We remind you to put hand to heart, gaze up at Old Glory, and say 'Fuck Patriotism!" Every year at about this time some misguided liberal type tries to "take back" patriotism from the "America, Right or Wrong" crowd. This is the logic of a fellow who would demand the return of a rotting fish from the town dump, and we say to hell with it. Let the pie-eyed flag wavers have it. Love of country is a disease like rickets only worse, because at least rickets doesn't cause people to put on red, white, and blue underwear.
America's not the worst country in the world, but we're its citizens by accident of birth and furthermore find it difficult to develop any warm and fuzzy feelings about the land that just within our lifetime has brought us Vietnam, Iraq, Richard Nixon, state-sanctioned torture, a prison system whose goal it is to put every minority citizen behind bars, Dick Cheney, Guantanamo Bay, the Bay of Pigs, ketchup as a vegetable for poor kids, and more CIA dirty shenanigans than you could shake Karl Rove's decapitated head at. Frankly we feel more a far stronger allegiance towards the hamburger, and we're talking about one with Mad Cow disease.
James Boswell notes in his Life of Samuel Johnson how one Arthur Lee "could not but be very obnoxious to Johnson, for he was not only a patriot, but an American." That about sums it up. As does the dwarf In Bruges, who says "I'm American, but don't hold it against me."