COOVER, Robert

p. 6 :

Not that Americans are superstitious, of course. How could they be, citizens of this, the most rational nation (under God) on earth? They need no omens to pull a switch, turn a buck, or change the world, for these are the elected sons and daughters of Uncle Sam, né Sam Slick, that wily Yankee Peddler who, much like that ballsy Greek girl of long ago, popped virgin-born and fully constituted from the shattered seed-poll of the very Enlightenment – « slick, » as the Evangels put it, « as a snake out of a black skin! » Young Sam, « lank as a leafless elm, » already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics, burst upon the withering Old World like a Fourth of July skyrocket, snorting and neighing like a wild horse : « Who – Whoo – Whoop! Who’ll come gouge with me? Who’ll come bite with me? Rowff – Yough – Snort – YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon – swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I’m in fer a fight, I’ll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I’ll have to be salted down to save me from spilin’! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin’ to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler – I can ride on a flash of lightnin’, catch a thunderbolt in my fist, swaller niggers whole, raw or cooked, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats, squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson, and out-insructabullize the heatin Chinee […]! Lo, I say unto you, I have put a crimp in a cat-a-mount with my bare hands, hugged a cinnamon b’ar to death, and made a grizzly sing « Jesus, Lover of My Soul » in a painful duet with his own arsehole – and I have not yet begun to fight! Yippee! I’m wild and woolly and fulla fleas, ain’t never been curried below the knees, so if you wish to avoid foreign collision you had better abandon the ocean, women and children first! For we hold these truths to be self-evident : […] that nothing is sartin’ but death, taxes, God’s glowin’ Covenant, enlightened self-interest, certain unalienated rights, and woods, woods, woods, as far as the world extends!

(The Public Burning, 1977)