Membership hath its privileges

What a deal! What a break! What a boon!

It's the bargain of this or any other century!

Imagine it: A bazillion books, books bound in limp leather and in faded buckram, books in glossy jackets, some with tight, razor-sharp pages, more with brown, well-fingered edges; books with such names on the spines: Jane Austen and the Brontes, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, T.H. White, J.R.R. Tolkien, Patrick O'Brian, William Trevor, Muriel Spark.

And J.K. Rowling.

You have the North Americans: Anne Tyler; Alice Munro; Johns Cheever, Updike, and O'Hara; Russell Banks and Richard Russo; Ernest Hemingway, if you like, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Dorothy Parker. Consider the Southerners Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Gilchrist, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, and Bobbie Ann Mason. (Barbara Kingsolver is only a part-time Southerner, but consider her, too.) Did I mention Amy Tan? And E.Annie Proulx?

Dame Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell (and her alter ego Barbara Vine), Denise Mina, John Harvey, and Ian Rankin are extra added attractions. Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, and Tony Hillerman come at no cost, along with Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Daniel Pinkwater.

[Feel free to pencil in any of your own favorites here.]

For a change of pace, you may opt for the historians, the newspaper columnists, the humorists, and the personal essayists, from Will and Ariel Durant to Gary Wills and Karen Armstrong; from Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin to Murray Kempton and Carl Hiassen; from Bruce Catton, David McCullough, and Kevin Phillips to Robert Benchley, David Sedaris, Bailey White, Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, Dave Barry, and the two Annies, Dillard and Lamott. By the way, what's the news from Lake Wobegon?

But that's not all! You get all the comedy and drama you'll ever need: William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Robert Sherwood, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, George S. Kaufmann, Philip Barry, Thornton Wilder, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, Mary Chase and Joseph Kesselring, A.R. Gurney and David Mamet, to name just a few.

You get all the lyrics, too: Noel Coward, Gilbert---or was it Sullivan?---Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Hal David, John Lennon, and Ogden Nash, whose verse twisted language and rhyme schemes as if he was making balloon animals.

Speaking of poets, you get the aforementioned Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, not to leave out the immortal "O Holy Cow: the selected verse of Phil Rizzuto."

In the privacy of your own home you can tune into NPR and the BBC World Service, Air America, even Dr. Laura, Dr. Ruth, and Dr. Phil, for all I care. (I prefer Dr. Seuss.) You can get your political spin from Fox News. Myself, I favor "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report," and "Real Time with Bill Maher." For hard news, there are The New York Times and The Washington Post---and The Onion, America's finest news source.

At your leisure and in your jammies you can revel in unforgettable lines from classic movies on cable---"Play it for me, Sam...Play 'As Time Goes By.'" "Merry Christmas, you old Bailey Savings & Loan!" "Leave the gun; take the cannoli." "Fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy night!" And, as Mel Brooks points out, "It's Franken-steen." You can kick back with memorable episodes of "M.A.S.H." or "Seinfeld" or "Star Trek." You can numb you overactive brain and your posterior with back-to-back episodes of "Law and Order."

As added bonuses, you get The New Yorker, the Times crossword puzzle, much truly creative advertising copy ("Volkswagen. Think small."), and some ancient Anglo-Saxon exclamations that still get the job done today.

Here's the clincher, the piece---as Archie Bunker used to say---of resistance: You get to play with all the toys yourself. You can sit in the driver's seat and steer, play with all the bells and whistles. You get to stand sentences on their heads, stretch them out to see how far they'll go, then let them snap back. You can color outside the lines, write outside the box. You've got the motive, means, and opportunity to tinker with language all the live-long day.

You "get" all of these marvels free, gratis, absolutely nothing down and nothing to pay, no PIN, no plastic card, no ID required, as members of the group Winston Churchill---whose written and spoken language is in a class of benefits all its own---described as "the English-speaking peoples." (He also quipped that Great Britain and the United States were "two nations divided by a common language," but I'm sure you get the joke. Of course, you do; to paraphrase the noted linguist Chris Tucker, you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth.)

If your parents were English-speakers, you're a legacy. If English is your second language or even your third, congratulations! You've been accepted on your merits and are entitled to full member benefits even if you don't speak the Queen's English as well as Helen Mirren does. ('Struth, the Queen doesn't speak the language as well as Helen Mirren does.)

However you qualified for membership in the group, if you understand, speak, read, and write English, thank a teacher, then thank your god, your muse, and your lucky stars for the privilege. All these riches of the language---priceless!