useful tips on topics such as how to avoid falling asleep on the job (Blow yourself up!) or how to disarm a bomb (Use a bobby pin!). He does magic, pulling lions and tigers out of hats. He even plays a medium, summoning the departed with \u201cEeny, meany, chili, beanie, the spirits are about to speak!\u201d He\u2019s a big dumb moose, but, though he doesn\u2019t pronounce everything correctly, his vocabulary is excellent.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the American Dream! Even if you come from nowhere, and don\u2019t have a title or a good family or an education or anything, really, you can still recite poetry and pull stuff out of a hat. It may turn out to be the wrong hat, you might pull something out of it that will tear your head off, but that\u2019s another story: it\u2019s still an American Dream.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

JOSEPH BEAM<\/div>\n

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Selected by Bryan Washington<\/em><\/p>\n

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Joseph Beam was an author, editor, bookseller, and advocate. Special dude. His philosophy was built upon dismantling the castigations of society\u2014and also, crucially, on the boon of Black queers in love. He wrote that this love was \u201can autonomous agenda for the eighties, which is not rooted in any particular sexual, political, or class affiliation, but in our mutual survival. The ways in which we manifest that love are as myriad as the issues we must address.\u201d Also: \u201cWhat an exciting yet fearful prospect, dreaming in the open.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beam was featured in Marlon Riggs\u2019s film \u201cTongues Untied,\u201d a 1989 documentary that aired on PBS and drew scathing conservative criticism for its portrayal of two men kissing. But Beam also assembled and edited \u201cIn the Life: A Black Gay Anthology.\u201d This book was a rarity: a collection of fiction, essays, and poems written by queer Black men in the U.S. Many contributors succumbed to AIDS<\/em>. In a literal race against time, Beam sculpted an indelible archive. \u201cWhat we offer,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis our lives, our love, our visions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beam died from an AIDS<\/em>-related illness on December 27, 1988, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday. About a year ago, I finally watched \u201cTongues Untied.\u201d A gay bar near my neighborhood in Shinjuku hosted a screening. About twenty men packed the space, leaning on shoulders and crowding the wall. The film was projected under some Christmas lights, which splayed over the liquor. Murmurs of \u201cawesome\u201d and \u201cwow\u201d and \u201cah\u201d underlaid the soundtrack. Then the movie ended, and someone flicked the lights, and people wiped their faces and checked their apps and the door opened for a chilly evening breeze.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more How to Celebrate America\u2019s 250th Birthday<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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