Five Greatest Americans

was rampant last year. We suffered through a flood of lists: the 100 best books, or 100 best baseball players, the 100 best albums, etc. I thought nearly all of those lists sucked, not because I don't like lists -- I'm addicted to making them -- but because they were commercially motivated, nothing more than a middlebrow sales gimmick. Boring.

Here's a list with no commercial tie-ins, no merchandising cross-promotional agreements. The five greatest Americans:

1. Fredrick Douglass
2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
3. Louis Armstrong
4. Martin Luther King, Jr.
5. Noam Chomsky

Who's on your list?