Personify the U.S that you like!

[Paul McEnery]

Unsurprisingly, the other one got contentious. And as Rick, Tages and others have rightly pointed out, America-bashing is just too damned easy. :evilsmile

And counterproductive, too.

So I thought I'd, um, accentuate the positive.

Who do you think of when you think of the America that you like?

[Agent Helix]

Scarlett Johannson's breasts, more or less.

[Jack Zodiac]

Stephen Colbert, the greatest American ever!

[Drew Van T.]

Scarlett Johannson's breasts, more or less.

Giving a different twist to "The Two Americas" paradigm, right there.

The America I like is represented by many, many individuals, too many to mention here. One of them, off the top of my head, is Johnny Depp. Lives in France, you know.

[moebius]

Honestly? Jesse Owens, FDR, John Glenn, Muhammed Ali, MLK, Caesar Chavez, Harvey Milk.

[HomerJay]

Just to name a few...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/251_Football_-_Ray_Nitschke_Hit_edi.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/DSCN0186-s.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/Robert20Johnson20formal20shot.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/sinatra2.jpg

[Puma]

Eleanor Roosevelt, Billie Jean King, Brandi Chastain, Katherine Hepburn, Ella Fitzgerald, Harper Lee

[Arrjay]

http://ffscat.csail.mit.edu/ffshtml/inlines/p/img0580.jpg

Not really personification at all.

But the Cali Redwoods and U.S National Parks in general are my favorite thing about the country. We can never have enough National Parks and heritage areas on the planet.

[HomerJay]

Eleanor Roosevelt, Billie Jean King, Brandi Chastain, Katherine Hepburn, Ella Fitzgerald, Harper Lee
I like Lesbians too!

[Dreadstar]

John Bernard Books.

[Paul McEnery]

John Bernard Books.

Feel like unpacking that one for the rest of us ignoramuses?

[cactusmaac]

John Wayne, Warren Buffett, Abe Lincoln, Reagan and Dave Mustaine.

[Slam_Bradley]

John Bernard Books.

You know that I agree with you 100% on this.

[Dreadstar]

Feel like unpacking that one for the rest of us ignoramuses?

John Wayne's final role in The Shootist.

"I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them."

[Paul McEnery]

John Wayne's final role in The Shootist.

"I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them."

Hah! Sweet. That's a fine movie.

[Dreadstar]

Hah! Sweet. That's a fine movie.

It fits on so many levels for me. Like: Books wasn't exactly what you would call a "nice" man. He was, after all, a hired killer.

This is what the Marshall had to say after asking him to leave town and finding out that he was dying of cancer:

"Hot damn! You know, Books, that's the best news I've had all day. While I was walking over here I was thinking, what if Books decides to kill me? Who will take over as marshal? Will the town council pay my pension to my wife? Damn, that's good news!"


Sound vaguely CBR familiar?

[Shellhead]

Benjamin Franklin
Abraham Lincoln
Frederick Douglass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglas
Harriet Tubman
Samuel Clemens
Teddy Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Martin Luther King
Jim Steranko
Muhammed Ali
Hunter S. Thompson
Oprah Winfrey
Tiger Woods

[Royal]

I'd post, but I don't want to be banned.

Let's say a mix of Bettie Page, Ida Lupino, Ada Lovelace and Nina Hagen.

EDIT: Found a pic.

http://rachel.nu/myspace/genki.png

[Ray R.]

http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2677834

Yup, this pretty much does it for me.

[Clint Barton]

Lewis Grizzard with a spackle of William Styron thrown in to counter the conservatism.

[Rob Imes]

In the liner notes to the Biograph CD, Bob Dylan is quoted as saying:

"People like to talk about the new image of America but to me it's still the old one -- Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, it's not computers, cocaine, David Letterman, we gotta get off that --- Hedy Lamarr, Dorothy Dandridge, that's my idea of America ..."

[howyadoin]

Elvis Presley and Jack Kirby. The fuckin' Kings.

[Iangould]

Ben Franklin - brilliant, simultaneously pragmatic and idealistic - and a bit of libertine.

Fredrick Douglass: The very epitome of the self-made man.

[Haunt]

Unsurprisingly, the other one got contentious. And as Rick, Tages and others have rightly pointed out, America-bashing is just too damned easy. :evilsmile

And counterproductive, too.

So I thought I'd, um, accentuate the positive.

Who do you think of when you think of the America that you like?

people keeping their big noses out of everyone else's business.

[Winslow]

The Tuskegee Airmen . . captured in this nice Howyadoin piece:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v225/howyadoin/Dawn_Patrol.jpg

[Tony Bang]

Johnny Cash
Martin Luther King Jr.

[Pól Rua]

Mostly people here.
I'd mention names, but I know I'd forget people.

[rick]

I, too, sing America
by Langston Hughes


I, too, sing America.


I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.




THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND
by Woody Guthrie


This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me


I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me


The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me


As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!


In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.


Haiku
by Jack Kerouac

The taste
of rain
—Why kneel?


America
by Alan Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.



America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
- William Burroughs



Dancing In The Street
by William Stevenson/Marvin Gaye/Ivy Jo Hunter

Calling out around the world,are you ready for a brand new beat.
Summer's here and the time is right,for dancing in the streets,
They're dancing in Chicago
Down in New Oreleans
Up in New york city

All we need is music, sweet music
There'll be music everywhere.
There'll be swinging, swaying, records playing, dancing in the streets,
It doesnt matter what hat you wear, just as long as you are there,
So come on
Grab a guy, grab a girl, everywhere around the world.

There'll be dancing,dancing in the streets.
Its just an invitation,across the nation, a chance for folks to meet.
There'll be laughing and singing,music swinging, dancing in the streets
All we need is music, sweet music
There'll be music everywhere.
There'll be swinging, swaying, records playing, dancing in the streets,
It doesnt matter what hat you wear, just as long as you are there,
So come on
Grab a guy, grab a girl, everywhere around the world.

Dancing, dancing in the streets,
Way down in LA, everyday, dancing in the streets
San Francisco way, they do it everyday now,
Dancing in the streets

[ragnarok_2012]

Stephen Colbert, the greatest American ever!

http://gallery.nofactzone.net/albums/userpics/AmeriConeDream.jpg

I like American ice cream.

[rick]

I'll Take New York
By Tom Waits

I'll tip the newsboy
I'll get a shine
I'll ride this dream
to the end of the line
I'm goin places
I'll take a ride
Up to the Riverside
I'll take NY
I'll let it happen
I'll pop the cork
tear off the wrappin'
I'll make a splash on the Hudson
that's how I will arrive
Hey, do you have two tens for a five?
Roll out the carpet
Strike up the band
break into the best
champagne when I land
Beat the parade drum
hit all the bars
I want the moon and stars
But I'll take NY
I'll make it happen
Blow out the candlels
tear off the wrappin'
And I know someday
they'll have to name a street after me
right next door to old Franklin D


America
by Paul Simon

Let us be lovers well marry our fortunes together
Ive got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and mrs. wagner pies
And we walked off to look for america
Kathy, I said as we boarded a greyhound in pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from saginaw
Ive gone to look for america

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said be careful his bowtie is really a camera

Toss me a cigarette, I think theres one in my raincoat
We smoked the last one an hour ago
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

Kathy, Im lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping
Im empty and aching and I dont know why
Counting the cars on the new jersey turnpike
Theyve all gone to look for america
All gone to look for america
All gone to look for america


The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
by Gil Scott Heron

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.


(and to end where I began)


Let America be America Again
by Langston Hughes


Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

[StoneGold]

http://stlcomics.com/gallery/jcpenney_stridex/cap1091994-copy.jpg

[Alex]

http://www.richard-seaman.com/USA/Cities/Chicago/Landmarks/ChicagoSkyline1.jpg

If the midwest is the heartland, Chicago is the friggen capital.
And when sinatra says you got a good place, you know the city rules.

[Slam_Bradley]

http://www.fairwood-mt.us/USA/Travel/Photo_TractorLoadingTruck.jpg

http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/pub/sept98/closer.gif

http://www.tristate.wsu.edu/_borders/dennispitt.jpg

[Slam_Bradley]

http://www.earlysundownstudio.com/IdahoCowboy.jpg

http://www.joltersdorf.com/people/page2-people_files/Gerd%20Cowboy%20Idaho.jpg

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f67/h20lawyer/ds2_0001.jpg

[Dreadstar]

http://www.tristate.wsu.edu/_borders/dennispitt.jpg
"Man, I tell you whut, that waitress, she had the finest knockers you'd ever want to see. Damn things were firm and out to here. Damn near knocked my hat off when she refilled my coffee."

[Slam_Bradley]

"Man, I tell you whut, that waitress, she had the finest knockers you'd ever want to see. Damn things were firm and out to here. Damn near knocked my hat off when she refilled my coffee."

Ain't nobody I'd rather sit and have coffee and a piece of pie with.

[Dreadstar]

Ain't nobody I'd rather sit and have coffee and a piece of pie with.

Both of them.

[jessecuster3]

Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.

[HomerJay]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/elvis2020johnny20cash20195720Small.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/sammy1.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/Favre.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/l_593b9e5bb9ec8bbb329d88ca86218360.jpg

[Gilda Dent]

Emily Dickinson, Lynn Conway, Lucy Kaplansky, Elizabeth Blackwell

[jessecuster3]

*snip* correcting one photo


You should have used:

http://espn-att.starwave.com/media/classic/2001/0110/photo/s_payton_i.jpg

OR:

http://www.nsccshow.com/images/Dick-Butkus.jpg


OR:
http://www.extrememortman.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Gayle%20Sayers.jpg

[Slam_Bradley]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/HomerJay64/l_593b9e5bb9ec8bbb329d88ca86218360.jpg

How did the dog manage to get in to the kid's kennel?

[HomerJay]

How did the dog manage to get in to the kid's kennel?
He was tired of his heated waterbed. :p

[Charles RB]

I don't care he's a fictional character created by an Irishman, I'm going with Jesse Custer.

[Drew Van T.]

I don't care he's a fictional character created by an Irishman, I'm going with Jesse Custer.

No stranger than the people who would go with John Wayne. Not a bit stranger.

[jessecuster3]

I don't care he's a fictional character created by an Irishman, I'm going with Jesse Custer.

Awww schucks thats so nice of you.