Encyclopedia Americana

From entries in the 2003 Danville Community Encyclopedia, transcribed by Anna Callahan from interviews with seventy-eight residents of Danville, Illinois. Contributors were asked to share knowledge on a topic of their own choosing.

America, Personality

I checked the diagnostic criteria in DSM-4, and I think that if you could say a country had a personality, the American personality would fit the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. I think, in retrospect, the classic illustration of that was the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. Half the world didn’t come. The East Germans weren’t there, the Russians weren’t there, the Czechs weren’t there. However, the Americans went running around waving their flag and saying, “We’re number one. We’ve got Olympic gold. We’re wonderful.” When you watch the Olympics on Canadian television, you watch the Olympics with a focus on Canadian competitors. When you watch the Olympics on American television, you’re watching the United States at the Olympics and you don’t see performances by great athletes if they’re not American. Now, that’s a sharp difference between the narcissistic personality disorder of the United States and a more balanced but somewhat smug and hypocritical personality that you might call Canadian.

Barbershop

Well, there’s four parts in barbershop harmony. There’s the lead. Then below the lead there’s a bass. Right above the top one or right above the lead is what they call a baritone, and then right above that is the tenor. And all four of them blend together, so it’s just unreal.

Batman

Bruce Wayne is his alter ego. He is a rich millionaire who lost his parents due to a criminal, so he decides to become Batman, which strikes fear in the hearts of all of those who are of the criminal world. He is rich, very knowledgeable, physically attributed—you know, he lifts weights and everything else. Batman is just human. He does not have any superpowers, and at any time he can be overcome by anything, so he does have his weak moments as well.

Books, Interlibrary Loan

I got a book and it came all the way from Concord, Massachusetts, and I’ve had them come all the way from Texas. I love it when they come from Maine. I love Maine, that and Connecticut. Another one I’m fascinated by is Cape Cod. I’ve read the landscape on it, and everything about the ground and grass and flowers and everything fascinates me.

Crucible, The

The Pilgrims weren’t really the people that you thought they were, they were basically like more into killing people and stuff like that. I think it’s in the United States. That’s when like all the—you heard of the witch trial? Basically, you just saw a couple of girls, they were running naked and the priest or the pastor caught them and it was his niece or whatever and he just tried to cover it up and say there was a devil or whatever that’s controlling the women trying to act like slutty or whatever. So people have it all wrong about the Pilgrims.

Earth, Taking Care of

Do not blow up bombs and stuff like that, don’t dump a whole batch of toxic stuff into the water, don’t pollute the air so that it is not breathable, and do not put so many poisons in the earth that you wonder what you are preserving, how much your preservation type of things are screwing up your metabolism and how come the fastest growth industry is medical. Usually most medical people say the best thing you can do is eat good food, drink clean water, breathe clean air, little things like that. But if we are, on a species basis, messing up, it gets harder and harder to find that clean food and good water and the clear air. A lot of people have the feeling that things are going wrong with nature but they feel the pressures and the pushing to exploit so strong that it just does not slow them up, it seems like.

Elders, Treatment of

Don’t you know that before there was writing the only way we did it was by talking. In Africa that is how they do it. That is why I have so much respect for them, because they do not take their old and put them in a nursing home. They set them around and let them tell the young and teach the young. But us, they get old and ask for too many glasses of water—“You have got to go.” And you go to the nursing home where they just die. And that is not a good thing, man. That is why I am never getting old. I am set on that. I am going to stay physically fit and mentally alert and, I pray, morally straight—go back to the Boy Scout days. I was one of those too, Boy Scout. All of that helps.

Foreign Policy

All these rumors about, um, all these Iraq, going in there to fight and stuff like that. I think my teachers call him a war hawk. Basically, that he just needs a excuse to get us in a war. I think it’s over China. My English teacher is telling us that if China, I think it’s—yes, it’s China. If China’s—what is that word—economy fails, ours would automatically fail. Because we, we lean on them for everything basically. If you look at anything you buy, it’s mostly China. So I feel if China’s economy collapses, ours is gonna collapse with it. We talked about this in class. This is what I believe, the main reason why he wants to go and fight Iraq is basically for control of China or Japan, one of the two. I can’t remember which one right now.

Gender

My teacher’s not sexist or nothing but he thinks males are better than females because he’ll tell you. He feels that, in masculine things, we’re—we can lift heavy things. And you never seen a female as president and stuff. And we get into the argument in class ’cause I told him my opinion that males are afraid of females, because there’d be an uproar if a female became president because she’d probably know what to do more than these male presidents nowadays. I mean the president we got now. I think his wife could do a better job. I think a female can hold up more stress than a male can. I consider America like a family when tragic things happen. And as a female she’d probably be able to handle it better than the male. ’Cause the first thing they’re gonna want to do is—let’s go fight! So I mean, man, they’re just! I don’t know. I been thinking lately—I think I am sexist. Because I do! I think males are stupid. They are and they’re illiterate. And they do some stupid things.

God

One thing Christianity has left out is that God’s ultimate responsibility, so to speak, is himself. God does everything for his own glory. He does everything for the sake of his own name. Take a husband and wife, for example. The husband does things for the wife and is good for the wife and everything. And in doing so that makes him look like a good husband. If the husband went off and cheated on her all the time, he wouldn’t get glory as a good husband. It’s the same with God. So in God choosing man, it’s not up to man whether we’re saved or not, it’s up to God. Because if man chose God, then man would have something to boast about in his salvation, like look what I did. I chose God, therefore I’m a good person. But God says he won’t share his glory with any other.

Knowledge

Everything that you encounter in your life, every experience, believe me you are going to be able draw off of it. I used to sit around these old, old guys on this tree. They had a tree they called the Tree of Knowledge, and they had benches there. They sit around them and I would listen. My friends would ask me, “Why you sitting around with those old heads?” And I used to always tell them, “I am getting schooled. I am learning.”

Military, Occupation In Other Countries

Just the fact that it would be totally preposterous to suppose that the Japanese military would build a base in Utah and we would have foreign troops on our soil, and yet we have troops stationed in Germany and England and France and Italy and South America. After the occupation of Japan, we just kind of left our troops there. The same with our different posts in Europe, especially in Italy and Germany. We have our Navy patrolling foreign waters all over the world. For what? Just to show off. The fact of the matter is, our forces are spread out all over the world. If any country did launch a determined attack against the homeland, we would stand no chance.

Painting

What I used to do all the time is buy Bob Ross books, because he really explains really well, like, how to paint and everything. My first painting—I did an island and he taught you how to do palm trees, and like it was just so easy just to read it and do it. I personally had never seen a palm tree before, a real one, so I had no idea what they looked like.

People, Real VS. Phony

You’ve got real people and phony people, okay. A phony person cannot be with a real person because a real person is a real person and would not be around a phony person whatsoever. And a phony person is always trying to find a way to be around that real person, because they don’t want it to be known that they’re phony. But whenever you see something that is not real and you say, “This is just a bunch of crap.” That’s what it is, because it’s phony, it’s not real. You’ve got BS and you’ve got real, okay. BS can’t be with Real S because Real S ain’t going to be with BS, and BS cannot get with Real S because Real S would not be around BS.

Thanksgiving

I guess the Pilgrims killed the Indians on Thanksgiving Day after they had the feast. Abraham Lincoln, he just like made up the whole story about the Pilgrims becoming friends and helping each other so, like, they would bring peace to each other, you know, so there wouldn’t be that war against Indians and stuff. You didn’t learn that in college?

World War I

World War I seemed like it was the first modern war, because it was fought with machine guns and gas war and things like that. And yet, for all the horrific things that occurred, you had these—they called them Knights of the Air, these Aces. And for these guys there was still a bit of chivalry left to war. These guys would shoot each other down, but when the planes would crash, if the guys survived, the person who shot them down, regardless of whose side they were on, they would land and usually invite the foe to have dinner. They were still gentlemen. I thought that contrasted really interestingly with what was going on on the ground with this horrific trench warfare and gas and machine guns and basically mass destruction. But yet in the air there was still this last vestige of chivalry, which is interesting.

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