America

I am an American. That feels more like a confession of guilt than a celebration of my national identity. I was born tainted with original sin, or at least original jingoism. We still pay Marshall Islanders for nuclear fallout to which they were exposed. There are revolutionaries in central America whose faces were burned off with acid bought with tax dollars. Men are being drowned to coerce information from them, drones are murdering children, and we have been at war in Afghanistan for longer than both World Wars together. It seems to me that those who say they're proud to be American have not been paying careful attention.
Moreover, those who tout America's greatness invariably seek to demonstrate that the rules don't apply to us. International law, the rules of war, even the Geneva convention, all of these are mere bagatelles in the face of American Exceptionalism with a capital E. Demagogues, crypto-fascists, war profiteers, and their ilk are keen to spread the idea that America stands above such petty concerns. I am deeply suspicious of patriotism, and I tend to see ulterior motives.

I love my country

By which I mean

I am indebted joyfully

To all the people throughout its history

Who have fought the government to make right

Where so many cunning sons and daughters

Our foremothers and forefathers

Came singing through slaughter

Came through hell and high water

-Ani Difranco, Grand Canyon

All of this is not to say that I am not patriotic. I am deeply proud of a culture of resistance to the status quo. Those who have fought to make my country more just, and in places even succeeded, marginally. I am proud to live in a country where the right to vote is not contingent upon sex, race, ethnicity, or religion. I am proud to live in a country with strict laws about child labor, weekends, overtime, and a minimum wage. I am proud to live in a country where people have a right to write, publish, and disseminate works of controversial genius like Alan Ginsberg's "Howl":

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, 

--Alan Ginsberg, Howl

It is this great current of counterculture, as American as obscenity trials, that speaks to my soul. To me, this is what it means to be an American: to feel lost, contemptuous, and disgusted with the way my country operates, and to have the optimism to believe that something better is possible. This is not the counterculture of other countries, and in rejecting Americanism, I cannot do so without exercising a sort of Americanism of my own. Rejecting American jingoism is a proud American tradition. The idea that "traditional values" means a return to a fictionalized 1950s or Victorian nuclear family, an affirmation of patriarchy, and a specific brand of protestant theology, is anathema to me. These values are no more traditional, than the break with England. 

It is more interesting to go against the grain, and usually everyone is better for it. So if they outlaw sex-toys, we will sell them on the black market, because we support perverts and the persecuted (and there's good money in it). If they ban liquor, we will open speakeasies, because the freedom to decide what we put in our body is inalienable (and there's good money in it). When the government sets limits on what will be tolerated in print, we will fill bookstores with poorly-written lesbian pulp novels, and poems about anal sex, because we will write what we damn well please (and there is good money in it). When our parents ban jazz records, rock and roll, death metal, or trance, in each generation, we thumb our noses at them and kick up our heels at sock-hops, mosh pits, and raves.

This is who we are, and this is what makes me proud to be an American. When people ask me where I am from, I can say "America. I know. I'm sorry. We're working on it."