Dumb question: entire USA sits at one table. Who sits at the head of it?

josevolution · July 2018

Howard Zinn

Ledbetterman10 · July 2018

rgambs · July 2018

Put Dolly Parton at the head, nobody got beef with Dolly!

Spiritual_Chaos · July 2018

keanu reeves

stuckinline · July 2018

Meltdown99 said:

Winfrey is a terrible choice she is disliked by many...

But at the end of the dinner, Oprah would say, "you get a car, and you get a car"

Poncier · July 2018

Close the thread, head of the table is Dwayne Johnson.

brianlux · July 2018

HesCalledDyer said:

curmudgeoness said:

Hmm. I'm not a fan of most of the names mentioned. They might be fighting words, but I'd wager that Tom Hanks is the most overrated actor of our time.

I like the round table idea.

How about more women? In the Willie Nelson vein, how about Dolly Parton? She's Nelson's songwriting equal. Or Mavis Staples? Or Michelle Obama?

While I'm tempted to argue the absurdity of the original question (no offense intended, OP, my mind immediately went to visualizing the size and placement of the table, how one would even know where the head was and who sat there, etc.), I think it does lead to an interesting cultural question: who is the defining character, the embodiment, of American (literary) culture? England has Shakespeare, Russia has Pushkin, Germany has Goethe, Poland has Mickiewicz (nice statue of him in Krakow!) -- who is the quintessential American author, the "father" of American literature? We also could have the same discussion about other art forms -- who is the embodiment of American music? Etc.

Probably Mark Twain. But there's also Hemingway, Hawthorne, Whitman, Poe, Dickinson (mother of American literature?) to choose from.

I like the idea of Mark Twain, but it might depend on at what age. An elderly Twain would rake us all over the coals with his feelings about "the damned human race".