As American as... the Banjo?

With all the division in our modern society, it's easy for us to forget how much our independent factions have to do with one another - how we're all Americans at the root. African slaves made as indelible and lasting an impression on our heritage as the Europeans who bought them.

Jazz is American. So is rock n roll, country music, and the blues. Coca-Cola, baseball, basketball, the electric guitar, comic books. Science fiction is American, as is the first Mystery story. Hollywood - for better and for worse - Playboy, peanut butter, film animation, television, and the home computer. And yes, even the banjo.

Tonight was the second time I've seen David Letterman literally in years. I watched a few nights back when Garry Shandling made an appearance and I tuned in tonight to see Steve Martin - one of the few, true living geniuses - and I do not throw that word around nor use it lightly. Steve Martin is an accomplished creative force, having turned his hand to many fields and conquered them all. He is an award-winning comedian and writer, a bestselling author, a film actor, a stage magician, an esteemed collector of fine arts, and a Grammy-winning musician.

And he plays the banjo. Well.

Tonight, he played with two very prominent banjo musicians and I started thinking, "Nobody plays the banjo. The banjo has just got to be American." I was right.

It's become so popular to choose a sector or sub-sector or anti-sector and align ourselves with them - to select a label or series of labels and identify ourselves as a "this"-American or "that"-one. People always say "foreigners built this country" when they actually stole it from its indigenous peoples. They say it's a "melting pot" and a "pastiche of diverse cultures" and the underlying sentiment is that America isn't anything, and would be nothing, if it weren't for all the other countries and nations and cultures which comprise our country...

But it's just not true.

America has a rich and colorful history all its own and has made the greatest contributions to the modern world, bar-none. True, it's a brutal and often shameful history and yes, much of it has to do with unchecked opportunism and swaggering arrogance. But the same can be said of everyone else's.

And even though I come down hard on my country and its systems and especially those who are running it, it's things like the banjo that remind me that it's really not all bad. In fact, there's a lot to be proud of, and most of those things are so simple, they're downright humbling.