You wake up full of anticipation, your plans already laid for the next two days. You click on the t.v. and bask in it’s comforting drone as you cheerfully bumble about the house, shaving your pubic hair into the stars and stripes before donning your “America – Love It or Leave It!” t-shirt and wandering off to drive your big, white SUV to the first cookout. You stop on the way to pick up hot dogs and beer, sharing conspiratorial winks with the other overfed, soon-to-be-sunburnt participants in this weekend’s tribal identification ritual. It’s the weekend of July 4th, and you’re a fucking idiot.
I’d bet money that you shrieked your head off at pep rallies in high school, because it’s exactly the same thing: you didn’t choose that school, you just happened to get assigned there. So why the hell did you give a damn whether the football team won or lost? Because someone told you to. Because if they could get you to identify with The Group which was your randomly determined school district, they could assure a little more control over their overcrowded classrooms. And because you needed to; biologically you felt compelled to seek a pack. And that pack is most easily established by identifying who isn’t part of it.
So, twenty years later, here you are still doing the same thing. Probably starting with your family and bowling buddies, perhaps extending through multiple social circles and work environments.  How’s that Facebook page going?  But sitting on top of them all, there’s the wondrous, sparkling beauty of Your Country. Which you were born into without any choice or intention on your part and which, despite everything you have been told, has its ups and downs just like any other country. It was founded on some lovely concepts, most of which have subsequently been warped into a monstrous parody of their original forms. It has made some nice contributions to science, art, and cuisine. It spawned some impressive people. It has some nice landscape. Just like everywhere.  It’s not the BEST country in the world…it’s a country.  A fiction, even.  No, it’s not a REAL thing, it’s a concept which we have all, to a greater or lesser extent, agreed to buy into.  The things you love?  They are not your country.  They are a physical environment, a group of people, or subsets of concepts that you probably never even really sat down and thought deeply about, since it was easier to quote off bits of ideas in catch phrases than it was to try to wrap your sadly inadequate neurons around an entire intellectual construct plus its history and current applications.
The problem is that it’s not enough for you to bask quietly in your baseless pride. You have to bludgeon me with it, presuming that if you beat me round the head with enough emotional appeals I will suddenly realize The Truth.  Fuck you.  You’re not going to convince me this is The Greatest Country On Earth by touting your military record (fuck your wars), the great works of long-dead men who thought more about what government and humanity actually mean than you and all your friends will in a lifetime, or by singing off-key renditions of the national anthem.  You will not convince me by setting off fireworks (did you know your country didn’t invent those…unless you live in China, in which case you probably aren’t reading this, because your country isn’t a fan of free access to the Internet), or by shoving hot dogs in my face (Germany invented those, by the way, so no pride points there unless you’re German, in which case you probably still can’t say the word “Nazi” out loud without feeling the need to slap yourself in the face).  There is no country in the world that hasn’t fucked up at least as much as it’s helped anyone, so where do you get off telling me to “love it or leave it”?  You think you love this country?  Do you even know it?  How can you love something without understanding it?  This isn’t a matter of faith…give me an actual fucking reason why this country is better than any other.
And until you can, keep your filthy little patriotic habits to yourself.
