[AgentZero]

Well patriotism is nothing more than love and pride in one's country. There seems to be a rather widespread belief however, that being proud of your country means you cannot, nay, must not acknowledge it's faults.

I love my country (as much as one can love an inanimate object, at least), and I'm proud of all the good it's done, but the economy is borked, health care is a mess, the east-middle-west balance is fuxored, and Stephen Harper is a tit. See? Not so hard.

Unfortunately, in an awful lot of cases, American patriotism tends to lean towards the, "America is the greatest place in the world and the best at everything and everything American is better than everything else and everything America does is good and America never does anything bad and people who don't like us are jealous and people who say America does bad things sometimes must just be really evil so they think good things are actually bad because America is perfect and incapable of wrong because America is the greatest place in the world" vein of patriotism.

And people accept this as patriotism, but at the same time any man who held such opinions about his significant other would probably be considered unstable/deranged/probably a threat to her safety.

And the sorts of things people get riled up about in the States rather confuses me as well. I remember a while back there was some big "controversy" over Barack Obama not wearing an American flag pin/Placing his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, and after he responded to initial criticisms by saying that he believed one's patriotism should be shown by real actions, and not just meaningless symbolism. And all sorts of people went to town on him over it. I remember thinking to myself, "Would these people actually prefer to have a president who is "patriotic" because he runs around saluting flags, puts his hand in the right place at the right time, wears little pins and keeps telling people how great America is, while he simultaneously ruins the country and violates the very principles on which the nation was founded?"

Then I remembered the results of the last two elections, and realized the answer was yes.