Let us pause now to praise a truly great American hero. From ABC News:

“It makes me feel proud of who I am, where I'm from and the fact that I am in a position to help people and especially the kids,” Parton said of the milestone for her nonprofit, Imagination Library. “It's so important to me because if you can teach children to read they can dream and if you dream you can be successful.” Alongside Carla Hayden, who heads the Library of Congress, the iconic country singer dedicated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the research library. Through the nonprofit, she has been donating millions of books to children for more than 20 years.

Consider this, if you will. Over the past two decades, Dolly Parton has given away one-hundred million books. To kids. All over a country in which public libraries, one of the great ornaments to the American experiment, are in desperate trouble. One-hundred million books. And why? For one of the most American reasons of all. Family.

“Yesterday when we put the book in the Library of Congress -- I really felt like mom and daddy was just up there looking down thinking, ‘You go.’ So I felt really proud that I could honor momma and daddy,” Parton said. Parton, who grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee, told Hayden that she started the program in 1996 as a tribute to her father. She said he was a hardworking man but had not attended school or learned to read and write. “My daddy couldn't read and write and that always troubled him and bothered him so I wanted to do something special for him,” Parton said. “So, I got the idea to start this program and let my dad help me with it and he got to live long enough to hear the kids call me the ‘book lady.’”

God bless the good work, as they say over in the Motherland. And, as a bonus, I get to re-up this great piece of American popular art. It's already a good day.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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