'America came bottom of everyone's list...' ('Anti-Americanism is becoming entrenched, and getting more personal', The Economist June 23 2005)
I love watching the arc of the ball when Jorge Posada throws out the runner at second: beautiful curves in the Yankee floodlights.
I love listening to Jimmy Hamilton's and Harry Carney's clarinets as they talk low to Claude Jones's trombone in The Duke's song 'Fugueaditty' (which will be played at my funeral).
I love reading the essays of Irving Howe ('a utopia for the sober, a utopia for unyielding democrats who still want to say that dignity is the opposite of humiliation').
I love the way Ralph Waldo Emerson makes me feel like I can do anything ('with the exercise of self-trust new powers shall appear'): Gabba Gabba Hey!
I love the scene in The Great Escape when the American Flyer (and 'Scrounger') Henley tells Big X about Colin (the British 'Forger' who has lost his sight) that 'Colin's not blind when he's with me, and he's coming with me!'
I love the democratic vistas seen by America's poet, Walt Whitman (and I love the clean-haired Yankee girl he met along the way).
I still love the first album that was ever played in the house I grew up in, bought by my brother with his apprentice's wages: America, by America.
I love Eugene Debs.
I love the ridiculousness of the fact that one city, New York, has produced more great music since the Second World War than the whole of continental Europe. (Prove it? It's a Fact! [Confidentially].)
I loved the courage of Walter Payton, always dying hard, the beauty and grace of Jerry Rice in flight, and the drama of Bernie Kosar and John Elway fighting it out in the freezing painted mud of Cleveland (98 yards!).
I love pancakes and coffee at the Empire Diner, Italian sausage hotdog at Yankee Stadium, and the pastrami sandwich at the Stage Deli (which the attentive waiter kindly wrapped for me).
And I love the people who on 9/11 showed us how good responds to evil.
I love the way Gillian Welch was thinking last night about Elvis.
I loved the way Fab Moretti didn't just throw his drum sticks but also himself into the audience at the end of a Strokes gig I'll remember to my dying day (and I love names like Fab Moretti).
I love the idea of taking a degree in 'The Great Books' at a Liberal Studies College.
I love the life-in-death of the American Milly Theale and its triumph over the death-in-life of the Europeans Merton Densher and Kate Croy (Listen Milly, don't let Merton and Kate get you down. As the magnificent Jimmy Eat World put it: 'Just try your best / Try everything you can / And don't you worry what they tell themselves when you're away / It just takes some time / Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride'. You just stay enamoured of the world.
I love digging for treasures in The Strand on 12th Street and Broadway - the greatest second-hand bookstore in the world - while my son is looked after by the friendly Goths in the toy store up the road.
I love American TV from CJ and Toby to Chrissie and Tony, from the Simpsons and Wacky Races to CSPAN and NYPD Blue.
I love the American soldiers who fought with my British father up the boot of Italy, from Sicily to Rome, to defeat European fascism (and then buried their dead, drank a beer, and went home).
Did I say I love Duke Ellington? 'Such Sweet Thunder'.
I love Winesburg, Ohio and the half-decayed verandas of its small frame houses that stand near the edge of a ravine - though I've never been there.
I love Patti Smith's horses, horses, coming in, in all directions, white, shiny, silver, with their noses in flames.
I love the look of Montana and hope I see it before I die.
I love the view across the Hudson when you sit behind home plate at the Staten Island Yankees, watching the awkward, hopeful young men trying to make the Show, while the boys and girls play on the bouncy castle, waiting to run the bases.
I love Martin Luther King and Ella Baker, and Bayard Rustin, and Robert Parris Moses, and Fanny Lou Hamer, and all the people who overcame with them.
I love the Hollywood star. I love the eyes of Jeff Bridges in The Fabulous Baker Boys, the smile of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and the sadness of Al Pacino in The Godfather.
I love the way Sundance says 'I'm better when I move'.
I love Jackson Pollock's 'Lavender Mist', Robert Motherwell's 'Elegy to the Spanish Republic', Willem De Kooning's 'Door to the River' and Barnett Newman's 'Heroicus Sublimis', before which I once stood and discovered a tear in my eye.
I love the classic John Coltrane Quartet. John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Stockholm, 1961, 'My Favourite Things'. (Not that Eric Dolphy didn't bring his own special genius.)
I love the slogan of my Mets: 'Always believe.'
I love the Marx brothers (and Keenan and Kel).
I love Tom Verlaine's guitar solo on 'Marquee Moon', like the darkness doubled, lightning striking itself, hesitating.
I love the humour of Woody Allen. ('The meaning of life? What do I know? I can't even use the tin opener'.)
I loved the summer I spent all my wages on Bob Dylan albums and the ghost of electricity howled in the bones of her face.
Oh, and I love Joni's Blue. Just perfect.
And while we're at it, thank you to the American soldiers who defended the polling stations in Iraq so that eight and half million Iraqis could vote, dance for joy, and hold their purple fingers aloft in pride. Way to go.
I love the way the sun splashes through the tops of the Redwoods in California and ennobles the arch of Washington Square Park, New York; I loved the people I met under both, and one day me and my girl are going to drive from one to the other and meet some more.
Until that day comes, whatever 'everyone' says, all these moments, these glories strung like beads, will tend inward to me, and I will tend outward to them, as the Long Islander who moved to Brooklyn wrote long ago. (Alan Johnson)
[Amended July 3 2005.]