across the bottoms of television news broadcasts came into
city of Pontiac, Michigan, or through an automobile which is no longer made, and most importantly, which would be cooler to see ? That’s what I love most about my country. Of course somebody made a cannon that shoots watermelons – but what did he do with it? That’s the question that really matters. Americans make things. Okay, everybody makes things. Homo Faber – Man the Maker – is a well-worn anthropological touchstone. What separates Man from beast is our use of language and our propensity to make tools to make stuff to make our lives better. What separates Americans from the rest of Homo Faberdom is the urge to make things for the sake of making them. The product need not have any useful application whatsoever, though they often do. It’s making it that matters. NASA’s Apollo moon program is the prime example of American know-how, determination, and resources martialed into common cause. In the end, these expeditions produced several hundred pounds of rocks – arguably more than what might be gained with a watermelon cannon, but not by much.
play on September 11, 2001 for very good reasons, and – for reasons unknown –
never went away again. Soon after the original calamity was sorted out, news people ran out of actual news alerts to put into the endless crawl and began posting any scrap of evidence of life on Earth: “Senate convenes... Panda something... Atlanta temps seasonal... DOW opens down... Something panda...” Staring at a television one day in an airport lounge somewhere in America, hypnotized by this dribble of nonsense, an alert caught my attention, “Man fires watermelon through Pontiac with homemade cannon...” Try as I did to find out more, it was the last I heard of the story. The homemade watermelon cannon is not what captivated me. Instead, it was the ambivalence over whether he fired the melon through the
American Consequences
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