The Z Man in a fit of realism:
“For most of my life, I was an easy mark, when it came to flag waving. I believed the stuff they taught us in school and preached to us in the media. Despite her flaws, I thought the ideal of America was worth defending. The trouble is, the people in charge had other ideas. Like a lot of people over the last dozen or so years, I’ve had a change of heart about a lot of things. One of them is patriotism. You can be loyal to people, but you cannot be loyal to ideas or institutions. That’s a sucker’s play and I’m not a sucker anymore.”
Via The Z Blog
“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”
Ambrose Bierce, of course.
Heh