“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” — James Baldwin (Autobiographical Notes, 1955)

Among my earliest memories is a scene of my older brother painting the fire hydrant in front of our suburban Cleveland house in vivid hues of red, white, and blue ahead of the Bicentennial in 1976.

It had to be around my second birthday that June. There are no photos or old films of this scene, but I recall it as clearly as my aging mind will permit. I’m blessed with very early memory recall in general, usually driven by sensory triggers. My brother, a dozen years older than me, was painting that fireplug on a sunny day under blue skies while I sat in a playpen in the driveway, a particular memory that for some unknown reason has remained with me for more than half a century.

Obviously, I was too young to understand any of what was going on, but I am aware today of the mainstream patriotic fervor of the time as the nation celebrated its 200th anniversary as a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate feel-good salute to itself. I’m sure it was a measure of healing for the nation, although perhaps not for those that had been left out of the founding myths and had not enjoyed the full flower of the noble ideas embedded within our origin documents – Black people, Native Americans, women, etc., all of whom were critical to the fight for our national sovereignty but were mostly kept from history’s spotlight.

Today, the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence that separated us from the British Empire.

Meh.

I don’t think I am alone in being unable to muster much enthusiasm for the occasion, not when my country is embroiled in increasingly open and hostile racial, gender, class, economic, and religious cold civil war that’s turning hot. Even the word “patriot” and our national symbols have been hijacked as shallow avatars for a hysterical religious-political cult of white nationalist evangelicals that crave a return to an antebellum America where everyone serves them or faces the fist, the whip, and the noose.

Worse, most of these self-proclaimed “patriots” would have been Tories in 1776 and absolutely would have joined the Confederacy in 1861. Today, they run the federal government, and many state and local ones, too. These men and women do not believe in the melting pot concept of a pluralistic America and want to hang a “whites only” sign from the Statue of Liberty while slamming the door shut to all immigrants and refugees (except white South Africans).

They do not believe in democracy, either. Their bleak vision of American democracy is that only Republicans win elections, and anything else is fraud. They want a society and nation that looks like them, votes and worships like them, and there’s no room at the inn for anyone else.

Old white men in stupid little red hats have appointed themselves the soi-disant arbiters of patriotism and who is a “real” American. Their limited and paranoid vision of patriotism is unquestioning mindless obedience, cruelty, violence, submission, jingoistic law of the jungle chest-thumping, big muscles over big intelligence and education, Old Navy flag tank tops, guns, war, flags, empty symbolism, dishonesty about the past, and a bit of manly grifting to profit at all costs.

It’s performative flag-humping by brutes who never question anything.

It’s obnoxious and obscene. It’s also bullshit. James Baldwin, whose quote is atop this essay, was more of an American patriot than anyone that’s ever worn a fucking MAGA hat.

But hey, our senile third-rate Bonapartist president and his neo-Confederate allies are staging a “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to show the country and world how wonderful everything is!

Problem is, no one is showing up to Trump’s empty and fraudulent propaganda spectacle being staged near the defaced White House and the Reflecting Pool covered in green scum that the enfeebled president insists is Marxist algae planted by anti-fascist frogmen saboteurs. And the entire “state fair” may be just another self-dealing swindle by Trump, several Democrats insist in a new report.

Defector’s David Roth assessed the fair thusly:

The event has come to embody both the low, grim vacuity and the annihilating constriction of Trumpist politics. Literally, not figuratively, the event is a public-private partnership that supplanted the Smithsonian’s scheduled celebration of America’s varied cultures with a celebration of the claustrophobic monoculture of contemporary Trump politics, which mostly means Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rasping the word “sperm” at Dean Cain in front of a dozen or so sun-dazed evangelicals starving for someone to proselytize at and a lot of vacant sod. Spaces designed and intended to be of use to every American are behind fences and armed guards. The quickie monuments created to honor Trump are visibly cheap and festooned in mysterious ooze; the power keeps going out and all the ice cream melted. Vanilla Ice’s performance was canceled due to bad weather that never arrived.

I’ve long considered Roth the best chronicler of the Trump era, so I highly recommend the piece and a Defector subscription overall. But, I digress.

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It’s hard to be patriotic under such circumstances, at least in the traditional sense. I loved setting off fireworks as a kid, and watching professional fireworks shows (and if that’s your jam today, go for it carefully!). But I do not recall July 4th being an overtly bellicose orgy of thoughtless nationalism, the sort parodied by “Team America: World Police.” This independence day is more about indulging in shallow Trumpism than anything else.

So why do I give a shit about not giving a shit?

As those who know me are forced to endure hearing about much too often, I am directly descended from a family that sent pretty much everyone to fight or help with the American Revolution. So, the patriotic malaise I’ve felt for the last decade is especially a bummer this weekend.

My Grandma Shea was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (which, BTW, accepts trans women as members), and one of our revolutionary ancestors was slightly notable: Sammy Deweese, a teenage fifer that served for much of the war and lost his parents and sister to it. He also later participated in the War of 1812 as a Maryland militia captain (photo etching below of him is that era) and was present to witness from a distance the actual “rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air” as per his incredible and cinematic autobiography published in 1844 (and now on Amazon, of course).

His descriptions of his life during the American Revolution are brutal, harsh, not sanitized, but there’s no sense of exaggeration or hype. There’s some well-earned humble pride but no bragging, no flag-humping. He was flogged himself and forced to flog other soldiers. He witnessed deserters being shot and the descriptions of shattered skulls and brains and blood strewn on trees and foliage are vivid. There’s also humor and fascinating details about life during that era.

His father, also named Samuel, was a leather breech maker from Berks County, Pa., and later worked blast furnaces making pig iron. He and his older sons John and William joined the rebel army outside of Boston in 1775, and later, as an ensign flag-bearer with the Third Pennsylvania Regiment, Samuel was captured when Fort Washington at the north end of Manhattan fell to the British in November 1776.

He was imprisoned for months on one of the many derelict ships in Wallabout Bay off Brooklyn that the British used to imprison captured American soldiers. His wife, Elizabeth, repeatedly met with British officers to secure his release, eventually with success in 1777.

Those prison ships saw an estimated 11,000 American prisoners die from disease and malnutrition. By contrast, only 6,800 troops were killed in action against the British during the nine years of the war.

Elizabeth Deweese died in Philadelphia not long after their release, and Samuel Deweese ignored his parole pledge not to fight again and returned to the Continental Army as a recruiting sergeant. He soon enlisted Sammy, first as an orderly and then as a fifer. The older brothers enlisted for the duration of the war with the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment an infantrymen. They saw a lot of fighting.

Sgt. Deweese was appointed to run an army hospital to treat the wounded after the American defeat at the battle of Brandywine in September 1777, but he and his daughter soon both fell ill with fever and died. Their burial spots in the Pennsylvania wilderness were lost to history.

Young Sammy would endure privation at Valley Forge and would play the fife for a number of combat actions and disciplinary beatings. He played the Dead March for the famous hanging of British spy Maj. John Andre.

His account of life during the Revolution is more personal, honest, and austere than many typical history books, and much like the modern “Andor” television sci-fi series, it presents the rebellion in its true shades of moral gray than the simplistic black and white we’re taught. War is hell.

His autobiography is interspersed with over-the-top patriotic slop from someone else, but you can find his text online without the bombast. I am proud to be his descendant.

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“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” – Samuel Johnson.

That’s a famous, if oft-misunderstood, sentiment that ironically was written days before the American Revolution began in earnest at Lexington Green on April 1775.

Johnson was talking about the sort of empty, usually bellicose nationalism we see today from MAGA, not a general love of country.

Do I consider myself a patriot? Yes. Of course. But not in the vapid, bovine-stupid and fascist-bent Trump brand of lazy, two-dimension patriotism. I love the physical land that is the United States, a vast and wildly diverse geography between two oceans. I love the diversity of people, the melting pot. I love our sense of humor and when we rally to do good and to accomplish wonders. The Artemis II lunar mission, the joyous Knicks celebration, the World Cup revelries are all splendid recent moments that remind us what a unified people can do and enjoy together.

I love our fantastic culture that’s a true quilt of the entire world. The diverse food, sports, music, festivals and other entertainment. Our wide-ranging customs, rituals, traditions, and beliefs. Where I live, within a half hour I can feast on genuine Mexican, Latin American, Polish, Balkan, Middle Eastern, Ukrainian, Asian, African, and even British food. It’s immigrants making that food of us to eat, and you could not pay me to give a fuck if they came here officially or not.

Only America could produce Steely Dan, Jimmy Buffett, Jeopardy, Larry David, Xanadu, Donatos Pizza, Key West, Family Guy, the Chateau Marmont and West Hollywood, Buc-ee’s, Las Vegas, Arby’s, the NFL, and Hunter S. Thompson (all personal delights).

What I am especially patriotic about is the idea of America, the notion that all of us are equal. No divine right of kings bullshit. No monarchs. No gods. No formal caste system. Just the exquisite idea of free people ruling themselves, all born with the same inalienable rights and opportunities.

Again, let me stress that I love that idea of America, the greatest concept for a country in human history at the time and subsequently an enviable template for the rest of humanity.

The reality of America is something I dislike. And with every fiber of my being I hate the regression of our admittedly glacial progress at the hands of these racists, bigots, rapists, cranks, charlatans, grifters, drunks, wife-beaters, perverts and every other flavor of stale and dull reactionary dipshit – and that’s just the executive branch led by the most pathetically insecure man in human history. Hence, all of his ruinous and ugly Albert Speer vanity projects as his death inches closer.

The unrestrained crony capitalism championed by these malicious fools has poisoned our beautiful land and its people and animals and given us a gilded ruling class devoid of any shred of soul, conscience, empathy, or community. Millions of middle- and working-class people speak and behave like serfs in support of these rancid ghouls. They do not understand that peasants never get to wear the boots they lick. It’s a religious-political mass psychosis.

My country that I am supposed to mindlessly cheer is waging cruel wars for reasons its leaders cannot even bother to articulate. Conquest? Pillage, looting, and plundering like the ancient conquistadors? Out of hate? Boredom? It’s just killing to kill, then lying about it or boasting about it, and our taxes pay for it against our will. Monsters are real and very American, and they want to display their wealth and power to do anything they please, including rape children and murder.

Three American men, one an immigrant, are richer than almost all of humanity in ways that Nero and Caligula and the pharaohs, sultans, and viceroys of history would find shocking. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, along with slightly less wealthy tech barons and oil tycoons, all sharing similar perverse anti-democratic notions of how the world should serve them, drape themselves in the flag and boast of their patriotism while millions suffer and starve.

I cannot celebrate a nation whose federal government employees will do literally anything they’re told, Nuremberg be damned, because they’re morally just warm Play-Do or they feel trapped in jobs that pay the rent, bills, and gives access to vital health insurance. I understand that the American Dream today is hoping to not have to eat cat food under a highway overpass when we’re old, and that reality forces people to do things they hate to survive. But goddamn is it disappointing.

The nation’s obviously corrupt highest court has given the president near-total and almost imperial power, apart from some nitpicking, and he kills with not only impunity but boasts of murdering people without providing any evidence they were doing anything illegal much less worthy of extrajudicial execution. Many presidents certainly had bloody hands, starting with Washington, but only Trump has made it a point of openly gleeful pride, as have his morally depraved servile underlings. He’s more guilty of the tyrannical high crimes and misdemeanors listed in the Declaration of Independence than King George III.

Trump and MAGA have coarsened and corroded American discourse with what amounts to white nationalist bullying and trolling from the depths of 4chan, cheapening everything that once had a shred of dignity.

“We are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

Hunter Thompson wrote that in September 1972 and the only thing that’s changed is there are now 340 million of us and even more guns. And he wrote those words as America and Nixon were winding down their failed war in Vietnam just as Trump is even more obviously losing a war with Iran in humiliating fashion. Perhaps it’s karmic justice for his serial draft-dodging cowardice to avoid Vietnam that he’s forever doomed to go down in history for so badly losing a recreational war to a much smaller power. We are all defeated soldiers of a defeated nation’s defeated army, and we now pay more for gasoline and other basic commodities because of it (and, if a decent person, wrestle with the moral culpability of having our taxes finances this evil).

Who celebrates that kind of wickedness? People who have to invent reasons to be mad and that believe anything state media tells them. You know, conservatives.

America also has plenty of goodness but so much of it is soaked in bloodthirsty greed, tainted and deformed by petty grievances and resentments, fear and loathing, all masked by a jolly and simplistic mythology that insists are nice and helpful and friendly and brave.

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“If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave it?” – morons everywhere, usually while wearing a Harley-Davison t-shirt with a white goatee, ample belly, wraparound Oakleys, and an education that ended with 12th grade in 1982.

I do not leave the USA because I do not hate America. Like Baldwin, I love America beyond measure, and because I do, I will point out her flaws, crimes, and hypocrisy. Because I want the America they promised us, not just more old vinegary wine in expensive new bottles.

I say all this as a middle-aged, middle-class white American man, which is near the summit of random biological chance’s privilege lottery. Through no effort of my own, my life is inherently easier than those who are not white men because that’s how America works. That’s not how, on paper, America is supposed to work, but that’s how it plays out because of other men that look like me. The color of my skin and my gender are not obstacles to anything in life, unlike millions of my fellow Americans.

It’s always been like this for people that do not look like me and will not change until more of the people that do look like me tell the other people that look like me to knock it the fuck off, again. It’s not up to people that do not look like me because they do not have the traditional legal, political, financial power that shapes the nation to most benefit the people that look like me. We must listen to the people that do not look like me and then do the difficult work of living up to the promises made 250 years ago (and constantly since).

Racism, bigotry, and sexism are anti-American, but only in theory if you believe those old parchment papers. But racism, bigotry, and sexism turned out to be extremely American. Look at all the angry demands we reverse same-sex marriage legality and even to roll back women’s suffrage. The Supreme Court is gutting the Voting Rights Act on behalf of a president and sour political party unable to win national elections now on its policies or record, so it must corrupt the electoral system to cheat to win.

That hideous reality is anti-American, anathema to my understanding of what life is supposed to be like in this country. The society we have created, especially in this century, is intellectually and morally bankrupt because of greed and hate. America in 2026 will damage the lining of your soul. Of course, non-white people have experienced all of this for up to 400 years.

So despite my family history, it’s hard to gin up enthusiasm for fireworks and red, white, and blue bunting and mall sales and online discounts.

There’s the weight of judgmental eyes upon anyone for failing to clap like a seal or at least nod approvingly at all the obligatory traditional displays of American patriotism: A flag t-shirt, drinking, smoking various meats, and losing fingers and eyeballs to cheap fireworks imported from China. Put it in reverse, Terry!

Fuck judgment. In the words of Rick Sanchez: “Your boos mean nothing. I’ve seen what makes you cheer.”

America has never come close to living up to the noble ideals outlined in her founding documents, and for a quarter of a millennium we have engaged in a generalized white-washing of our history. In many places, it’s now illegal to even teach some of that history because it makes the baby-shit soft “fuck your feelings” white people uncomfortable and sad. And it’s not like this is ancient history. History was yesterday. There are elderly people today that knew formerly enslaved people. The Black children spit upon and attacked by jeering white crowds outside of elementary schools in the Civil Rights era are still alive. As are many of those jeering whites, whose legacy is trickle-down resentment and racism.

While we have absolutely accomplished great things as a nation, the negatives are just as powerful – wars of conquest, genocide, environmental devastation, wholesale slaughters, an utterly corrupt justice system that hinges on skin color, gender, and money. It’s brutal when you learn the truth.

Yet anyone critical of America, and that pokes holes in the myths with truth and facts, gets labeled subversive, unpatriotic, a commie traitor, and perhaps listed as a potential domestic terrorist. I may exist only infinitesimally above total obscurity, but I still probably have an FBI file for my dissident essays, public comments, and protest activity. Cool. It’s the zenith of patriotism to make enemies of a government that’s rapidly becoming a fascist police surveillance state that exists to enrich and protect degenerate oligarchs. I am happy to be an enemy of Orwell’s pigs with whips. At this point, I’d be disappointed to not be on a list of anti-fascists.

Good, moral, ethical countries do not elect openly corrupt racist rapists like Donald Trump and his sleazy ilk that are arrogantly looting the country and leading it into immoral failed wars.

Good, moral, ethical countries do not re-elect them, either.

In a good, moral, ethical country, the president would immediately resign after the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal of a $5 million judgement against him for rape.

Good, moral, ethical countries do not create a secret police force to conduct ethnic cleansing campaigns that send innocent people, including citizens, to for-profit concentration camps or deport them to harsh countries they didn’t even come from. Being undocumented generally is a misdemeanor, not a capital felony, despite what Fox News and the regime say.

I find it impossible to mount any sort of traditional patriotism in these times.

What I am patriotic about are those resisting. The rallies. The push-back. The crowds not backing down from the masked Confederate Gestapo meatheads despite tear gas, truncheons, and rubber bullets – and real bullets.

U.S. Air Force Maj. Jason Watson, arrested on the Capitol steps Wednesday after calling for the impeachment and removal of Trump and his slimy court jester/scheming vizier sidekick J.D. Vance, is something I am patriotic about.

Seeing the success and popularity, so far, of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gives me some optimism. We may be at the turning of the tide.

So I’ll spend this weekend, amid the endless neighborhood fireworks in the rotten tropical heat, thinking about Sammy Deweese and his family that gave so much so that we can all be free. Or free-ish.

I will tip my hat and throw back a high-proof (or 20mg edible) salute to all the others that risked and gave so much that we could fuck up so badly 250 years later. The people I consider heroes are not just the astronauts and soldiers and inventors or pioneers, but the men and women that laid their lives on the line to make this a better place for everyone, to live up to those old promising documents.

It’s been 250 years, and we’re not there. One day, perhaps.

Until then, we will continue the long march that began in earnest at Lexington and Concord and one day will end in something better than this, for everyone.

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