We here at National Review love America; it is this affection that animates the institution and inspires our jealous defense of our country’s history, structure, and traditions. To supplement today’s celebration of our winning independence from kings and conquerors, we’ve compiled a list of a few of our favorite things — abbreviated though it may be compared to the whole of our adoration for the land of red, white, and blue — for your enjoyment and consideration.
From NR editor Ramesh Ponnuru:
- Burgers
- Air conditioning
- “Have a nice day”
- The Constitution
- The Grand Canyon
- Dryers that work
- The work ethic
- Being able to have cappuccino any time of the day you feel like it
From NRO submissions editor Jack Butler:
- Free refills
- Cornhole
- The smell of cut grass on a large lawn
- Water balloon fights
- Long drives, especially through one part of the country to another
- Our bizarre and often hyperlocal folklore
- Suburbia
- Small towns with main streets and squares
- Regional variation in accent/vernacular
- Summer cookouts with the baseball game on the radio in the background
- The fact that we stick out anywhere in the world that we travel, even when we try not to
From NRO managing editor Judson Berger:
- Jazz
- Large kitchens
- The national parks
- Endless road-trip possibilities
- The mutual and implicit understanding at any café that “coffee” means filter coffee, not an espresso-based beverage
From senior writer Dan McLaughlin:
- Baseball
- Opportunity
- Inventiveness
- Big, sprawling diversity — climates, urban/suburban/rural, races, ethnicities, religions, local cultures and accents and folkways
- Hot dogs and bagels
- Self-confidence
From NR summer intern John R. Puri:
- S’mores
- Geographical diversity
- TP-ing high schools
- Hot dog eating competitions
- Dropping peanut shells on the ground at games
- James Madison and all he did
- Bill Buckley and National Review [Editor’s Note: Well played, slick.]
From associate editor Sarah Schutte, she “who makes us sound better than we deserve”:
- Ice in your water
- A/C
- Enormous hamburgers
- The Great Lakes
- Fixer Upper
- Cracker Barrel 🙂
- Tillamook ice cream
- Hillsdale College
- Speedboats and tubing
From marketing manager John Bush:
- Country music
- Sweet tea
- Interstate road trips
- That we’re more polite than Europeans but never servile
- Kids raised to say “Yes ma’am,” or “No sir”
- Adequately heated and/or cooled indoor environments
- Waffle House
- The Everglades
From news writer James Lynch:
- Optimism against all odds
- Regional variation and national pastimes
- Big cities and small towns
- Skyscrapers and dirt roads
- Founding Fathers
- Restless, revolutionary spirit
- Natural beauty and geography
- Economic and cultural domination
- Athletic and intellectual prowess
- Competitive spirit
- Separation of powers & political competition
- Due process & the right to a fair trial
- Endless innovation and ingenuity
- Romantic and aspirational people
- Vets who put everything on the line
- National conflict and reconciliation
- Great presidents and statesmen
- Revolutionary War & WWII
- Technological disruption
- Always building and searching for new frontiers
From Buckley Fellow Haley Strack:
- Diners
- The American interstate
- Deep dish
- Skyscrapers
- The redwoods
- Yosemite
- The American novelists
- Levis jeans
- Boutique fitness craze
From Thomas L. Rhodes fellow Dominic Pino:
- An extra $10,000–$20,000 in GDP per capita over our European “peers”
- Cheap electricity and gasoline
- Air conditioning
- Powerful household appliances
- Root beer
- Free refills
- Peanut butter
- State-level peculiarities
- The moon
From content manager Calvin Corey:
- Football
- Country music
- Barbecue
- Pecan pie
- Banana pudding
- Whiskey
- Fly-fishing in the mountains
- Kentucky Derby
- Front or back porch rocking chairs
From magazine managing editor Jessica Hornik:
- Freedom
- Soft-serve ice cream cones
- Hamburger stands
- Diners
- Small towns in New England
- Cape Cod National Seashore
- Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Willa Cather
- That you can live in a small town and commingle, getting to know your neighbors, or choose not to commingle, and maintain total privacy
- The line in Born Yesterday, when William Holden tells Judy Holliday (dumb blonde with natural smarts but who has never voted and doesn’t know how), “Voting is easy, you just press a button.” Holliday: “Yeah, but which one?”
- Humphrey Bogart
- Jimmy Stewart
- Jean Arthur
From NR summer intern Benjamin Rothove:
- Regional fast food chains
- An ocean separating us from Europe
- Cheese
- The Mississippi River
- The Supreme Court
- Guns
- Fireworks
- Ice cream
- Corn syrup [Editor’s note: Can you tell Benjamin hails from the Midwest?]
From staff writer and carnival barker Jeff Blehar:
- Air-conditioning as a standard amenity
- MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
- Our country’s weird, almost mystically unknowable vastness. Nobody has truly seen it all.
- People who call soda “pop”
- That one rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter once
- Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ’80s career
- We beat the Russians when it really mattered — at Lake Placid
- Johnny Cash
- Bob Dylan
- The Grateful Dead
From editor at large Kathryn Jean Lopez:
The pilgrimage sites — they are everywhere. Mother Cabrini is buried near the George Washington Bridge. Three of the Jesuit martyrs were killed 40 minutes from Albany. Fulton Sheen used to preach at the heart of it all on Fifth Avenue at St Patrick’s Cathedral. At Caldwell Hall at the Catholic University, my alma mater, in DC. In Columbus Ohio, take time about an hour to Our Lady of Consolation, one of the most peaceful places, with a European and healing feel to it. Want tranquility, though? The house for Jesus Mother Angelica built in Hanceville, Ala., of all places. People adore Jesus daily, those most gloriously hopeful environs. Catholics may not have been welcome at first here, but now we have planted sanctuaries for seeking the external. God beckons the restless heart here in America. We were founded for this. To remember we did not come first and have gifts to preserve and share.
The retreat opportunities in America can truly seem endless when you start paying attention. Your local Catholic Church might look like a Pizza Hut but it’s very possible there’s a Gothic or other treasure that immigrants poured their hearts into with tributes to all their favorite most reliable saints throughout. They are legacies of love of God and faith in the unknown that America’s prioritization of religious freedom and encouragement of virtue as a necessity makes possible in a unique way here. God bless America. Make a pilgrimage and enjoy! Rest in the peace that is not of this world.
From associate editor Molly Powell:
- Bobcats
- Fishers
- Groundhogs
- Moose
- Black bears
- Grizzlies
- Bald eagles
- Blue herons
- Alligators
- Manatees
- North American beavers
- Wild horses
- Lawn-chair brigades in July Fourth parades
- Marching bands
From social-media manager Claude Thompson:
- Kansas City (and its bbq, which is the best in the world)
- Football
- Sparkler bombs
- The fact that America is G O R G E O U S
- America’s love for dogs
From NRCM editor Andrew Stuttaford:
- Half the TV-fed dreams of my childhood
- Saving the world, several times, sometimes belatedly
- Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13
- SpaceX
- Skyscrapers
- Art Deco
- Hollywood (1931-84)
- O. Winston Link, Ansel Adams
- Second chances, third chances
- Get up and go (Claude’s point)
- Bluegrass played in a Tennessee hole-in-the-wall
- Slovak bluegrass played in a Colorado bar
- Weber grills
- “Roadside attractions” (such as the entirely unauthorized F-Troop tribute I saw in Arizona)
- Roadside advertising
- Neon
- Steam in NY streets on winter nights
- “Congestion”
- Milkshakes
- Huge trucks on the interstate, evoking “Duel”
- Endless freight trains
- My uncle on his first U.S. vacation seeing the Grand Canyon and telling his wife of 40-plus years (my mother’s sister) that this was the “first thing in his life that wasn’t a disappointment” (and my mother’s account of the call she got from her sister a few hours later)
- Crazed radio preachers
- UFOs
From associate editor Vahaken Mouradian:
The Colorado sky. The Bishop’s Garden at the Cathedral Church in Washington. Redwoods, Red Alert 2 (but not 3), red Solo® cups, Red Lobster. The ability to take anything seriously or unseriously. The F-16, the M16. The very size of the place. Southern Gothic, Midwestern blondes, bluegrass, the Christmas-movie genre, nonholy holidays. The ability to make Asian cuisine taste good. Jack Daniel’s, Jeff Daniels; Stormy Daniels’s brief 2010 campaign for David Vitter’s Senate seat on behalf of the people of Louisiana. Coleslaw. Supreme dentistry. Twentieth-century Jewish-American literature. Twentieth-century new(ish) American journalism. Auden. Lawns. The liberal-arts college for all its sins. Business brio — a readiness to flirt with failure; an unwillingness to espouse it. Ideological polarization (it’s nontoxic). Also, the rowdiness and absurdity and ritual of American politics, and its hyperbolic language (these are vital signs). Your revival of the ancient Greek virtue of xenia. Corn bread.
From senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke:
- Roller coasters and all the reasons they proliferate in the United States at sizes and speeds unknown to the rest of the world
- Amicable sports fans
- How ours is a sun-soaked country compared to most of Europe
Anonymous voice from the void:
- A big country full of “great American cities” that are all unique
- Having a thousand different regions to choose from in which to make your life and pursue your dreams — or just stop for a while and soak in the scenery
- Looking up at a jet fighter streaking across the sky and feeling awe at the technological achievement, admiration for the skill of the pilot, and peace of mind that they are there to help keep me free
- A hundred kinds of pizza, ribs, and barbecue sauce to choose one — each one the right, best choice at some point.
- Big skies, big smiles, and bigger tomorrows
From nights & weekends editor Luther Ray Abel:
- Adirondack chairs
- Tire swings
- Golfing under F/A 18 Superhornets on Coronado Island
- Riding lawnmowers
- McDonald’s
- Historic downtowns
- Sears homes
- Big skies in a Walmart parking lot
- Bison and cows in the fields
- Endless customization for one’s home, yard, and machines
- The ability to attend a Catholic Mass one week and a low-church nondenominational service the next and fear no reprisal from the state or my countrymen
- The ubiquity of the American flag in and on anything you can imagine
- Good Virginia pipe tobacco on a long summer night
- Basketball hoops on garages and in driveways
- High school homecomings in the South
- Parochial schools
- How we conquered Europe and then gave it back twice.
- Founding Fathers who knew enough of themselves to devise a government that would disfavor both the minority and the majority and accommodate the world’s strivers, second sons, and dreamers.
- The opportunity for a Wisconsin boy to fall in love with a Texas girl on the shores of the Great Lakes under the fireworks of Independence Day
From associate editor Craig Young:
- The First Amendment
- The Second Amendment
- Ford F-150s
- Japanese cars and German cars: We beat ’em, then we bought ’em.
- The patriotism of brand-new citizens
- The rocky Oregon coastline
- Barbecues
- Bales of hay in the field
- Blueberries, blackberries, and cranberries
- The Rocky Mountains
- Our bedrock of religious faith
- Rednecks
- The perseverance of the pro-life movement
- The unfathomable variety of America
- Political cartoons
- The U.S. military
From content manager Emma Foley:
- Jeopardy
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Buffalo wings
- Saint John Neumann
- Oreos
- Michael Phelps
- Iced coffee after noon
- Ralph Lauren
- Drive-in movies
From Buckley Fellow Kayla Bartsch:
- The twirl of a soft serve ice cream cone after a day on the lake
- Abraham Lincoln
- The open road, both literal and metaphorical. The spirit of rolled-down windows, a Johnny Cash album on the speakers, and a wide horizon ahead
- Our fierce belief in every person’s dignity and potential for excellence
- Grit anchored in faithfulness
- The incomparable culinary innovation of two Honey Maid graham crackers, a Jet Puff, and a Hershey’s square — sealed together in a ceremonial ritual around the campfire
- Federalism
America is worth the everyday work of preserving her. All of us here at National Review wish you and your families a splendid Fourth of July.