I'm still catching up with a lot of what went down in the blogosphere while I was gone. Something that vaguely seems to have done the rounds was the idea of a top 20 greatest Americans. Here's Michael J. Totten's list.

Generally, I don't pay much attention to these kinds of things. But, a comment in Totten's thread got me thinking: why have I not seen more nominations for people like Louis Armstrong? How about Robert Johnson? Bessie Smith? Charlie Christian? Or, how about Les Paul?

Sound weird? My angle on this is simple, if not kind of silly: these people created what is in my opinion, the single greatest thing America has ever produced, something that is wholly and originally American, and a thing that has had more of an impact on the rest of the world than Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Einstein, Lincoln, and FDR: popular music. Popular music, and everything that helped make it or derived from it. Blues, jazz, folk, country, R&B, soul, rock, hip hop, punk. It's America's most influential export. American Popular music and the vast culture it has engendered are what people the world over lust for. Not the Federalist papers, nor the thinking of the Framers. Yes, obviously it's implicitly understood that the Constitution and the thinking behind it underpin a society dynamic enough to create popular music, but ask someone in Xinjiang about Hamilton, and then ask about Elvis Presley, and see what you get.

I wonder if it could even be reduced to just Charlie Christian and Les Paul: without them, there'd be no rock and roll.

Imagine a world with no rock and roll.

The communists would have had nothing to hate! And then there'd have been no JFK heroics, no Reagan facing down the bear, no...[Ed: stop...stop now!]