What’s So Great About America? opening argument, Dartmouth, January 30 2014 | Bill Ayers

What’s So Great About America? opening argument, Dartmouth, January 30 2014 | Bill Ayers:

What’s So Great About America? opening argument, Dartmouth, January 30 2014

Such a huge subject, and such a lovely question— when a dialogue on that expansive question was first proposed to me, my initial impulse was to make a list.

Let’s see…OK: I’ll start my what’s-so-great list with Chicago; yes, Chicago—because it’s my hometown and I know it well, and because it’s one small piece of America in all its outsized and crazy complexity, the city of the Big Shoulders, the essential American metropolis—Chicago is one of the things that’s so awesomely great about America.

The musical, sure, the song and the film, The Jungle and The Pit andThe House on Mango Street, too, Augie March and Bigger Thomas, the Blues Brothers and V I Warshawski, Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest kid on earth, Studs Terkel’s Division Street and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and