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8 Reasons I (Still) Love America

8 Reasons I (Still) Love America

It is the United States of America's birthday weekend—the 249th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—and I do not think I’m alone when I say I have never felt less like celebrating. Every hour brings new bad news, like existential bad news, like the hospice nurse is on the phone bad news. Looking the other way won’t do you any good anymore because whichever other way you look, it’s there too. The guardrails are not holding, the atrocities are piling up fast and furious. Not only is nobody trying to hide the atrocities, they are selling atrocity-themed merch. They are pocketing that money, and they are not even trying to hide that, because there is no longer any incentive for them to. It is grim, and this year I feel about a Fourth of July party the exact same way my dog feels about fireworks: No thank you, and if you need me, I will be under the bed.

There is a line from Mike Doughty's 2004 song “Move On” that sums up how I feel right now: “I love my country so much, man,” Doughty sings, “like an exasperating friend.” America is in crisis, and we wouldn't be as angry about it if we didn't love it like we do.

I love America, and you love America, and we got a whole day off, and we don't want to spend a whole day off angry. So let’s take a moment to reflect on what we still love about this country, this concept, this exasperating friend who unlike most friends has the unchecked power to show up at our door and throw us in a van and lock us in a cage in the Everglades if we get too mouthy, because, you know, things have accelerated a bit since 2004.

Here are a few things I still love about America. I don’t need to tell you this, but the tone is going to be all over the fucking place.

MOTELS
tourists at tahiti motel swimming pool in wildwood, new jersey
Aladdin Color Inc//Getty Images

The swimming pool at the Tahiti Motel in Wildwood, New Jersey, in the 1960s. Today a motel’s amenities might be HBO, air conditioning, and the whiff of danger, but they remain a vital part of the American landscape.

I like a luxury situation as much as the next guy, but there is still something comforting about the roadside motel, the beautiful by-product of our country's highway system. You can picture it, can't you? You’re on a road trip, the sun is down, your eyelids are getting heavy, and there it is: the buzzing neon sign, the exterior hallways, the promise of vacancy and HBO. You get your key from a desk clerk who has seen everything and said nothing. You drive right up to your front door, and you pass out onto a screeching mattress, in a room where statistically a murder almost has to have taken place, no more than three doors away from active adultery. But it’s none of your business, you’re just passing through. You wake unrefreshed and you move on, further into your American interstate adventure.

PUBLIC ENEMY
paul natkin archive
Paul Natkin//Getty Images

Public Enemy performs in Chicago in 1992. The group offered a pure and honest form of patriotism.

Since the twin American disasters of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, it has been fashionable to tell people that if they criticize America, it’s because they hate America and the values for which it stands. Particularly progressive people, and people of color. You say you’re being profiled and targeted by the police? No, you just hate law and order. You believe the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made? Well, I guess you hate capitalism. You’re gay and want to start a family? It’s because you hate the family. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t matter that nobody has ever complained about and insulted America more than the current administration. It just works. Public Enemy let America have it, with rage and precision, and that's my kind of patriotism. Chuck D gave a more honest account of life in the inner city than the news has ever tried, and Flavor Flav wrote some of the goofiest rhymes of all time then later had more than one season of a VH1 dating show. If that isn’t the American dream.

THE FAST CASUAL RESTAURANT CONCEPT
chipotle reports better than expected quarterly earnings
Joe Raedle//Getty Images

Truly, one of America’s greatest contributions to the globe.

It’s not quite McDonald’s, it’s not quite Ruby Tuesday’s. You don’t have a server, not here. No, you order at a counter, you settle your check right there, and then you sit down. You have been given a number on a stand, or if this concept is really cooking, a buzzer. After a few minutes a runner arrives or a buzzer buzzes, and there it is: your meal, on a tray. You’re in a fast casual restaurant, baby: Shake Shack, SweetGreen, Panera Bread. The cost and the time commitment suit your modern lifestyle, seasonal menu items are available for a limited time, the meat and produce are a little fresher (not locally-sourced, it’s not that kind of scene, but just, I don’t know, fresher, you sense it). Afterwards, you bus that tray yourself, and when you go outside, you are absolutely no more than 50 yards from a YogaSix. America invented fast casual. I’m actually not a hundred percent sure about that, but I do know America does it better than any other country on this planet, unless we consider the UK’s peri-peri chicken chain Nando’s, which actually does kind of rip now that I think of it.

THERE IS JUST SO GODDAMN MUCH OF IT
remote desert highway
Bob Riha Jr//Getty Images

A remote highway in California. We are a big country that contains multitudes.

If I were to hop on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica and go north, I’d pass the mansions of Montecito and the mist-cloaked beach town of Cayucos, drive above the rocky cliffs and past the pricey meditation retreat centers of Big Sur, right into the eclectic urban landscape of San Francisco, then past the redwoods and the weed farms and Oregon’s sand dunes all the way up to the rocky coastline and snowcapped peaks of Washington’s Olympic National Park. And that’s just the rightmost edge of this place, and that’s not even all of it. When you run the New York City Marathon, the accents of the people cheering you on change every five to seven minutes. New Haven and New Orleans are in the same country. We have Montana and Miami. We contain multitudes. You cannot homogenize us.

CHICAGO’S “SATURDAY IN THE PARK”

When this song was released in 1972, there wasn’t a robust entertainment media debating the Song of the Summer. You were kind of at the mercy of the radio back then; if you wanted to hear your favorite song, you had to wait for a DJ to play it. If you were lucky enough to be driving a car with an 8-track player in the dashboard, you still weren’t really at the driver’s seat: those things had no rewind function. If you wanted to listen to a song on repeat, you had to be sitting next to your record player so you could pick up the needle and put it back to the beginning. But I still picture the people of 1972 listening to this song over and over. It feels like summer in a way few songs have ever managed. And it’s about what the songwriter Robert Lamm saw in Central Park, on the actual 4th of July 1970. All that laughing and dancing and singing of Italian songs is happening at the height of the Vietnam War, in the middle of the Nixon presidency, two months after National Guardsmen opened fire on student protestors at Kent State. This is resilience. We can learn from this.

THIS NEWS BLOOPER

Sorry to this mountain climber, but even thinking about this moment makes me laugh out loud. I love this. I love that this is the only existing copy. I love that it’s so pixelated you can only imagine the looks on the anchors’ faces. I love that it happened in the moment just before it would have been a sensation, before there would have been a slew of reaction videos and think-Substacks about it, before it would have launched all three of these people into the kind of instant viral fame that would have them added to the cast of The Traitors by the top of the 6pm hour. I love the “if you think you know where this story is going, just you wait” index finger, and I love that the woman holding it aloft does not herself know where this story is going. By the second “he’s gay” I am in heaven, always always. I will see you at the next item on this list after you have watched it ten more times.

OTIS REDDING AT THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL, 1967

Welcome back. Redding’s set was cut short by rain and a local curfew, but D.A. Pennebaker captured it while he was collecting footage for Monterey Pop! and released it as the short film Shake! Otis at Monterey in 1987. It’s up on Criterion now, and it earns those exclamation points. It is 18 minutes of pure joy, and this is the closing number. Pennebaker takes a break from the concert-film format for this song, and treats us to close-ups of the audience: the young adults of 1967, the first wave of hippies, the front line of the new American Bohemia. Remember, just four years before this, it was a huge big deal that The Beatles had hair that touched their ears. Two years later, we’d have T Rex and Roxy Music. It’s a reminder that culture can move fast in good and groovy directions. It’s also fun to imagine what a shitty time Stephen Miller would have had here.

THIS WHOLE BUSINESS ABOUT US BEING THE HOME OF THE BRAVE
anti trump "no kings" protests take place across the country
Joe Raedle//Getty Images

A "No Kings" protest near Mar-A-Lago on June 14, 2025.

So, yeah, listen, we are at a crisis point. Due process and the idea that nobody is above the law have turned out to be suggestions, like a stop sign at a remote intersection where there’s not another car for miles. People scoffed at the idea of concentration camps in America a month ago, we are already at “commemorative concentration camp t-shirts.” And I feel like the best plan Chuck Schumer has is to tell us to Pokemon Go to the polls in 2026. We’re in trouble.

It was easy to see it coming, and it was easier to say it wasn’t. We have flattered ourselves right to the brink of death with the idea of American Exceptionalism, the notion that it can’t happen here because we are different, and we are different because God said so, and if you ask a question about that as detailed and pointed as “huh?” it’s because you hate America, because that shit still works. This time, the people who are telling you that you hate America are the same people who are currently reacting to things like the United States Attorney General being kind of iffy on habeas corpus with a shrug and a whaddya gonna do.

We're not exceptional. We're just a country. We're just regular people. But we're a country because around 250 years ago we were brave regular people who fought tyranny. Eighty-ish years ago, we were brave regular people who fought fascism. Now tyranny and fascism, which historians have warned us could one day be at our door, are on our couch eating our leftovers. I’m in Los Angeles, where currently ICE is hitting the hardest. You won’t see this on the news, and it is anecdotal, but there are four houses currently under construction on my block, and do you know what I haven’t heard in two weeks? A hammer. The restaurants we go to are visibly understaffed. The big park nearby just cancelled its July Fourth picnic because of ICE activity in the area. Think about that: there are people who do want to celebrate the birthday of the country where they live, but they cannot, because there is a decent chance they might get put in a van and sent God knows where, whether their papers are in order or not. Think about that.

ICE has the guns, and the vans, and maybe the badges, though they’re mostly not showing those. They have the budget, and now that the “Big, Beautiful Bill” has passed, that budget is about to balloon. But they do not have the bravery. We do. I have seen it. I have seen communities turn out to protect their neighbors. I have seen people use their law degrees or their high school Spanish to inform their fellow citizens of their rights. We the people have the bravery, and I know it, because I have seen the people, and I have seen the agents, and only the people are showing their faces.

We all have jobs to do. Everyone has a little tiny hammer and a piece of this wall that they can tap it on. Enough hammering and it falls down. We just have to hammer.

Next year, it might as well be us who celebrates our 250th birthday.

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